Improbable Research

Watch:

This well-paced 1949 documentary came from the Hamilton Watch Company. (Thanks to Tim Billingsley for bringing it to our attention.)

Contrast it with this more modern, wordless, music-fueled documentary of a pricier watch, the Tourbillon Zephyr. Watch:

Today’s Icky Research Item award (with echoes from earlier French and British work—see below) goes to this new Dutch study:

“Decapitation in Rats: Latency to Unconsciousness and the ‘Wave of Death’“, Clementina M. van. Rijn, Hans Krijnen, Saskia Menting-Hermeling, Anton M. L. Coenen, PLoS ONE 6(1): e16514. (Thanks to investigator and LFHCfS member Holly Brothers for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands, explain:

“The question whether decapitation is a humane method of euthanasia in awake animals is being debated. To gather arguments in this debate, obsolete rats were decapitated while recording the EEG, both of awake rats and of anesthetized rats. Following decapitation a fast and global loss of power of the EEG was observed… Two conclusions were drawn from this experiment. It is likely that consciousness vanishes within seconds after decapitation, implying that decapitation is a quick and not an inhumane method of euthanasia. It seems that the massive wave which can be recorded approximately one minute after decapitation reflects the ultimate border between life and death.”

PREVIOUS RESEARCH: This extends a line of research that includes

Join us in celebrating the work of research publicist Mary-Ann Twist, managing editor of the Journal of Consumer Research. In this and related posts we feature the beginnings of press releases written by Ms. Twist. Each has a characteristically (yes!) Twisty headline and/or opening sentence. Here’s the sixth:

Does Clenching Your Muscles Increase Willpower?

The next time you feel your willpower slipping as you pass that mouth-watering dessert case, tighten your muscles. A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research says firming muscles can shore up self-control.

We’ve seen that dog rotation can be pleasing (as in the instance we described recently) or not (as in the instance described even more recently). But what of rabbit rotation? Here’s one instance that, one can infer, was not terribly pleasing:

“Changes in animal reactivity under the influence of prolonged rotation,” N.I. Arlashchenko and A.A. Shipov, Kosm. Biol. Aviakosmicheskaya Med , (USSR). Vol. 14, no. 6, pp. 51-54. 1980. The authors write: “Rabbit experiments demonstrated that a prolonged (up to 14 days) rotation at a rate of 7 rpm in a 110 cm arm rotating system alters reactivity of the animal body as follows from measurements of radioresistance, vestibular reactivity, and barrier function of eye vessels, thus indicating increase in general resistance to environmental effects.”

Now here’s a contrasting example. The manufacturer of the sex toy in this video might argue that its rabbit rotation is pleasant indeed:

Following-on from our earlier article examining the meaning(s) of YES! . . .

Gary Peters, Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory at York St. John University, UK provides a paper ‘‘Yes’, ‘No’, ‘Don’t Know’’ for the journal Parallax ( #56, 2010). His essay examines the affirmative implications of the word ‘Yes’ – especially with reference to art and philosophy – but, curiously perhaps, doesn’t mention of one of the most famous applications of ‘Yes’ in art – Yoko Ono’s Ceiling Painting (1966).
Viewers of Ono’s now-classic piece climbed up a white step-ladder in the centre of the Indica Gallery in London, finding a magnifying glass hanging from the ceiling which allowed them to view the word “YES” written in tiny letters on a framed piece of paper fixed to the ceiling. As John Lennon put it at the time : “I would have been quite disappointed if it had said ‘NO,’ but was saved by the fact it said ‘YES’”.
The paper does, however, cover the philosophical implications of an earlier and perhaps equally world-famous artistic usage of ‘Yes’  – created by Frank Silver and Irving Cohn back in 1922  – ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’

“Like the famous song––‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’––the co-presence of affirmation and negation is not dialectically resolved but announced as an affirmation of negation that, in Heidegger’s sense, allows the work to leap into its own becoming.”

Bonus:
The professor also curated a collection of thirteen especially composed ‘YES!’-inspired musical items for the journal issue (four of which feature him as composer/performer). Unfortunately they weren’t included in the final production of the journal, but they are nevertheless archived online and can be heard or downloaded here. (mp3 format)