Improbable Research

There’s pleasure to be had in reading The Possible Pain Experienced During Execution by Different Methods, if only the pleasure of feeling the author’s possible satisfaction at having done a thorough job.

There exist few reliable firsthand reports of the pain experienced during an execution. Harold Hillman [shown here on one of the Ig Nobel tours of the UK] was director of the Unity Laboratory of Applied Neurobiology, and a reader in physiology at the University of Surrey, in Guildford. He spent years gathering whatever information he could find about what it feels like to undergo each of the most popular forms of capital punishment.

Hillman drew from a wide variety of sources: “observations on the condemned persons, postmortem examinations, physiological studies on animals undergoing similar procedures, and the literature on emergency medicine”.

This he caringly distilled into a fact-filled, eight-page report that provoked reactions of many different kinds – admiring, disgusted, disdainful, horrified and, in some circles, mordantly amusé.

Hillman gave a detailed description of each method of execution – how the act is performed, the typical physiological course of events in the executee, and a quick pathological examination of the remains…

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

Young people who chose books and learning to help them make sense of the overpowering world become so enamored of the books that they lose interest in that world that those books were supposed to help them understand until, if they are historians, they are writing papers on where Napoleon went to the bathroom, and if they are psychologists, they are running rats through multicolored mazes…

—Bill James, in Let’s Not Eat the Bones—Bill James Without the Numbers, 1989, p. 221.

I have news for Simon Hoggart (March 8). There is a teapot orbiting the sun. It’s in my kitchen cupboard.
Dr David Philpott
London

—letter in The Guardian, March 10, 2008

[NOTE: the notion of the orbiting teapot may have originated with Bertrand Russell. See pages 547-8 of volume 11 of the book The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell.]

It was mid winter when Till Eulenspiegel arrived at Ascherleben. Times were hard, but finally he found a furrier who was willing to take on an apprentice, and he was put to work sewing pelts. Not being
accustomed to the smell of the curing hides, he said, “Pew! Pew! You are as white as chalk, but stink like dung!”

The furrier said, “If you don’t like the smell, then why are you a furrier’s apprentice? It’s a natural smell. It’s only wool.” Eulenspiegel said nothing, but thought, “One bad thing can drive another bad thing away.” Then he let such a sour fart that the furrier and his wife had to stop working.

The furrier said, “If you have to fart like that, then go out into the courtyard. There you can fart as much as you like.” Eulenspiegel answered, “A fart is more natural and healthier than the stench of your sheep pelts.”

The furrier said, “Healthy or not, if you want to fart, then go outside.” Eulenspiegel said, “Master, it would do no good, because farts don’t like the cold. They are used to being in a warm place. That’s why if you let a fart it always rushes for your nose. It goes from one warm place to another.”

The furrier said nothing, for he could see that Eulenspiegel knew nothing of the furrier trade and was a rogue at that. And he sent him on his way.

This story, Retold from Ein kurtzweilig Lesen von Dyl Ulenspiegel (Strasbourg, 1515). Is part of Univeristy of Pittscburgh professor emeritus D.L. Ashiman‘s collection, called “Breaking Wind: Legendary Farts”, of folktales, folklore, fairy tales, and mythology.

(Thanks to Maddalena Feliciello for bringing this to our attention.)

If you talk to some physicists you might hear something like “Not a single word in the series is Landau’s, and not a single idea is Lifshitz’.” Mermin disagrees:

“The great Russian physicist L. D. Landau was said to have hated writing. He coauthored an extraordinary series of textbooks in collaboration with E. M. Lifshitz, who did all the writing. From my perspective Lifshitz operated in a coauthor’s paradise. He was linked to nature through Landau, who was in deep nonverbal communion with her, but had no investment whatever in the process of articulating that communion.

“It is also said that even Landau’s profound technical papers were actually written by Lifshitz. Many physicists look down on Lifshitz: Landau did the physics, Lifshitz wrote it up. I don’t believe that for a minute. If Evgenii Lifshitz really wrote the amazing papers of Landau, he was doing physics of the highest order. Landau was not so much a coauthor, as a natural phenomenon — an important component of the remarkable coherence of the physical world that Lifshitz wrote about so powerfully in the papers of Landau.

So writes Andre Brown at Biocurious