Improbable Research

Scientifically speaking, exactly what makes April in Paris delightful? A computer scientist of my acquaintance, a Paris native now living abroad, analysed the question and wrote up a study that will be published soon, albeit pseudonymously. His data imply that vacations and strikes are what drive Parisians to behave as they so famously do.

Paris school vacation periods are scheduled with clockwork regularity. This scientist believes that strikes are nearly as predictable. The two quasi-metronomes make Parisians tick…..

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

“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.