Improbable Research

“Food Idiosyncrasies: Beetroot and Asparagus,” S.C. Mitchell, Drug Metabolism and Disposition, vol. 29, no. 4, part 2, 2001, pp. 539-43 (http://dmd.aspetjournals.org/cgi/content/full/29/4/539).

(Thanks to Danny O’Hare for bringing this to our attention.)

The author, at Imperial College School of Medicine, London, reports: Anecdotal observations scattered throughout the literature have often provided clues to underlying variations in humans’ ability to handle dietary chemicals. Beetroot, the red root of the garden beet used extensively as a food source, is known to produce red urine in some people following its ingestion, whereas others appear to be able to eat the vegetable with impunity. Asparagus, a vegetable whose young shoots have been eaten as a delicacy since the times of the Roman Empire, has been associated with the production of a malodorous urine smelling like rotten cabbage. Those who produce this odor assume that everyone does, and those who do not produce it have no idea of its potential olfactory consequences. These two examples, where the population appears divided in its ability to process food products or more precisely the chemicals contained within them, are reviewed in detail in this article.

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Boys Will Be Boys (Research by and for adolescent males of all ages and sexes),” published in AIR 14:2)

“Boredom and the Yawn,” Linda A. Bell, Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, vol. 17, no. 1, 1980-1981, pp. 91-100. In it, Bell:

Discusses Sartre’s views in Nausea on boredom and the yawn, asserting that boredom is connected with facticity — the aspect of self most closely connected with the being of things–and not with freedom and transcendence. This state is contrasted with an authentic embrace of freedom and transcendence. It is concluded that individuals can become bored with their own freedom and that boredom, or its possibility, plays a role in an ethics of authenticity developing out of Sartre’s thought.

(That’s an excerpt from the article “A Smattering of Yawns (Some research highlights,) published in AIR 11:1.)

Now that both major political parties have announced their nominees for president and vice president, the Annals of Improbable Research U.S. Presidential Election Algorithm (Debowy and Schulman 2003) can be used to predict the results of the upcoming November election. The algorithm was developed based on the experience of the major party candidates for president and vice president in each of the 54 U.S. presidential elections between 1789 and 2000 and correctly predicted the outcome of the 2004 election.

According to the algorithm, being a United States Senator does not contribute to one’s electability for president or vice president, so the Obama/Biden ticket has a total electability of zero. In addition to his 22 years in the Senate, John McCain spent four years in the U.S. House of Representatives, giving him 4 points of presidential electability. However, he divorced his first wife (-110 electability points), so he has a total presidential electability of -106. Sarah Palin has been governor of Alaska for two years, which means she has a vice presidential electability of 2 and the McCain/Palin ticket has a total electability of -104.

The algorithm thus predicts that the Democratic ticket of Barack Obama and Joe Biden will win the election in November. The fact that both major political parties chose candidates with low electabilities when candidates with high electability were available suggests that the validity of the Annals of Improbable Research U.S. Presidential Election Algorithm is not yet accepted by most major party primary voters in the United States, despite its 100% rate of successful predictions.

The August issue of mini-AIR just went out. Topics include: Most-Absurd-Drug-Name Compendium — Selection #1; Ig Nobel Tickets; Presidential Election Statistical Predictor; Scientist Wrestlers; Cheek/Tongue/Bread Poet; Regge Pole Limerick Competition; Bacteria and the Burnt Pancake; The Cox-Zucker Machine; Bikinis and Sneeze Raccoon Eyes;; etc.

(If you would like to have mini-AIR automatically sent to your email box every month, please subscribe to it. It’s free.)

An improbable (but real) reunion [see photo] took place during the 2008 Alpbach Technology Forum in Tirol, Austria on August 23, 2008, where I was invited to talk – together with Marc Abrahams – about Improbable Research and the Ig Nobel prizes. Among the other plenary speakers were several Nobel laureates. One of them – Wolfgang Ketterle (Physics, 2001) I had met before. He presented me the 2003 Ig Nobel prize in biology …

So begins my latest blog entry on www.moeliker.com