Improbable Research

Today’s short movie about Books and What’s In Them is The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore:

Some people seem to have noticed its appeal.

(Thanks to investigator Kevin Petrus for bringing this to our attention.)

Today’s Curiously Refreshing Title is:

Association between personality profiles of decision makers and characteristics and performance of swine herds, Paul Yeske, University of Minnesota, 1999, 198 pages.

Award-winning author and vice-presidential candidate Paul Yeske is pictured here.

BONUS: Swinecast presents Paul Yeske, in video form:

For the first time, a peer-reviewed comprehensive discography of US-based apical musical recordings has been assembled. (Think : bees, hives, honey, buzzing, stingers, &etc). Professor William Lewis Schurk (Sound Recordings Archivist of the Music Library and Sound Recordings Archives at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, US) and colleague professor B. Lee Cooper, (presently at the North Carolina Center for Creative Retirement, US) have co-authored ‘Bumble Boogie: 100 Years of Bee Imagery in American Sound Recordings—A Discography’. (Popular Music and Society, Volume 34, Issue 4, 2011)

“This discographic study explores several bee themes featured in more than 200 commercial recordings released in the United States during the past century. Themes cited include references to scent, terms of endearment, analogies to bee-related structures and hive-oriented treasures, allusions to romance, sexuality, and reproduction, and fears of physical pain and emotional rejection.”

For some examples, see/hear these bee-centric musical excerpts via Youtube.
• Muddy Waters – I’m A King Bee
• Flight of the bumblebee
• Eric the half a bee

Note: The same team have also compiled : ‘Odes to Obesity: Images of Overweight Men and Women in Commercial Sound Recordings: A Discography‘ (Popular Music and Society,Volume 34, Issue 2, 2011)

Coming soon: Cookin’ lobsters.

Mary Mulvihill did a five-minute talk about ‘The night Dublin dissected an elephant’. It (the night Dublin dissected an elephant — not Mulvihill’s talk!) was was a big, smelly moment in the history of science. Here’s video of her talk:

Allen Mullin did the dissection, way back when, in 1681. He described it in a book called An anatomical account of the elephant accidentally burnt in Dublin on Fryday, June 17 in the year 1681:

Colltales adventures into the story of color preferences in the insane, jumping off from our excursion in that far-off land:

There are many reasons why the 1931 research “Color Preference in the Insane,” by Dr. Siegfried Katz, was important. At the time, for example, lobotomy was still an accepted treatment for schizophrenia. In fact, the procedure involving cutting nerve fibers from the frontal lobe of the brain, where emotions are generated, would grant the 1949 Nobel Peace prize to Portuguese doctor Egus Moniz.

So kudos to the good doctor Dr. Katz, working at the New York State Psychiatric Hospital, for having chosen alternative ways to make mental patients “less agitated and aggressive”….

They found no “clear-cut relationship between color and psychiatric illness,” and even questioned the use of color in diagnosis. And that was that. For all they cared, those patients who showed preference for some colors over others were, in all likelihood, well, insane.

As for us, color us lazy but never crazy for keeping going back to tap into the Improbable Research site’s bottomless pit of humorous but dead serious scientific tales. Let us praise and thank those enlightened folks and their off-kilter take on things that never cease to tickle us.