Improbable Research

“A complete theory of icicle shape, including tip growth, self-similarity and the ripple instability, is currently lacking.”

Prompting professor Stephen W. Morris and Antony Szu-Han Chen from the Department of Physics, at the University of Toronto, Canada to construct ‘An apparatus for the controlled growth of icicles’. The team used their specially designed table-top apparatus in an attempt to grow what they call ‘ideal icicles’:

A study called The Sexual Unification of Germany tells what happened, on paper and in some people’s heads, when East Germany hooked up with West.

Ingrid Sharp

After the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989, salacious minds wondered how many, how quickly, how often, and just how Easterners would fall into bed with Westerners. Ingrid Sharp, a senior lecturer in German at the University of Leeds, pored through newspapers and academic papers in search of something related to the answer. She published her findings in a 2004 issue of the Journal of the History of Sexuality.

Sharp focused on a single question…

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

With bedbugs much in the news [and see the the EPA/CDC joint statement on bedbug control], let us not forget the Ig Nobel Prize-winning life’s work of Prof. Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. She was awarded the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize in entomology for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night.

See part of her Ig lecture in the video here. And you might enjoy reading her monograph “Huis, Bed en Beestjes” [House, Bed and Bugs], J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde, vol. 116, no. 20, May 13, 1972, pp. 825-31, and her many other related publications.

Advertising today, as prognosticated by T. Baron Russell in 1906 in his book  A Hundred Years Hence:

advertising will in the future world become gradually more and more intelligent in tone. It will seek to influence demand by argument instead of clamour, a tendency already more apparent every year. Cheap attention-calling tricks and clap-trap will be wholly replaced, as they are already being greatly replaced, by serious exposition; and advertisements, instead of being mere repetitions of stale catch-words, will be made interesting and informative, so that they will be welcomed instead of being shunned; and it will be just as suicidal for a manufacturer to publish silly or fallacious claims to notoriety as for a shopkeeper of the present day to seek custom by telling lies to his customers.

This month’s Quasi-Poetical-Research-Paper-Title-of-the-Month is “On Quartzite Lenticles in the Schists of South-Eastern Anglesey” read by Edward Greenly (who also read the abstract of the paper) at a meeting of the British Association, in Liverpool on September, 1896.

BONUS: Edward Greenly also wrote The metalliferous mines of Parys Mountain.