Improbable Research

Miss Conduct is running a clerihew contest. The submissions have been winnowed down to these (see below) final five, the sole winner to be chosen from among them by popular vote. For reasons unknown or maybe nonexistent, technologists proved to be the most successful subjects.

Bill Gates
Has left the giant software company everyone hates.
“Hey, Mistah?
Are *you* gonna use Vista?”

William S. Burroughs
Had a brow filled with wrinkles and furrows
(Which were probably exacerbated, of course,
By his addiction to horse).

Tim Berners-Lee
Invented HTTP
Thus the World Wide Web was born
For Nigerian Diplomats and porn.

Thomas Edison
Invented a type of electricity that we have mostly had to jettison.
The clear advantages of direct over alternating current
Weren’t.

Edmund C. Bentley
Wrote intently,
But would now be anonymous
Were it not for the verse form for which his middle name is eponymous.

To measure laughter, he attaches sensors on the skin of a tested subject’s stomach, particularly the diaphragm and detects muscle movements.

The machine looks 3,000 times a second at electric elements normally produced in the body.

“I have a theory that humour detected in the brain gets directly discharged through the movement of diaphragm,” he said. By checking the movement of the diaphragm and other parts of the body, it will be possible to see if a person is only pretending to laugh while also distinguishing different types of laughter such as derision and cynicism, Kimura said.

So says a February 22, 2008 Agence France-Presse report about Kansai University professor Yoji Kimura.

(Thanks to investigator Mark Schreiber for bringing this to our
attention.)

Today I found an online Asteroid Orbit Viewer. This was particularly interesting for me because it allowed me to see the orbit of the asteroid that my wife and I discovered in April of 1993 while we were making observations at MDM Observatory on Kitt Peak….

Some more fun facts about minor planets: There are currently 96,154 numbered minor planets. Giuseppe Piazzi discovered the first one, Ceres, on January 1, 1801. The 96154th numbered minor planet was discovered in 1977 at Palomar Observatory. Minor planets 96010 through 96050 were discovered in August of 2004. Since 1997, the LINEAR project has discovered 47,898 numbered minor planets, 49.8 percent of the total number discovered during the last 200 years!

So writes Eric Schulman.

Memory consists, among other things, of verbal information and of mental images. To illustrate this difference, I will often start a lecture on cognition by asking students to think of their home address. Then I ask them to think of how many windows are in their living room. Ostensibly, I do this to illustrate the different processes of recall and imagery. Really, though, it’s just entertaining to watch 35 faces simultaneously go slack and 35 pairs of eyes roll back in their heads as they count the windows.

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Socially Scientific (Notes on the intriguing behavior of human beings,)” by Robin Abrahams, published in AIR 11:1.)

Investigator Rose Fox writes:

Here you will find many of the yeasty books written by Dr. William G. Crook. (Occasional co-authors include Elizabeth B. Crook and Cynthia Crook.)

Dr. Crook’s research on yeast hypersensitivity has been prominently covered on Quackwatch. So apparently he was a quack as well as a Crook.