Improbable Research

A new invention aims to foil paparazzi who try to photograph people who do not wish to be photographed. Wilbert Leon Smith, Jr. and Keelo Lamance Jackson of California obtained a patent last year for what they call “Inhibiting Unwanted Photography and Video Recording”. Their invention builds on a simple idea patented in 2005 by Jeremy and Joseph Caulfield from Arizona.

The Caulfields equipped celebs with a flashgun that fires automatically the instant another flashgun fires nearby. Smith and Jackson’s device goes that bit better: it’s a rotating, swivelling, oscillating device that can emit multiple strobe lights and other light beams for as long as the celebrity deems necessary.

The device has uses beyond deterring pesky paparazzi. As Smith and Jackson explain, it can also protect our own spy agencies against nosy foreign bad guys…

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

Here’s a technical drawing from the Smith/Jackson patent:

BONUS: Martin Gardiner’s report on this.

A core definition of Britishness, the official six-page specification for how to make a cup of tea, is officially “under review”. But don’t panic. It is standard procedure for the British Standards Institution (BSI) to do a “systematic periodic review” of each of its many specifications which, piecemeal, define nearly everything British.

Belying stereotypes of peremptory rigidity in anyone or anything that officially tells the populace what’s what, the BSI is nice about what it does. “British Standards are voluntary in that there is no obligation to apply them or comply with them,” it says. The standards are “devised for the convenience of those who wish to use them”. That sentiment appears in the 44-page specification for standard number BS 0, “the standard that governs the way BSI produces standards”, copies of which are available free of charge.

The cup-of-tea standard, officially numbered BS 6008, has been unchanged since 1980. It does come at a cost: £82 per copy, more than triple the £24 price, in effect, when I profiled it eight years ago….

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

BONUS: The BSI was awarded the 1999 Ig Nobel Prize for literature, for BS 6008.

BONUS: A salute to Smoot.

Prior to 2008 no one knew, at all precisely, the pain people suffer when they gaze at an ugly painting – relative to what they’d feel if they were looking at a pretty picture – while a stranger shoots them in the back of the hand with a powerful laser beam. Now something is known about the subject. The knowledge is preserved in a study called Aesthetic Value of Paintings Affects Pain Thresholds.

The study’s authors, Marina de Tommaso, Michele Sardaro and Paolo Livrea at the University of Bari in Italy, had 12 people each identify paintings as beautiful or ugly, then stare at some of each kind while a laser heated into the dorsal surface of their hand. Each volunteer, after each viewing, rated the pain on a scale of zero to 100. The hurt was a little worse when they looked at ugly art, they said, mostly.

This manner of inflicting pain – applying a carefully aimed column of light amplified by stimulated emission of radiation (that’s the phrase, more or less, that gives us the cool, five-letter word “laser”), is not the only possible way….

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

Mary Douglas, who supervised the man who watched people eat

Confident that no one would notice what he was doing, Michael Nicod spent months in the homes of families he did not know, making detailed notes about everything they ate. Nicod was performing research for Britain’s Department of Health and Social Security in 1974. He and his colleague, University College London professor Mary Douglas, wrote a report called Taking the Biscuit: The Structure of British Meals.

Nicod and Douglas wanted to identify what typical British persons see as the essential parts of their typical meals. The pair drew on their training as anthropologists: “We imagined a dietician in an unknown Papuan or African tribe wondering how to introduce a new, reinforcing element into tribal diet. We assumed that the dietician’s first task would be to discover how the tribe ‘structured’ their food.”

Nicod lived as a lodger with “four working-class families where the head was engaged in unskilled manual labour”, in East Finchley, Durham, Birmingham and Coventry. He stayed in each place at least a month, “watching every mouthful and sharing whenever possible”….

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

The name of the sloth is synonymous with a certain style of sin. But scientists pursue them for other reasons, too. The animals move – something they do on occasion – in what can seem mysterious ways. They hang upside down from tree limbs, and sometimes amble that way there. On the ground, ambling right-side-up is their preferred way to get from here to slightly over there. They often snooze.

A study called Three-Dimensional Kinematic Analysis of the Pectoral Girdle During Upside-Down Locomotion of Two-Toed Sloths appeared two years ago in the journal Frontiers in Zoology. John Nyakatura and Martin Fischer of Friedrich-Schiller-Universität in Jena, Germany, analysed the “suspensory quadrupedal locomotion” of two sloths. They concluded that an earlier biologist had exaggerated, but only slightly, in proclaiming that “of all mammals, the sloths have probably the strangest mode of progression”.

Others hesitated less to say more….

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

BONUS: Maggie Koerth-Baker’s “Four Fun Facts About Sloths“, in BoingBoing

BONUS (conceivably related, in an immaculate fashion): Catholic Answers Magazine tells tales about “The Sin of Sloth”