2021 Ig Nobel Prizes!

The 2021 Ig Nobel laureates have been announced!

I think my favorite one this year is the prize in chemistry, but I of course have fondness for the winners in complex systems (especially with one of them published in Physical Review E).

April Fooling: 2021 Edition

Well, the April 1st arXiv articles are out, and sure enough there are some of them that are in honor of April Fool's Day. For example, there is one about Taylor Swift and a paper that is "coauthored" by a cat in which the cat "analyzes" a laser pointer and a dot on a wall as a coupled dynamical system.

Update: Here are some other papers, although I don't think the one about procrastination qualifies. I saw that one in my own arXiv scouring, and in my opinion that one is more of the 'improbable research' style (something that first makes you laugh and then makes you think), rather than something that is simply a joke. (Tip of the cap to Celeste Labedz.)

Update (4/01/21): The article that I was thinking of — which concerns our poor estimation of how long things take — was indeed intended as a sort of a joke (based on the author's Twitter thread), but my own view of it is still as an example of 'improbable research'.

Update (4/01/21): Here is a joke about noodle knitting. (Tip of the cap to Katherine Seaton.)

Update (4/01/21): Some department websites also experienced a few changes. (Tip of the cap to Karen Daniels.)

Update (4/02/21): There is also now an article about various spoofs in physics and astronomy.

Update (4/02/21): The Santa Fe Institute finally created a web page for Dr. Ian Malcolm. Life finds a way, so to speak. (It has long been rumored that a certain SFI faculty member provided some inspiration for the fictional scientist. (As a subtle hint, think of The Power Law OF DOOM.)

Update (4/02/21): This fake rejection of Roxy Music fooled me.

2020 Ig Nobel Laureates

This year's Ig Nobel laureates were announced in today's ceremony. 

 I have some fondness for the Physics prize (for exciting Faraday-like waves in earthworms), given that nonlinear dynamics and pattern formation are involved, and several of the other ones are also very amusing, but I think that my favorite one this year is the one in Management:

(奚广安) Xi Guang-An, (莫天祥) Mo Tian-Xiang, (杨康生) Yang Kang-Sheng, (杨广生) Yang Guang-Sheng, and (凌显四) Ling Xian Si, five professional hitmen in Guangxi, China, who managed a contract for a hit job (a murder performed for money) in the following way: After accepting payment to perform the murder, Xi Guang-An then instead subcontracted the task to Mo Tian-Xiang, who then instead subcontracted the task to Yang Kang-Sheng, who then instead subcontracted the task to Yang Guang-Sheng, who then instead subcontracted the task to Ling Xian-Si, with each subsequently enlisted hitman receiving a smaller percentage of the fee, and nobody actually performing a murder.

Dramatic Readings of Academic Research and Other Scholarly Works

I am doing "dramatic readings" of scholarly research as part of a series of short podcasts for the Annals of Improbable Research (@improbresearch).

A new one dropped today ("Mask Wiggling"): https://t.co/I9zhPODp1H

Another one ("Cocker’s Arithmetick"): https://t.co/66twU8zjqn

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) April 25, 2020

It's (Probably Not) the End of the World as we Know it (and I Feel Fine)

According to this article, "This is not the end of the world, according to Christians who study the end of the world". What a relief!

(Tip of the cap to the Improbable Research blog.)

Tales from the ArXiv: The "Chicken McNugget Monoid"

Yes, there really is a mathematical object called the "Chicken McNugget Monoid", and here is a screenshot from page one of the paper.

Apparently, this comes from the standard nugget counts in boxes of Chicken McNuggets. Here is one line from the paper: Under regular integer addition, ⟨6,9,20⟩ forms a monoid, meaning the sum of any two McNugget numbers is again a McNugget number. And if this sounds like something out of The Onion, you may be interested in this recent article.

Also, in case you were wondering: Using [17, Proposition 1 and Table 1], it follows that the Frobenius number of 🐤 is 43. This is the largest number of Chicken McNuggets that cannot be ordered using whole boxes of sizes 6, 9, or 20.

Facial Recognition Software for Sheep

This is classical improbable research. This is extremely useful for many things, so first it may make you laugh, but then it makes you think.

Okay... pic.twitter.com/Qbsm6yptuH

— Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) November 27, 2019

(Tip of the cap to Richard Parker.)

New Journal Paper: "The Value of Thoughts and Prayers"

A new study, which was just published in PNAS, is called "The Value of Thoughts and Prayers". It considers the monetary value of thoughts and prayers, as quantified in psychology experiments.

This paper seems very worthy of an Ig Nobel Prize, though just seeing the title of it mostly makes me feel sad, despite its amusing (and 'improbable') nature.

(Tip of the cap to Bruno Gonçalves.)

2019 Ig Nobel Prizes

The 2019 Ig Nobel Prizes have been announced. I really like the one for medicine (which was awarded to Silvano Gallus, for collecting evidence that pizza might protect against illness and death, if the pizza is made and eaten in Italy), and the physics one (making Patricia Yang and David Hu second-time Ig Nobel laureates) is a familiar study about why wombats have cubic poo. David Hu and his group regularly do a lot of cool, quirky projects.

