Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 550

“This Is Improbable” Today is publication day!

Today is publication day for my new book, This Is Improbable.

I hope you will read the book, and that you will spread the word.

Tomorrow, Friday, September 7, I will be on two radio programs, talking about some of the improbable stories in the book: in the US on Science Friday (NPR), and in the UK on the Today programme (BBC radio 4). If you happen to produce a radio or TV or other program and would like to do something with, about, or to the book, please get in touch!

In late September and early October, I will be doing some events — all-star-group recitations of studies mentioned in the book (the biggest will be at Conway Hall, in London, on Sept 30); appearances on The Infinite Monkey Cage and on The Museum of Curiosity; and other good things in London, Edinburgh, Bristol, Oxford, Cambridge, and perhaps other places. If you would like to host an event, please get in touch!

And oh golly gee by the way: two weeks from today, on Thursday, September 20, there’s the 2012 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, which will be webcast live.

BONUS: Events schedule

BONUS: A sheepish admission about my new book

BONUS: The new book’s ISBN is 9781851689316. That number maybe be of mathematical interest to someone. If it is, I would enjoy hearing who you are and specifically what wonders you see in the number.

The birth of the New-Knot Claims Assessment Committee

Yes, the International Guild of Knot Tyers Forum is a source of news and gossip about the International Guild of Knot Tyers. The organization’s lovely logo is reproduced here.

The Forum is where Dan Lehman writes about the birth of the New Knot Claims Assessment Committee of the International Guild of Knot Tyers:

 My motivation for establishing the New-Knot Claims Assessment Committee (back in 1999-November, pub’d in km67:03-6, June 2000) was, as stated:

In response to the issue raised in km57:57 and in various KM Letters, most notably that from Roger Miles [km58:12], the Council has approved the formation of a committee of the IGKT to handle the initial validation of new knot claims.  Guild Member Dan Lehman, who made the proposal to the Council, has been appointed as its chairman. This committee is named “New Knots Claims Assessment Committee (NKCAC)”; its purpose is to receive, review, and give technical opinion on claims by members and others:  that a knot is unknown in knot literature and is valid in terms of performance.

One obvious relief as I saw it was the removal of such Is-it-New? queries from KM when in many cases the answer was clear.  (E.g., one fellow, as did I ca. ’73, “invented” the Marlinespike hitch — no benefit to having KM pages carry such a claim or question, and then the answer(s).  The Perfection/Anglers Loop has appeared more than once there; and some other, single bowline-in-the-bights have been repeatedly presented.) Beyond that, our “assessment” was hoped to put a candidate novelty through some pulling & testing and various-materials checking….

BONUS: The Guild created a not not knot-delightful illustrated chart of knots, in PDF form, which they generously make available, free, to anyone who might find it useful. Here is one of the knots from the chart. It’s a back splice – 3 strand rope, drawn by the prolific, multi-talented Percy W. Blandford:

BONUS: A discussion of Knots on Mars (Thanks to Charlie Niles for bringing it to our attention.)

Danger in the Fall: Confirmation Bullet

Investigator Don Weinshank writes:

Tragically, the predictions by Incorvaia, Poulos, Jones and Tschirhart, Synergy Medical Alliance, East Lansing, Michigan (in their 2007 study “Can a Falling Bullet be Lethal at Terminal Velocity?”, reported in AIR, July/August 2012, p.11), were confirmed locally this July 4 when a woman was struck in the head by a bullet fired by somebody outside of the immediate area of the fireworks.

See the  XXYZ Action News report on July 5: “Stray bullet hits woman in the head at Lansing fireworks show“.

She subsequently died of her injury. See the WLNS News report that same day: “UPDATE: Woman Dies After Fireworks Shooting“.

Vegetable philosophy

“There are not many of us doing vegetable philosophy, either professionally or casually.” – notes associate professor Karen L.F. Houle (from the Department of Philosophy at The University of Guelph, Canada) in a recent article for the Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Volume IX, Issue 1/2, 2011.

Her paper, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics as Extension or Becoming? The Case of Becoming-Plant takes inspiration from examples given by philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari in their 1980 philosophical text entitled ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’, in which they explore the implications of a human ‘becoming-animal’ – and cite attempts made by artist/writer Vladimir Slepian  to make himself more dog-like by putting shoes on his hands.

“If I wear shoes on my hands, then their elements will enter into a new relation, resulting in the affect or becoming I seek. But how will I be able to tie the shoe on my second hand, once the first is already occupied? With my mouth, which in turn receives an investment in the assemblage, becoming a dog muzzle, insofar as a dog muzzle is now used to tie shoes.”

Professor Houle broadens the ‘becoming-dog’ concept described by Deleuze and Guattari into ‘becoming-plant’, and asks “What would ‘becoming-plant’ involve?”

“In principle, becoming-plant would involve our extension and ideas entering into composition with something else in such a way that the particles emitted from the aggregate thus composed will verb vegetally as a function of the relation of movement and rest, or of molecular proximity, in which they can enter. Becoming-plant is the emission of particles from a heterogeneous alliance we make which expresses in action the unique qualities of plants or plant-lives.”

°                °                °Also see: Plants with charisma: A first analysis (Improbable Research, Aug 2012)

1 ½ Hr. BONUS For those interested in mysteries of vegetable-ness (and music) see the 1979 documentary film The Secret Life of Plants – with soundtrack by Stevie Wonder.

