Improbable Research

Newspapers today, as prognosticated by T. Baron Russell in 1906 in his book A Hundred Years Hence:

the regeneration of the newspaper will be forced upon the newspaper-office by the development of public intelligence.…

a well-informed public will resent obvious garbling or clearly unfair selection. The newspaper reader will no longer (as now) want only to hear what is said on a side more or less emotionally and hardly at all reflectively embraced. He will want to know what is said on all sides, and will make up his own mind, instead of swallowing whole the printed opinions, real or momentarily assumed, of other people.

Next Monday, Sept 6, at 7:00 pm, at the Coolidge Corner Cinema, in Brookline, MA, Marc Abrahams (the man in the blue suit — an Ig Nobel Prize-winning self-perfuming business suit) will introduce a special showing of the classic Alec Guinness film “The Man in the White Suit“. Daniel Rosenberg (the man in the white lab coat) will add insights about the chemistry of the white suit. Special appearances by Human Spotlight Jim Bredt (the man in the silver suit) and Boston Globe Miss Conduct columnist (and Improbable Research psychology editor) Robin Abrahams (the woman in the little black dress).

Robotic Chess Players are not new. But robots which play Chess via a touch-screen are. For this reason, the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology has just received a US patent for their ‘Board Game System Utilizing a Robot Arm’.
The emphasis on the ‘arm’ part is perhaps an understatement of their achievements, for the drawings show a semi-complete humanoid-bot playing chess. This is one of the very few inventions to implement a robot which operates a touch-screen (initially designed for humans) via the prodding of its robotic arm.
The University previously published details of the supporting research which led to the patentable invention in their paper ‘The Multifunctional Interactive Touch Panel System for Entertainment Robot’ (caution: 6MB .pdf)

Note: Because of the re-configurable touch-screen the bot can also play Checkers, Go, GoBang, and Machang.

War today, as prognosticated by T. Baron Russell in 1906 in his book A Hundred Years Hence:

we may take it as quite certain that war as an institution will be as obsolete as gladiators in the year 2000. Even if the increasing amenity of the human race did not abolish war, two other things would be certain to do so. One is the enormous development, already clearly in sight, of the means of destruction : the other the revolt of the peoples against the stupendous cost, not merely or chiefly in time of war, but also in time of peace, of modern armaments. The rising tide of educated democracy must inevitably banish war.

“A complete theory of icicle shape, including tip growth, self-similarity and the ripple instability, is currently lacking.”

Prompting professor Stephen W. Morris and Antony Szu-Han Chen from the Department of Physics, at the University of Toronto, Canada to construct ‘An apparatus for the controlled growth of icicles’. The team used their specially designed table-top apparatus in an attempt to grow what they call ‘ideal icicles’:

A study called The Sexual Unification of Germany tells what happened, on paper and in some people’s heads, when East Germany hooked up with West.

Ingrid Sharp

After the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989, salacious minds wondered how many, how quickly, how often, and just how Easterners would fall into bed with Westerners. Ingrid Sharp, a senior lecturer in German at the University of Leeds, pored through newspapers and academic papers in search of something related to the answer. She published her findings in a 2004 issue of the Journal of the History of Sexuality.

Sharp focused on a single question…

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