Maybe I will get one in one of these years...

Trying to Trademark the Word "The"

THE Ohio State University is apparently trying to trademark the word "the". Oy vey.

I love University of Michigan's response on Twitter.

™ pic.twitter.com/bx2vTBUtst

— University of Michigan (@UMich) August 14, 2019

The Physics of Paper Springs!

There is a new paper in Physical Review E about the physics of paper springs (i.e., springs that one constructs by folding paper). I used to do that as a kid, and I think it's really cool that there is now a scientific article about it!

The physics of a paper spring https://t.co/5yMjj4uXuM pic.twitter.com/zilPHpOGeS

— Steven Strogatz (@stevenstrogatz) July 18, 2019

Finding Identical Packs of Skittles

One blogger has examined the probability of finding identical packs of skittles and posted their data online.

In my new lower-division mathematical modeling course (Math 42; "Introduction to Data-Driven Mathematical Modeling: Life, The Universe, and Everything"), we started our unit on discrete stochastic modeling today, so this post makes me very happy! I have, of course, e-mailed my students about this.

(Tip of the cap to Jeremy Jay.)

Academic Paper on Evil Laughter

With this new study, soon they'll take over the world!

(Also, Evil will always triumph, because Good is dumb!)

I Would Code Anything for Love (but I Won't Code That)

Somebody clearly wants an Ig Nobel... Wow.

(Also, I am highly amused!)

Money quote from the programming language's GitHub page:

"Rockstar is a dynamically typed Turing-complete programming language.

Rockstar is designed for creating computer programs that are also song lyrics, and is heavily influenced by the lyrical conventions of 1980s hard rock and power ballads."

The Rockstar programming language, where power ballads = code https://t.co/l4sdSlV0BV pic.twitter.com/a7Fhm9zlf5

— Samuel Arbesman (@arbesman) July 23, 2018

Update (7/23/18): I wrote a blurb about Rockstar for the Improbable Research blog.

Apple Seismology

Here is a cool 'Quick Study' about "apple seismology".

Quoting the article's lead: Just as an earthquake’s seismic waves reveal properties of Earth’s interior, elastic surface waves on an apple can tell us about what’s going on inside the fruit.

This research may be a contender for an Ig Nobel prize.

Update: Apple seismology was discussed originally in a 1973 mathematical modeling paper by J.R. Cooke and Richard Rand. (This paper is cited in the Physics Today article above.)

Algorithms in the Form of IKEA Instructions

I think my life could not possibly have been complete without seeing algorithms presented in the form of IKEA instructions. I am highly amused. :)

This is brilliant: Common algorithms explained in the style of IKEA instructions. https://t.co/BIHCed5o0T pic.twitter.com/wTd1DMY2GR

— Thomas Roth (@StackSmashing) March 17, 2018

(Tip of the cap to Lior Pachter.)

Old Article: "On the Fracture of Pencil Points"

I got my first taste of solid mechanics (and fracture mechanics) as a kid when attempting to use 'Number 2' pencils, on which I gave up rather quickly. Once they break once, they will soon break again. I switched to "mechanical pencils" (I like the .07 size) when I was very young.

Here is an old article on pencil-tip fracture (by Henry Petroski). The picture below, which comes from an even earlier article, sets up the the geometry of a pencil tip.

(I was thinking about this because a 'Number 2' pencil showed up in The Grimm Legacy, which I am currently reading.)

Proposal: Use Computational Topology to Study Aversion to Pictures of Holes

Clearly, we need to use topological data analysis (in which one tries to algorithmically compute things like holes and their generalizations) to study aversions to images of clusters of holes.

For science!

Is There a Mathematical Formula for How Long it Takes for a Child to Ask "Are We There Yet?"?

Well, I find the formula to be rather dubious, though I am highly amused to see it.

I was looking at Dwight Barkley's Wikipedia page, and I noticed that apparently he is also known for deriving an equation to estimate how long it will be until a child in a car asks the question "are we there yet?"

You can read about it (and see the equation) in this short article.

Tales from the ArXiv: "The Random Walk of Cars and Their Collision Probabilities with Planets"

Well, the title of this paper pretty much says it all.

However, there are also some choice quotes in the paper. For example, I really like this deadpan sentence: We now turn to the long-term dynamical evolution for which we integrate 240 realizations of the Tesla for 3.5 Myr into the future.

The final part of the abstract is also nice: By running a large ensemble of simulations with slightly perturbed initial conditions, we estimate the probability of a collision with Earth and Venus over the next one million years to be 6% and 2.5%, respectively. We estimate the dynamical lifetime of the Tesla to be a few tens of millions of years. (I guess the simulation of 3.5 million years wasn't long enough.)

(Tip of the cap to Predrag Cvitanovic.)