Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 6

The special QUESTIONS issue of the magazine (Improbable Research)

The special QUESTIONS issue (volume 31, number 3, May/June 2025) of the magazine Annals of Improbable Research has gone go out to subscribers. Even if you are not a subscriber you can read several of its articles online free, for looks at many kinds of questions: Baby Questions Economics Questions Medical Questions Behavior Questions Biology Questions Food […]

Psychology Tackles a New Question: Deodorants (1942)

Psychologists must sometimes find new depths of cleverness and gumption when they confront a new kind of problem. A historic example of this is Jackson and Schoenfeld’s attack on the question of deodorants. Details are in their study: “Experimental and Statistical Analysis of the Effectiveness of Deodorant Creams,” T.A. Jackson, E.A. Jerome, and N. Schoenfeld, […]

Experiments in live-drawing to illustrate science (or other) talks

This photo shows the latest in our series of experiments in which a good artist live-illustrates a lecture. This was at the NEMO science museum in Amsterdam, on April 15, 2025. The show was the concluding event in the 2025 Ig Nobel EuroTour. The photo (taken by NEMO’s ace photographer) shows artist Keira Lee Rice […]

Reported Benefits of Swaying While Standing

Perhaps your thoughts will be swayed by the argument made in this study: “Benefits of Swaying While Standing to Higher Selective Attention in Goal-Directed Visual Tasks,” Anke Hua, Mélen Guillaume, Sergio T. Rodrigues, Fabio A. Barbieri, and Cédrick T. Bonnet, Human Movement Science, vol. 99, February 2025, article 103318. The authors explain: “Overall, our finding […]

Ig Nobel Prizes in the New Yorker Crossword Puzzle

The Ig Nobel Prizes have again turned up in a crossword puzzle, this time as an answer in the April 22, 2025 puzzle in The New Yorker. The clue for one of the across words is: 53 Its inventors won an Ig Nobel prize “for diverting millions of person-hours of work into the husbandry of virtual […]

Ig Nobel Events in Southern California (May 2-5, 2025)

The Ig Nobel Southern Cal Tour begins a few days from now, with events in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and Irvine. It’s all about Ig Nobel Prize winners and other people who have done things so surprising that they make people LAUGH, then THINK. All three events are open to the public, free. Here is […]

A Transactional Effect of String Cheese on Internet Commerce

String cheese plays a literally remarkable role in US patent 9424840B1, which was granted on August 23, 2016. As illustrated in the drawing you see here, the patent includes this passage: FIG. 1A, for instance, illustrates the user providing an example request 128(1). Here, the user 104 states “I’d like some string cheese, please.” In response to generating an audio […]

“Vegetative Electron Microscopy”

The Retraction Watch blog tried to make sense of a nonsensical phrase — “vegetative electron microscopy” — that appears in several published research reports. Read the details to see what they discovered about how this meaningless phrase came to reside in those papers: “As a nonsense phrase of shady provenance makes the rounds, Elsevier defends […]

Pseudo Green Hair

The phrase (and maybe the very idea of) “pseudo green hair” was introduced to the public in this trichological study: “Pseudo Green Hair,” Xavier Tomas, Marina Nogueras, Alvaro Bartolome, and Juan Ferrando, International Journal of Trichology, vol. 14, 2022, pp. 65-7. The authors report: “we present a case of green hair highlights, coinciding with the […]

Kind Thoughts for the Vulnerable Artificially Intelligent

Consider the plight of hypothetical artificially intelligent beings. This study worries about exactly that: “Taking AI Welfare Seriously,” Robert Long, Jeff Sebo, Patrick Butlin, Kathleen Finlinson, Kyle Fish, Jacqueline Harding, Jacob Pfau, Toni Sims, Jonathan Birch, and David Chalmers, arXiv 2411.00986, 2024. The authors explain: “We argue that there is a realistic possibility that some […]