Humor

What makes adult human males attractive (to adult human females) ? Of the many possible factors, at least three have been scientifically investigated, measured, and described by ‘Honest Signals’ researcher Dr. Nick Neave, of the School of Life Sciences, Department of Psychology, at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Factor one: Facial hair (of the right length) “A within-subjects design employed one condition (facial hair) incorporating five levels (clean-shaven, light stubble, heavy stubble, light beard and full beard).” “Males with light stubble were considered to be the…

Many may jump to the conclusion that ‘Uninformative Advertising’ simply provides a route by which a manufacturing corporation can ‘burn its money’ – but this may not always be the case, as explained in a recent paper from the Yale School of Management.  Professors Dina Mayzlin and Jiwoong Shin have identified ways in which advertising that is deliberately devoid of any attribute information can (sometimes) help to promote sales. This can happen, according to the researchers, because consumers seeing the uninformative ads are encouraged to search via the internet to find the crucial…

• The problem – How to tell if a banana is senescent (old). • The solution – Apply fractal Fourier analysis to the banana spots. The computational method was jointly developed by the Department of Science and Food Technology, Universidad de Los Lagos, Chile, along with the Department of Chemical Engineering and Bioprocesses, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and the Departamento de Graduados e Investigación en Alimentos, Escuela Nacional de Ciencias Biológicas, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico. Bananas (Musa cavendish) were stored for 10 days at 20 °C. and scans of the banana…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/27/hacking-the-mainframe_n_2958380... Actually it should have read, "What David Stephens and HuffPo got wrong". There's only one response possible.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSra6ML4wI0

In order to clear any doubts regarding the comparative growth rates of the whiskers of harbor seals (Phoca vitulina) and Steller sea lions (Eumetopias jubatus), researchers at the Institute of Marine Science, University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the Mystic Aquarium, CT, U.S.A. performed a series of experiments in 2001. The whiskers of participant seals and sea lions were stable-isotope-labeled with Carbon 13 and Nitrogen 15, and whisker growth rates were measured over a period of  more than two years. The results: Seals: The peak positions indicated that growth began in the fall,…

A ground breaking paper has been published in the journal of comparative irrelevance which shows the Lambda CDM model is wrong.  It's all in the numbers..This theory explains everything better than LCDM. http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.7476 Conspiratorial cosmology - the case against the Universe Jörg P. Rachen, Ute G. Gahlings (Submitted on 31 Mar 2013) Based on the cosmological results of the Planck Mission, we show that all parameters describing our Universe within the \Lambda CDM model can be constructed from a small set of numbers known from conspiracy theory. Our finding is…

Cross-disciplinary  academic progress in vagueness has recently been augmented  with a paper from Prof. PhDr. Jarmila Tárnyiková CSc. at Palacký University, in Olomouc, Czech Republic. The professor has authored one of the very few papers to examine and compare English and Czech Non-numerical Vague Quantifiers (also known as Vague Non-numerical Quantifiers – VnQs). Some examples from the paper : • Piles of • Oodles of • Mountains of • A Smidgen of • A Dash of • A Pinch of “The prototypical structural sequence is [VnQ + of + N], as in a bag of nerves, bags of energy, mountains…

“…there is no authoritative definition of the sense of humor, and it is also not yet clear what ‘laughing at oneself’ is, or if it even actually occurs in people’s everyday behavior.” - explain authors Dr. Ursula Beermann and Prof. Dr. Willibald Ruch, who conducted the very first scientific study on the subject of ‘laughing at oneself’ at the University of Zurich in 2009. The two investigators showed a series of ‘Distorted Pictures of Oneself’ and ‘Distorted Pictures of Strangers’ to 67 experimental participants while a hidden video camera recorded the resulting facial and verbal…

Dr. Timothy Elbert Wise  is not only a joint-program leader of both the Popular Music and Recording and Popular Musicology degrees at the University of Salford, UK, but is also one of the world’s foremost authorities on the history and physiology of yodeling.  He has published a number of scholarly papers on the subject, (full publications list here). Take for example Yodel Species: A Typology of Falsetto Effects in Popular Music Vocal Styles (published in the journal Radial Musicology, Volume 2, 2007) The paper - “… presents a classification system for falsetto vocal effects…

Martin A. Schwartz is Professor of Microbiology and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia. The professor draws attention to the importance of stupidity in scientific research in his recent article for Seismological Research Letters – January/February 2011; v. 82; no. 1; p. 3-4. Entitled : THE IMPORTANCE OF STUPIDITY IN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH.    “Science makes me feel stupid too. It’s just that I’ve gotten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn’t know what to do without that feeling. I even think it’s…