Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 61

Research about Ice Cream Sticks

“Ice Cream Stick Research” (read the article free, here online) is a featured article in the special ICE CREAM issue (volume 28, number 1) of the magazine, Annals of Improbable Research.

[image error]

“The Third Element” Celebrates the Ig Nobel Prizes

The Croatian TV program “Treći Element” [The Third Element], with its 250th jubilee episode, celebrates the Ig Nobel Prizes:

The program describes itself [this is a translation into English]:

The 250th jubilee show of the Third Element has a slightly different edition. We gathered all four presenters to tell us about the Ig Nobel Prize – an alternative Nobel Prize. The Ig Nobel is awarded for, at first glance, funny discoveries that will make people laugh, but also very quickly encourage thinking. The award aims to celebrate unusual, original research that will stimulate the general public’s interest in science, medicine and technology. This way you will find out, among other things, whether cats are liquids, about the synthesis of blue jelly, how much saliva a five-year-old can produce and what is the correlation between the obesity of politicians and corruption. Participants: Martina Manenica, Jelana Šuran, Marko Košiček, Saša Ceci

The first (Improbable) Conversation: Cats/Liquids/Language

Join us this Thursday for the premiere of a new kind of conversation: Two researchers, in different fields, explore each other’s worlds a little bit. Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, will compere. Here’s who and what:

“(Improbable) Conversation: Physics and Psychology of Cats“, with physicist (and Ig Nobel Prize winner, for exploring the question “Can a Cat Be Both a Solid and a Liquid?”) Marc-Antoine Fardin, and psycholinguist (and inventor of the Wug Test) Jean Berko Gleason.

This is the first in a collaborative series by The Conversation and Improbable Research.

It happens online, Thursday, January 20, 2022, at 4 pm (US eastern time).

It’s free. RESERVE A PLACE IN ADVANCE.

Here are quick video peeks into the past, with Marc-Antoine Fardin and Jean Berko Gleason each explaining some of their research:

UPDATE: Here is recorded video of the event:

Here the first (Improbable) Conversation: Cats/Liquids/Language

Join us this Thursday for the premiere of a new kind of conversation: Two researchers, in different fields, explore each other’s worlds a little bit. Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, will compere. Here’s who and what:

“(Improbable) Conversation: Physics and Psychology of Cats“, with physicist (and Ig Nobel Prize winner, for exploring the question “Can a Cat Be Both a Solid and a Liquid?”) Marc-Antoine Fardin, and psycholinguist (and inventor of the Wug Test) Jean Berko Gleason.

This is the first in a collaborative series by The Conversation and Improbable Research.

It happens online, Thursday, January 20, 2022, at 4 pm (US eastern time).

It’s free. RESERVE A PLACE IN ADVANCE.

Here are quick video peeks into the past, with Marc-Antoine Fardin and Jean Berko Gleason each explaining some of their research:

UPDATE: Here is recorded video of the event:

See the first (Improbable) Conversation: Cats/Liquids/Language

Join us this Thursday for the premiere of a new kind of conversation: Two researchers, in different fields, explore each other’s worlds a little bit. Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, will compere. Here’s who and what:

“(Improbable) Conversation: Physics and Psychology of Cats“, with physicist (and Ig Nobel Prize winner, for exploring the question “Can a Cat Be Both a Solid and a Liquid?”) Marc-Antoine Fardin, and psycholinguist (and inventor of the Wug Test) Jean Berko Gleason.

This is the first in a collaborative series by The Conversation and Improbable Research.

It happens online, Thursday, January 20, 2022, at 4 pm (US eastern time).

It’s free. RESERVE A PLACE IN ADVANCE.

Multi-rider vehicle retention apparel [new patent]

“When a passenger rides behind an operator of a motorcycle, the only way to hold on is to wrap the passenger’s arms around the torso of the operator.”

What could be done to improve the passenger’s grip? Californian inventor Dale Lafayette Marks has just been awarded a US patent for his Multi-rider vehicle retention apparel (Jan. 4th 2022). In which the passenger attaches him/herself to the front-rider with Velcro* (or any other suitable hook-and-loop-based fabric fastener system)

 

Improving the grip of the passenger around the operator may be accomplished by providing gloves worn by the passenger and a jacket worn by the operator, whereby the gloves and the jacket have corresponding hook-and-loop fasteners. In this way, the hook-and-loop fasteners aid the passenger in keeping grip on the operator.”

