Improbable Research

“Acquired Growth Hormone Deficiency and Hypogonadotropic Hypogonadism in a Subject With Repeated Head Trauma, or Tintin Goes to the Neurologist,” Antoine Cyr, Louis-Olivier Cyr, Claude Cyr, Canadian Medical Association Journal, vol. 171, no. 12, December 7, 2004, pp. 1433-4. (http://dx.doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.1041405).

(Thanks to Doug Hatlelid for bringing this to our attention.)
The authors explain that:

We describe the unique case of a public figure who is well known for having delayed
pubertal development and statural growth (Fig. 1). We believe we have discovered why Tintin, the young reporter whose stories were published between 1929 and 1975, never grew taller and never needed to shave.

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Icky Cutesy Research Review,” published in AIR 11:1.)

When illness or injury strikes, you want to feel relief. Our new Relief Therapy™ ensures that you will. When you visit our clinic we will therapeutically decrease your comfort level, using state-of-the-science technology: loud ambient sound; flicker-fluorescent lighting; and chilled air. Three hours of that, and then you go home. You will feel almost instant relief — and the memory of it stay with you, therapeutically, until such time as you make a full recovery.

(That’s an excerpt from the article “HMO-NO News,’ published in AIR 11:1.)

Dylan Tweed has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. He says:

I started my PhD in 2005, in the field of large scale structure formation. I’m currently working on the semi-analytical galaxy formation model GalICS with the horizon-project french consortium. I don’t know why girls put flowers on my head in spring.

Dylan Tweed, LFHCfS
PhD student in Cosmology.
Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon
Lyon, France

Nigel Tomm’s 2008 novel, The Blah Story, composed almost entirely of the word “blah,” is a delightfully cheap knock-off or follow-on to Doug Zongker’s delightfully cheap research study “Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken,” which was published in the September/October issue of the Annals of Improbable Research.

We would be pleased to learn about earlier, equally substantive works in this genre.

Physicists enjoy it when someone pontificates jerry-built nonsense — nonsense based on assumptions that are known to be wrong. Physicists see this as an invitation to use their most famous dismissive phrase: “It’s not even wrong.”

Authority figure Michael Medved, in a column about deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) published May 14, 2008, demonstrates the concept of “not even wrong”:

In today’s ruthlessly competitive international economy, the United States may benefit from a potent but unheralded advantage: the aggressive edge sustained by the inherited power of American DNA…. The insight carries crucial political implications…

(Thanks to investigator Paula Trowbridge for bringing this to our attention.)