Improbable Research

Is Obama the Antichrist? asks a November 15, 2008 headline in Newsweek magazine. The answer, of course, is almost certainly no. Mikhail Gorbachev is the Antichrist—something we know thanks to Robert Faid, author of the book “Gorbachev! Has the Real Antichrist Come?“, in which Mr. Faid calculates the exact odds (710,609,175,188,282,000 to 1) that Gorbachev is the Antichrist.

For this achievement, Mr. Faid was awarded the 1993 Ig Nobel Prize in mathematics.

The three men who inspired John Troyer’s study “Abuse of a Corpse: A Brief History and Re-Theorisation of Necrophilia Laws in the USA” (discussed here earlier this year) are again in the news. The Associated Press reports on November 20, 2008:

3 men plead not guilty to digging up grave to have sex with dead woman
LANCASTER, Wis. — Three men accused of trying to dig up a grave in Cassville in order to have sex with a dead woman have entered not guilty pleas in Grant County Circuit Court. The case against twin brothers, Alex and Nicholas Grunke, and Dustin Radke, was reinstated last July by the state Supreme Court. The high court ruled Wisconsin law bans sex with dead bodies. A lower court earlier ruled nothing in state law banned necrophilia…

(Thanks to Professor Troyer for bringing this new news to our attention.)

The edible dormouse is the star of Giuseppe Carpaneto and Mauro Cristaldi’s 1995 study Dormice and Man: A Review of Past and Present Relations, published in the journal Hystrix. The two Rome-based scholars, Carpaneto at Terza University, Cristaldi at the University of Rome, savour one of the tasty rodent’s two major historical roles. Though some scorned it an agricultural pest, many prized the critter for its succulence.

Carpaneto and Cristaldi suggest that dormouse cuisine and dormouse documentation owe much to the Romans, and almost nothing to earlier civilisations. “The ancient Greeks,” they write, “were not very interested in dormice because they did not eat them … Oribatius (fourth century AD), a Byzantine author on medicine, wrote that their meat is untasty and purgative.”

Carpaneto and Cristaldi tell of how things changed once the Romans got cooking…

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

This Saturday in Vienna, Austria, Kees (”The Duck Guy”) Moeliker will will elaborate on ‘Science communication with a laugh: Improbable Research and the Ig Nobel Prizes’. In no more than fifteen minutes, he will tell how and why he won the 2003 Ig Nobel biology prize, highlight the (new) 2008 Ig Nobel prize winners and show a new way of communicating science: the Improbable TV series.

DETAILS: This is part of the SciCom08 conference, an event designed to explore the possibilities and boundaries of science communication (“What are the formats and experiences on a global scale, and are they useful for Austria?”). Saturday, a panel of four speakers (only one of who has studied homosexual necrophiliac ducks) will talk about their international experiences in the scicom trade.

WHERE/WHEN: November 22, 2008, Saturday, 10.00 - 11.45 am, Technical University Vienna, Festsaal, Karlzplatz 13, 1040 Vienna. Ticket for the day 35 euro; students 15 euro. Sign in here. (Or try to sneak in)

Here’s episode 111 (”Inertia Debates”) of the Improbable Research TV series.

To see it, click on the image at right, and you will be whisked to YouTube (where you can subscribe, if you like, to the Improbable Research channel).

These are three-minute videos about research that makes people laugh, then makes them think.

For links about each episode’s content, and an FAQ, see the Improbable TV page.