Improbable Research

“The ‘Holy Plane’ of Rectal Surgery,” R.J. Heald, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, vol. 81, September 1988, pp. 503–8. The author, at Basingstoke District Hospital, Basingstoke, U.K., explains [AIR 16:1]:

this is the story of a simple artisan’s pleasure in the actual style of performing an operation—in essence the way to use a pair of scissors to define and develop a plane in a precise manner…. A surgical plane is a potential space between contiguous organs which can be reproducibly created by dissection…. It has long been a strong personal preference to find these planes around the gut and its derivatives with exasperating slowness

Philosophy and medicine join forces because of a donut, in the study:

“The ethics of eating a drug-company donut,” Karl Broznitsky, Canadian Medical Association Journal, 1996 March 15; 154(6): 899–900. It concludes with this passage:

“He bit into the donut, as content with his rationalization as his
staffmen were with theirs. A blob of grape jelly trickled down his chin. It may not have been ethical, but it sure tasted good.”

Marc Abrahams will insert a highly compressed Ig Nobel Prizes talk/demo into the Halloween night show of w00tstock, at the Wilbur Theater in Boston.

What, you may ask, is w00tstock? Officially, this:

a special event for geeks of every stripe. Television host/special-effects artist Adam Savage (“MythBusters”), actor/author/blogger Wil Wheaton (“Star Trek: The Next Generation”, “Stand By Me”) and music-comedy duo Paul and Storm (The Internet, Da Vinci’s Notebook) present a night of songs, readings, comedy, demonstrations, short films, special guests, and other clever widgets born from and dedicated to the enthusiasms, obsessions, trials and joys of geek pride.

Details:

Wilbur Theatre – 7 pm, Sunday, October 31
Tickets: http://bit.ly/w00tBoston3
featuring Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy as “Wil Wheaton”
Confirmed guests: Marc Abrahams; Marian Call; Grant Imahara; more to come!

“We have been unable to find literature which specifically examines doll-making within an organizational context, or as a form of leadership development.”

- explain Dr. Patricia Gayá Wicks and Dr. Ann Rippin from the Department of Management at the University of Bristol, UK. To address this gap in the literature, 20 participants on an MSc. course entitled Management Learning & Change (also at the University of Bristol, UK) “… were invited to create leadership touchstones, or dolls, as a way of learning about leadership and themselves as leaders”.

BONUS: The Guardian column about this
BONUS: Special mummy issue of the Annals of Improbable Research