*Note: Velcro itself was patented in 1955, but the patent has now expired. The story of its development can be found here at Swissinfo.ch

Bonus assignment [optional] What other human activities might benefit from individuals attaching themselves together with Velcro* (or any other suitable hook-and-loop-based fabric fastener system) ?

Patent research by Martin Gardiner

Special ICE CREAM issue of Improbable Research

The special ICE CREAM issue (volume 28, number 1) of the magazine, Annals of Improbable Research, has just been sent to subscribers.

Among the tasty or tasteless treats in this issue:

Ice Cream ResearchIce Cream HeadachesIce Cream ImpactsIce Cream Stick ResearchMedicinal Instances of Ice CreamIce Cream Multiplicity and FrequencyIce Cream and HappinessA Hitchhiker’s Guide to Brain Science on Planet EarthMay We Recommend: Unidirectional FriendshipMedical: Drinking Grandma, Snoring, MeditationImprobable Research: Distance, High Heels, BlinkingIcky Cutesy Research: Lettuce Lego, DogIg® and Beyond: Earwigs, Dog Food, and Ice Creamand more.

Not yet a subscriber? You can buy a copy of this issue or individual back issues, or you can take the gigantico plunge and subscribe (six new improbable issues a year, all in spiffy PDF form).

Podcast Episode #1086: “Beards and Face-Punching”

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK.

In the Ig Informal Lectures, some days after the ceremony, the new Ig Nobel Prize winners attempt to explain what they did, and why they did it. We released these lectures one at a time.

In Podcast Episode #1086, Marc Abrahams presents the 2020 Ig Nobel Peace Prize winners Ethan Beseris, Steven Naleway, and David Carrier. They received the prize for testing the hypothesis that humans evolved beards to protect themselves from punches to the face.

REFERENCE: “Impact Protection Potential of Mammalian Hair: Testing the Pugilism Hypothesis for the Evolution of Human Facial Hair,” Ethan A. Beseris, Steven E. laNeway, David R. Carrier, Integrative Organismal Biology, vol. 2, no. 1, 2020, obaa005.

The video for this lecture—graphs, charts and all—can be found online at www.IMPROBABLE.com.

Seth Gliksman, Production Assistant

Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Google Podcasts, AntennaPod, BeyondPod and elsewhere!

A History of Modern Computer Crashing

Steven Sinofsky wrote a good (and long) essay about why and how computers crash less often than they used to. Sinofsky says in part:

… In the early days of PCs before Windows, crashes froze the computer—nothing worked, not even banging on the keyboard. The only recourse was to turn the computer off and start over, losing unsaved work and causing a potentially extreme emotional moment. In the earliest days of automobiles, drivers had to be mechanics for fear of getting stranded by flaky engines—PCs were sort of like that….

The situation improved dramatically, Sinofosky explains, after software developers became able to — and set up ways to — gather crash info rapidly, and somewhat reliably, using the internet.

We began to see that while there were many different crashes, the majority of them could be attributed to a small number of buckets. In other words, if we fixed a few bugs we eliminated a huge number of crashes, dramatically improving the reliability of the product for everyone….

People used to ask if clicking on that “Send Error Report” button did any good. It absolutely did.

Inspired by Ig Nobel Prize Winner, China Builds a Rising Moon

The South China Morning Post reports, on January 12, 2022, that “China has built an artificial moon that simulates low-gravity conditions on Earth“. The report begins:

China has built a research facility that simulates the low-gravity environment on the moon – and it was inspired by experiments using magnets to levitate a frog.

Further details:

Li said the idea came from Russian-born physicist Andre Geim’s experiments to levitate a frog with a magnet – for which he won an Ig Nobel Prize, celebrating science that “first makes people laugh, and then think”, in 2000. Geim, from the University of Manchester in England, also won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for his work on graphene. Responding to an approach by the South China Morning Post, Geim said he was pleased that his “purely education experiments on diamagnetic levitation led to applications in space exploration”.

Here’s two-decades-old video of Andre Geim’s famous frog:

 

An Unrelated Other Levitating Moon in China

Thanks to Phil Hopkins for alerting us to the new moon project. Hopkins points out a superficial similarity with an unrelated project in China several months ago.

The Guardian reports about that: “A giant ‘moon’ rolled to freedom in Henan province after it escaped festival celebrations. It was not the first time a large inflatable satellite went rogue: in 2016 another model moon was blown into the streets of Fuzhou in south-east China during Typhoon Meranti. The moon festival is celebrated in many east Asian countries and coincides with the full harvest moon in September”. The Guardian presents this video: