Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 8

A New Appreciator of Dead Duck Day

An inspired description from a veterinary tech who has just discovered Dead Duck Day: @h717p4r3 Dead duck day is celebrated to commemorate the billions of birds that collide with windows annually worldwide wide and to try to figure out a way to solve this problem. Kees Moeliker is the ornithologist who documented this case and […]

Speaking of Jet Lag and Hamsters and Other Stuff

Diego Golombek, who shared the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize for Aviation, spoke of it toward the end of an interview this week (the lengthy interview was, until that point, about much weightier subjects — the headline is “Science in the eye of the storm: Diego Golombek and the defense of reason in a world of […]

The International Incident of the Herrings and the Submarine

Comedian Chad the Bird gives an entertaining and accurate telling of the once-top-secret international incident of herring farts and submarines that eventually, as a side effect, produced the 2004 Ig Nobel Biology Prize. The story begins at about the 8:43 point in this video (thanks to Sip Siperstein for bringing this to our attention): After […]

Statistics: Mullet Tallying

Statistics can be used to analyze, illuminate, or ridicule any subject, even mullets. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (the ABC) provides a moderately high-level example, with hairstyles of players in the Australian Football League (AFL). The report bears the headline: The mullet is alive and well in AFL The ABC investigates the numbers behind football’s most […]

mini-AIR and Carmelite Nun winner

The February issue of mini-AIR just went out. It includes the winner of the contest to write a research limerick about this Very (the lead author is named Very) study: “Birth Order, Personality Development, and Vocational Choice of Becoming a Carmelite Nun,” Philip S. Very, Robert B. Goldblatt, and Vincent Monacelli, The Journal of Psychology, […]

Bright Idea: Light Up Tropical Forests at Night?

The brightening idea to light up a tropical forest all night could both solve and create problems, maybe, as suggested in this study: “Exploration of a Novel Geoengineering Solution: Lighting Up Tropical Forests at Night,” Xueyuan Gao, Shunlin Liang, Dongdong Wang, Yan Li, Bin He, and Aolin Jia, Earth System Dynamics, vol. 13, 2022, pp. […]

Experiments with the ‘Kicking the Barking Dog Effect’

This experiment is one of the (so-far) few that explicitly consider the ‘Kicking the Barking Dog Effect‘: “Effects of anger and trigger identity on triggered displaced aggression among college students: based on the ‘kicking the barking dog effect’, ” Shen Liu, Wenxiu Li, Xinwei Hong, Minghua Song, Feng Liu, Zhibin Guo, and Lin Zhang, BMC […]

Join us at the AAAS Annual Meeting’s Improbable Research Show

Please join us at the Improbable Research show on Valentine’s Day night. Here are details: AAAS Annual Meeting, Boston, Massachusetts, USA — Improbable Research Show. Sheraton Boston Hotel (next to the Hines Convention Center), Constitution Ballroom — The annual Improbable Research show will be a featured part of the meeting. All talks will be kept briskly brief, thanks to a […]

A Quick Video Look at the Pigeon-Guided Missile Research

Darryl Laiu of the BBC made a nice two-and-a-half-minute video documentary about B.F. Skinner‘s Ig Nobel Peace-Prize-winning pigeon-guided missile project. The BBC describes it: The WWII experiment to make pigeon-guided missiles During WWII, psychologist B F Skinner tried to use pigeons to guide missiles towards enemy ships. His study proved it was possible, and it […]

Tom Lehrer’s “The Elements” and the Joy of Scientists [at the AAAS Annual Meeting]

Tom Lehrer’ song “The Elements” has a unique, gleeful role in the universe. You are invited to a special performance of the song on Friday Night, February 14, 2025, at the Improbable Research show at the AAAS Annual Meeting, in Boston, Massachusetts. Here’s some history and context about the song. And here’s the lineup of everything […]