Improbable Research

When parents warn children not to play with their food, there’s now reason to add a menacing “even if”: “even if the food begins playing with you”. Recently, food was given a new ability to play, a little, the moment it encounters milk.

Researchers have patented a way to make breakfast cereal change colour as it sits in the bowl, awaiting its roller-coaster ride down somebody’s throat.

The patent documents explain why the world needs this to occur, as well as how, chemically and mechanically, to do it.

Hideo Tomomatsu of Crystal Lake, Illinois, filed a patent application in 1987 for what he called “colour-changing cereals”. Eight years later, Joseph Farinella of Chicago, Illinois, and Justin French of Cedars, Iowa, used much of the same stilted wording in filing their own application. Both patents were granted, with the rights being assigned to the Quaker Oats Company….

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

This week’s Math Exercise is: Count how many times the word “repetition” appears in the following text. The text is the citation for a published academic study:

“Importance and Need of Reconsidering Rhetorical Repetition,” Sabzalipour Jahandust [pictured here], Journal of Faculty of Letters and Humanities (Tabriz), Fall 2009-Winter 2010; 52(211):81-103. The author, at Rasht Azad University, writes:

There are numerous references to repetition or “TAKRIR” in rhetorics. For repetition, various motives and types have been enumerated. In these cases, frequency of repetition was considered to distort eloquence, and proper repetition was regarded to be of significance and fruitful. Most scholars are of the opinion that repetition in Quran is not only proper but also miraculous.

The present study aimed at investigating the importance of repetition through reviewing numerous texts. Also, this paper sought to study repetition in Persian language and literature and its importance. The findings revealed that repetition, not only in colloquial language but also in literary language, can be viewed as having an asthetic nature in composing poetry and creating a piece of art.

The main parts of this article are: definition of repetition, motive of repetition, human an’s interest in repetition and kinds of repetition. The type of repetition that was studied here is not repetition in terms of phoneme or morpheme but it is repetition in phrases and sentences and at discoursal level.

BONUS: The importance of repetition.

It’s time for still another visit with Nigel Bradley.

This is the most exciting video you will have seen during the minute and two seconds you were watching it. It’s specially made for market researchers. It’s called “Methodology options available to the researcher”. It’s from Oxford University Press. It’s right here:

BONUS: All about the star: Nigel Bradley

Handicapping a genuine fight is not always as easy as it seems. As in other endeavors, much of the “everybody knows” knowledge ain’t necessarily so. Consider this case study from the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts:

“Eunuchs as better fighters?” Simona Kralj-Fišer [pictured here] and Matjaž Kuntner, Naturwissenschaften, Volume 99, Number 2, 95-101, The authors report:

We recently showed that Nephilengys malabarensis eunuchs, i.e. sterile spider males that lost their genitals during copulation, become more aggressive during male–male contests. Here, we add crucial comparative data by exploring eunuch fighting behaviour in Nephilengys livida from Madagascar, specifically by testing the ‘better fighter hypotheses’ in a laboratory setting. Similar to N. malabarensis, N. livida copulations resulted in total male castration with the severed palp plugging the female genitals in 70.83% cases, which mostly (63.63%) prevented subsequent copulations. Unexpectedly, however, N. livida eunuchs exhibited lower aggressiveness than virgin males.

(Thanks to investigator Tom Gill for bringing this to our attention.)

Professional indexer Glenda Browne, who lives in Australia, has been traveling, observing all the while. She says:

We’ve been travelling in Europe. As an indexer, this sign took my fancy:

BACKGROUND: Browne was awarded the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize in literature for her study of the word “the” — and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order.  That study is:

“The Definite Article: Acknowledging ‘The’ in Index Entries,” Glenda Browne, The Indexer, vol. 22, no. 3 April 2001, pp. 119-22.