Humor

The number of scholarly authors who have formally studied the significance of verbal (and physical) interactions at Fawlty Towers is very limited. Nonetheless, professor Annjo Klungervik Greenall, of the Department of Modern Foreign Languages, at the Norwe ...

Article - Martin Gardiner - Apr 11 2012 - 7:09am

Physics Proof Of Innocence- Using Science To Get Out Of A Speeding Ticket

What's the world coming to? With all of the PhDs America produces, pretty soon law enforcement will be limited to officers with graduate degrees in quantum physics- but for now, Newton is still all it takes. Well, usually. Sometimes even the laws of ...

Blog Post - Hank Campbell - Apr 15 2012 - 11:17am

More On Anti-Gravity Developments

It was back in 2005 that inventor Boris Volfson was granted a US patent for a device which has been erroneously summarised by some as a 'Flying Saucer'. But which is more accurately described as a Space Vehicle Propelled by the Pressure of Infla ...

Article - Martin Gardiner - Apr 16 2012 - 1:08pm

Progress Towards Celebrity Recognition

Can software automatically recognise celebrities? Hewlett-Packard (motto: Let’s do Amazing) believes so, and has recently published a paper on the feasibility of ‘Wikipedia-based Online Celebrity Recognition’. Researchers Demiao Lin, Jianming Jin, and Yuh ...

Article - Martin Gardiner - Apr 19 2012 - 9:38am

Robots- Just How Polite Should They Be?

Should robots behave politely? Because, to some, it’s a given that in the not-too-distant future large numbers of people will be interacting with robots (domestic, public, corporate and perhaps even law-enforcement/military) on a frequent basis. ...

Article - Martin Gardiner - Apr 23 2012 - 9:28am

Wobbly Tables- The Math

Mathematical theory describing the problem of four-legged wobbly tables stretches back at least as far as 2005, when a paper on the subject of “The Intuitive Table ‘Theorem’ “, was published in the math journal Viniculum. ...

Article - Martin Gardiner - Apr 26 2012 - 1:22pm

Aircraft Nose Art- The Psychology

Of all the available publications on 'Aircraft Nose Art', very few have investigated its psychological undercurrents. An exception is ‘ Aircraft Nose Art: From World War I to Today ’ (1991). Chapter 1 of which was authored by the late George R. K ...

Article - Martin Gardiner - Apr 30 2012 - 10:29pm

Update: Psychoacoustics Of Mongolian Gerbils

There are new clues in the quest for a fully coherent theory of the perception and neural representation of size-variant human vowels in the Mongolian gerbil. Previous investigations in the US (see: Science 2.0, Beachcombing in Academia, February 15th 2012 ...

Article - Martin Gardiner - May 5 2012 - 2:24pm

M-O-O-N Spells Freaking Moon: My Rant on the Super Moon

Everywhere on facebook, on yahoo news, on Huff, everyone's talking about the super moon. Some are even wondering if it will cause problems. There's even an article on myths about the moon. Everybody's out taking pictures of the moon and post ...

Blog Post - Kim Wombles - May 6 2012 - 11:34am

Shirking- The Upside

The word 'Shirk' normally carries quite pronounced negative connotations. But are there circumstances when shirking might have beneficial effects? For example in the efficient operation of teams? Shirk: verb ‘To avoid work, duties or responsibili ...

Article - Martin Gardiner - May 10 2012 - 9:21pm