Improbable Research

The July issue of mini-AIR just went out. Topics include: Most Absurd Drug Name; Feline Reactions; Bald Scientists’ Limbo: Still Languishing; Too Much Where; Ig Nobel Tickets — and Call for Delegations; Greek Hip Joint Poet; Pastanticipation; Piero’s Preliminary Pasta Procedure; Cheek / Tongue / Crisp Bread Limerick; Blyth on Hair; Monkeys *Can* be Forced (Pot); Hamsters and Mah-Jong; etc.

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If you want to use technology to identify when a person is snoring, you’d probably need a long series of steps that begins with attaching wires to the person’s scalp, chin and eyelids. But soon the task will be much simpler – just stick a microphone on the bedside table, and use a computer to distinguish what’s a snore sound and what’s not.

Credit for this breakthrough goes to William Duckitt, Seppo Tuomi and Thomas Niesler of the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. They describe their technical tour de force in a paper called Automatic Detection, Segmentation and Assessment of Snoring from Ambient Acoustic Data, published in the journal Physiological Measurement….

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

Here’s episode 104 (”Cuticles, and two reactions”) 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). Improbable TV can also be seen on MySpace and elsewhere.

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.

My colleague Anneke Valeros’s letter (AIR Vents 14:2) about my letter (AIR Vents 13:7) about Valeros’s attitude toward hydrophilic molecules claims that she has not revised her view of detergent chemistry. She quotes her role model, Richard Dawkins, and says, “Like many scientists, I am delighted to acknowledge occasions when I have changed my mind, but this is not one of them.”

Piffle. I repeat here what I have repeated elsewhere many times. Valeros did shift her opinion. I can only repeat (quoting Valeros quoting me quoting Richard Dawkins, who was my role model before he was Anneke Valeros’s role model): “Like many scientists, I am delighted to acknowledge occasions when I have changed my mind, but this is not one of them.”

Burlei Rimsz, Ph.D.
Kalamata, Greece

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Air Vents,” published in AIR 14:3.)

We finished up a walking tour of Corkscrew, a nature sanctuary run by the Audubon Society. I took notice of the Strangler Fig wrapped around the Cypress trees, especially the direction of the spiral as it wound around the trunks. They were all counter-clockwise as viewed from the ground. Being curious, I asked the desk attendant if the spiral wound in the opposite direction south of the equator. He was pretty sure they did, adding, “It’s the same as the way water swirls in the opposite direction in the toilet bowls when you cross the line.”

Wait a minute! it’s been proven many times that the Coriolis Effect is so weak that it has almost no connection to the direction of the waters motion. The rotation of the Earth in 24 hours is so slow that any reasonable size tank wouldn’t make any difference.

Here, it got strange. He laughed and stated that he had PROOF. He had traveled to Surinam and watched a five gallon tank swirl in the opposite direction every time compared to another tank at home. The proof? He had taken a photo. Never mind the disconnect with the scientific method of independent research, Never mind that Surinam is actually NORTH of the equator and that the Coriolis Effect is almost zero when you are right on the equator. He was right and thus another urban legend is reinforced.

I think I need to use another source to answer the original question.