 

 

Russian tank invention: To lay waste upon the enemy

Aleksandr Georgievich Semenov patented an efficiently disgusting weapon system. Using his method, soldiers inside an armoured tank, under battle conditions, can dispose of their biological waste products in an unwasteful way: encasing those materials, together with explosives, in artillery shells that they then fire at the enemy.

Semenov, residing in St Petersburg, can and does brag of having Russian patent #2399858, granted in 2009, officially titled Method of Biowaste Removal From Isolated Dwelling Compartment of Military Facility And Device or Its Implementation. As patents go, it’s of modest length: 12 pages, with only two technical drawings. The original document is mostly in Russian. The prolific inventor (he has about 200 other patents), sent me a full translation into English….

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

Rediscovered double Tom Lehrer performance of The Elements

This video of Tom Lehrer singing “The Elements”, in Copenhagen in or about 1967, is something we’d not seen before.

And it may be the only recording of him also performing the earlier version of the song — a performance so rare that that Tom himself later half-forgot about it (Tom generously gave us permission to have the song’s modern debut, at the 2011 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, where Roberta Gilbert did the vocal honors):

BONUS: Daniel Radcliffe performing the traditional version of “The Elements” in 2010:

BONUS: The Internet now features recordings of Tom Lehrer performing other of his works.

A sheepish admission about my new book

My new book — This Is Improbable — has its official UK/US publication date this Thursday. September 6. Before it comes out, I have to make an embarrassing admission.

Foyles bookstore asked me to do up a little essay for their blog. I decided to write the confession as part of that essay. Here’s the confessional bit:

Oh. There’s one thing in the book about which I feel sheepish. It’s not the story about the Scottish attempt to profile the personalities of certain sheep. Nor is it the Austrian study, which I mention only glancingly, about performing surgery to alter the facial shapes of certain other sheep. No. It’s one little story that’s fictional. We, the book’s editor and I, had joked about including one fictional story, with a Clear Mention that – unlike everything else in the book – it’s concocted. And then, somehow, A Mistake Was Made, and one of my fictional pieces got lodged in there, but the Clear Mention went missing. So… sorry about that. And I hope you can spot which story’s the ringer.

…

 

Teenagers doing nothing – the upside

The next time you see a group of adolescents just hangin’ out at a bus stop, rather than grumbling to yourself ‘Why don’t they do something useful?’, you might ask instead ‘Could it be that “doing nothing” is a healthy teenage behaviour?’

This is exactly the question posed by postdoc researcher Maria Patsarika (currently at the Department of Educational and Social Policy, University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki, Greece) in a recent paper for the journal European Health Psychologist,  Vol. 14, issue 1 (March 2012). Whilst acknowledging that :

“The benefits for young people of organised activities are numerous and indisputable, discussed as they are by psychological research.”

- the author also draws attention the opportunities presented by considering possibly counterintuitive aspects of teenage (in)activity :

“The aim of this paper, instead, has been to exculpate the practice of ‘doing nothing’ as a healthy teenage behaviour, which is hopefully shown to deserve more attention by academic researchers and practitioners alike.”

BONUS

Sir Cedric Webster Hardwicke, Bill Bendix and Harry Lillis Crosby illustrate their take on (in)activity, circa 1949.

Ig Nobel Prize winner Sun Myung Moon dies

Sun Myung Moon [pictured here, wearing a tie], who was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in economics, in the year 2000, has died.

Reverend Moon won his Ig Nobel Prize for bringing efficiency and steady growth to the mass-marriage industry, with, according to his reports, a 36-couple wedding in 1960, a 430-couple wedding in 1968, an 1800-couple wedding in 1975, a 6000-couple wedding in 1982, a 30,000-couple wedding in 1992, a 360,000-couple wedding in 1995, and a 36,000,000-couple wedding in 1997.

The ASSOCIATED PRESS reports today about his passing:

Sun Myung Moon, self-proclaimed messiah who founded Unification Church, dies at age 92

GAPYEONG, South Korea — The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the self-proclaimed messiah who turned his Unification Church into a worldwide religious movement and befriended North Korean leaders as well as U.S. presidents, has died, church officials said Monday. He was 92…. In 2009, Moon married 45,000 people in simultaneous ceremonies worldwide in his first large-scale mass wedding in years. Some were newlyweds and others reaffirmed past vows. He married an additional 7,000 couples in South Korea in February 2010. The ceremonies attracted media coverage but little of the controversy that dogged the church in earlier decades…

The Ig Nobel Prize was the highest honor accorded to Reverend Moon during his lifetime.

BONUS FACT: Reverend Moon was awarded his Ig Nobel Prize in the same year that Andre Geim — now Nobel laureate Sir Andre Geim — was (together with Sir Michael Berry) awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in physics, for using magnets to levitate a frog.)

After a Delay: Ig Nobel Winner’s New Procrastination Book

“The prize gained Perry the attention of a literary agent who encouraged him to expand his original essay into a book,” says a PRI report about Professor John Perry. (Click here to read the report and hear an interview with Professor Perry, on The Takeaway program.)

That prize is the 2011 Ig Nobel Prize in literature, awarded to Professor Perry [pictured here] for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which says: To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that’s even more important.

Now, at long last, Professor Perry has produced a new book about procrastination. It’s called The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging and Postponing.

BONUS: Professor Perry is a professor at Stanford University and at the University of California Riverside. The latter institution has just published a celebration of Professor Perry’s new book.