Improbable Research

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.)

Newspaper editors, some of them, are eternally fascinated by intestines, and sometimes let this creep into their work. Today’s example, from the Boston Globe, is the headline in a report about a baseball player named Bartolo Colon, who might replace an injured player on the local team. The headline: “Colon may fill the void Tuesday“.