Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 82

In short, how to take a group photo with no blinks

Every Ig Nobel Prize celebrates something that makes people laugh, then think—each is a good, true, short story. An organization called Short Story, in South Korea, made this short video that tells the story of the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize for mathematics :

The 2006 Ig Nobel Prize for mathematics was awarded to Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization, for calculating the number of photographs you must take to (almost) ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed.

They described that research, in the report “Blink-Free Photos, Guaranteed,” Velocity, June 2006,

The Height of Policing

The higher one stands skeletally, the higher one stands in rank in the official realm of the Dutch policing, suggests this study:

“Effect of Self-reported Height on Occupational Rank Among Police Officers: Especially for Women it Pays to be Tall,” Abraham P. Buunk, (pictured here), Gert Stulp, and Wilmar B. Schaufeli, Evolutionary Psychological Science, epub 2021.

The authors, at the University of Groningen, KU Leuven, and Utrecht University, explain:

“This study among 725 male and 247 female police officers from The Netherlands examined the association between self-reported height and occupational rank from the perspective of sexual selection. Male and female police officers were taller than the average population. A larger percentage of women than of men was found in the lowest ranks, but in the leadership positions, there was a similar percentage of women as of men. Overall, but especially among women, height was linearly associated with occupational rank: the taller one was, the higher one’s rank.”

The graph you see here comes with this explanation: “Percentage of women and of men in the various ranks. The percentages refer to the percentage within each sex in a given rank. Numbers in white represent sample sizes in each rank.”

Study Hints that Low Viagra Price Enlivens Men in Sweden

Cheap thrills save lives, some might infer from this new study:

“Sildenafil and Suicide in Sweden,” Ralph Catalano, Sidra Goldman-Mellor, Tim A. Bruckner, and Terry Hartig, European Journal of Epidemiology, epub 2021. (Thanks to Staffan Yngve for bringing this to our attention.)

Here’s a plot of data from the study, which comes with the explanation “Observed (points) and expected (line) suicides among Swedish men aged 50–59 for 120 months beginning January 2005 and ending December 2014 (first 6 months of expected values lost to modeling). Lower than expected sequence of observed suicides marked with ‘X’ “:

The authors, at Uppsala University; and at the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, Merced; and the University of California, Irvine, explain:

We use an intent-to-treat design, implemented via interrupted time-series methods, to test the hypothesis that the monthly incidence of suicide, a societally important distal measure of mental health in a population, decreased among Swedish men aged 50–59 after July 2013 when patent rights to sildenafil (i.e., Viagra) ceased, prices fell, and its use increased dramatically….

Consistent with the argument that suicides fell below expected values after the introduction of relatively inexpensive sildenafil, the differences between expected and observed values appear increasingly negative in the last 18 months.

The Apostrophe’s Greatest Champion Has Died

Sad news from Boston, England: John Richards, Ig Nobel Prize-winning founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society, has died. He taught the world that proofreading is a form of moral philosophy.

David Seymour reports, in the Boston Standard:

Tribute paid to Boston man and founder of internationally famous Apostrophe Protection Society following his death, aged 97

The family of a Boston man who achieved international fame as a grammatical crusader have paid tribute to his memory following his death.

The Apostrophe Protection Society itself has published a tribute to its founder. That tribute includes exactly one apostrophe (as does the headline on the blog item which you are reading at this moment).

The 2001 Ig Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to John Richards of Boston, England, founder of The Apostrophe Protection Society, for his efforts to protect, promote, and defend the differences between plural and possessive.

Ways to Use the Chocolate Issue

“Ways to Use This Issue” is a featured article in the special Chocolate issue (volume 27, number 1) of the Annals of Improbable Research. This article is free to download:

Here’s a shorthand version of what’s in that article:

Write a limerick about one of the cited studies….Write a long-single-sentence short story that includes the titles of every study mentioned in one of the review articles….Do dramatic readings, in person, or in live or recorded video, of little chunks from the magazine….Watch an Ig Nobel Prize winner…Go down a rabbit hole. For some item that catches your fancy…Go down a maybe-important rabbit hole…If you are a journalist, some of those rabbit holes house bunnies that can make news editors hop to attention…Start an argument about whether some particular study is good or bad, important or trivial, valuable or worthless.

Podcast Episode #1064: “The Best Life Opera (Act 3)”

In Podcast Episode #1064, Marc Abrahams presents the third act of “The Best Life”, a mini-opera which debuted in 2015 at the 25th First Annual Ig Nobel Ceremony.

Remember, our Patreon donors, on most levels, get access to each podcast episode before it is made public.

Seth Gliksman, Production Assistant

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

The Need for Justifiable Busyness [study]

If someone had told Sisyphus that he was no longer required to push a large boulder up a mountainside for all eternity . . . would he have carried on anyway? According to a 2010 paper in the journal Psychological Science, he might well have.

“Our research suggests that Sisyphus was better off with his punishment than he would have been with a punishment of an eternity of doing nothing, and that he might have chosen rolling a rock over idleness if he had been given a slight reason for doing it.”

The research team speculate(d) that :

“[…] most people today no longer expend much energy on basic survival needs, so they have excessive energy, which they like to release through action.”

And so, due to idleness aversion, prefer fighting each other, making money, or writing scientific papers. The authors offer some practical advice regarding their discoveries :

“For example, homeowners may increase the happiness of their idle housekeepers by letting in some mice and prompting the housekeepers to clean up. Governments may increase the happiness of idle citizens by having them build bridges that are actually useless.”

See: Idleness Aversion and the Need for Justifiable Busyness Psychological Science. 21(7):926-30. A free copy of which may be found here

Illustration source Wikipedia. Research research by Martin Gardiner 

Depression and Chocolate

“Depression and Chocolate” is a featured article in the special Chocolate issue (volume 27, number 1) of the Annals of Improbable Research. This article is free to download:

The article highlights several research studies about the search for delicious mood management methods.

Dr. I.C. Notting— A classic case of nominative determinism

Dr. I.C. Notting, an ophthalmologist at Leiden University, is a classic case of nominative determinism.

Shareholder Value Destruction following Tiger Wood’s Earlier Car Crash

Tiger Woods, the celebrated professional golfer, was in a car crash in 2020. This was his second widely-reported major smash-up. After the first crash—in 2009—economists calculated some of the economic knock-on costs to companies that had paid Woods to endorse them or their products and services.

They reported details in a study: “Shareholder Value Destruction following the Tiger Woods Scandal,” Christopher R. Knittel and Victor Stango, University of California, Davis, January 2010. The authors report:

“We estimate that in the days beginning with Tiger Woods’ recent car accident and ending with his announced ‘indefinite leave’ from golf, shareholders of companies that Mr. Woods endorses lost $5-12 billion in wealth. We measure the losses relative to both the entire stock market and a set of competitor firms.”