Humor

Is karaoke a passing fad? Kevin Brown PhD. Associate Professor of Theatre History, Theory, Criticism, Performance Studies, New Media, Non-Western Theatre, and Popular Culture at the University of Missouri, US. believes not. For his doctoral dissertation, he conducted a two-year ethnographic study of karaoke in America, a portion of which is: ‘Liveness Anxiety: Karaoke and the Performance of Class‘, and is published in Vol. 1, Issue 2, of the academic journal Popular Entertainment Studies. “It is very tempting to dismiss karaoke as a passing fad.” explains the professor. “It is even more…

“Considerable work exists to describe the functions of yeah.” explain authors Chad D. Nilep and colleague Tamara Grivičić from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado. And there has also been some academic research investigating the so-called ‘Creaky Voice’. But the team’s study is one of the very first to investigate the two together (i.e. Yeah + Creaky Voice). As a dataset, the researchers used approximately twenty-five minutes of telephone conversations which they describe as “found data” – in that it was not recorded by the investigators themselves. Instead, the phone…

For aesthetic reasons, plastic surgeons are sometimes required to re-position male nipples – after dramatic weight-loss for example. In such a case they are presented, in effect, with a substantially blank canvas. But the presently accepted methods for calculating ideal nipple locations are far from straightforward. “Currently available guidelines create areolas that are too large, place the nipple-areola complex too high and too far medially, and/or require complex abstract mathematical calculations.” - explain Dr. Bishara Atiyeh and colleagues at the Beirut Medical Center, Lebanon, who…

Does subglottal resonance have a significant influence on register transition when singing falsetto? To find out, investigators at the University of Iowa decided on an innovative approach – involving helium. Or, more accurately, Helox (a.k.a. Heliox) a mixture of helium and oxygen [see safety note below].Because helium is considerably less dense than normal air mixtures, the vocal resonant frequencies of those who breathe it tend to be higher – suggesting a possible application in falsetto research. Reference: see this video of Lionel Ritchie singing ‘Hello’ (with helium). Researchers Martin…

“Our results raise important questions about our representation of tastes and flavors and could also lead to applications in the marketing of food products.” - say a research team who have been investigating possible associations between flavors and various musical instruments. The Crossmodal Research Lab at Oxford University in the UK have presented their paper : ‘As bitter as a trombone: Synesthetic correspondences in nonsynesthetes between tastes/flavors and musical notes’ in a recent issue of the journal Attention Perception&Psychophysics. Previous studies have concluded that even…

Having recently graduated college, I can recall on more than one occasion waking up in the morning with a pounding headache, insatiable thirst, and intensely nauseous, regretting that one-cocktail-too-many (I'm sure most of you reading this can sympathize). Most people can recognize when you've had a rough night, and all of a sudden everyone becomes the expert on curing hangovers: "Have plenty of water, it washes away the alcohol" (Somewhat true, at the very least it does prevent dehydration.) "Take a few Tylenol, and you'll be as good as new" (Bad idea. Your liver has already been through…

“Ears are a particularly appealing approach to noncontact biometrics because they are relatively constant over a person’s life and are unaffected by expressions, unlike faces.” - explain researchers from the Image Processing and Computer Vision dept. at the University of Southampton, UK in a recent article for IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (A). In which professor Mark S Nixon BSc PhD FIAPR FIET CEng and colleague John D. Bustard (Ph.D researcher) draw attention to the large potential of ears for biometric recognition purposes. But although electronic ear-recognition…

The question is posed, and then answered, by  Jonathan Harrison, former chair of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham, UK, in his online essay “Is Eating People Wrong?” The professor points out that - “Animals that can be eaten are often better taken care of than men, whose artificially induced inedibility provides those responsible for them with no such incentive. “ That said, however - “I would not be in favour of individuals eating people in contemporary bourgeois society, as this might well interfere with regulations for the hygienic disposal of human bodies…” Though with…

Neil Armstrong changed the way we think of ourselves – but, oddly, not the way we think of the Moon, writes Daniel Hannan on Telegraph Blogs. But what I particularly like is the comment by one Maria Kay: I've toured the USS Hornet, now retired in Alameda, Calif. (That is the aircraft carrier that fished the Apollo 11 capsule out of the ocean.) There is a small museum of moonshot memorabilia stored on board.Among the items is a signed U.S. customs cargo declaration from that Armstrong had to fill out for the Port of Honolulu.The line for "country of export origin" reads THE MOON.U.S.…

The sailing event of the recent 2012 London Olympics were held at Weymouth, half-way along Dorset and East Devon’s famous Jurassic Coast.  Thinks: Sources: Sailing picture: goc2012.culture.gov.uk; Plesiosaur LHL Digital Collections