Improbable Research

Eric Schulman, famed author of The History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less (which appeared in the January/February 1997 issue of AIR), has produced another in his continuing statistical analyses of fame (which is related, in a fashion, to celebrity). Click here to see Schulman’s new study in its entirety. Here is a snippet version, with one simple data chart:

Measuring Fame Quantitatively. IV. Who’s the Most Famous of Them All?
by Eric Schulman, Alexandria, Virginia

Abstract
Barack Obama.

Introduction
In this fourth paper on measuring fame quantitatively we introduce a new unit of fame and discover a new category of celebrity with only one known member.
Our research over the past ten years (Schulman 1999, Schulman and Boissier 2001, and Schulman 2006) has shown that many people are famous to some extent and that Internet search engines can measure the exact fame of such people by comparing the number of search engine hits for the person to the number of search engine hits for a universal standard of fame comparison. Previous authors (Schulman 1999, Schulman and Boissier 2001, and Schulman 2006) identified Monica Lewinsky as the universal standard of fame, but we show in this paper that her fame has been decreasing since 2001 and she is therefore not a good candidate for the position. We find that George Harrison’s fame has been roughly constant over the past ten years, making him a more appropriate universal standard of fame.
Schulman (2006) presented a quantitative method for classifying people as ‘A’ List Celebrities, ‘B’ List Celebrities, and so on, but did not anticipate that there could be a category of people more famous than ‘A’ List Celebrities. Such people would have to be more than 30 times as famous as the archetypal ‘B’ List Celebrity. However, we have now identified one such person and have therefore created a new cateogry of ‘A+’ List Celebrities. In order to motivate readers to continue past the introduction, no revelation will yet be made concerning the identity of this ‘A+’ List Celebrity….

The Jan/Feb 2009 issue (vol. 15, no. 1) of the magazine (the Annals of Improbable Research) just went out. It’s a special Mummies, Zombies & Bagles issue, with research reports about medicinal mummy powder, bagel specifications, zombie drug analysis, and more. Click on the magazine cover (below) to:

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Mel says it’s swell.

The Royal Society of Chemistry, their curiosity and pique piqued by the phrase “100% chemical free“, is offering to make someone rich. Their October 30, 2008 press release (which, perhaps ironically, is in digital form and thus is itself chemical-free) explains:

It has been misappropriated and maligned as synonymous with “poison”. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) recently defended an advert which perpetuated the myth that natural compounds are free of chemicals.

The truth, as any right-minded person will say, is that everything we eat, drink, drive, play with and live in is made of chemicals – both natural and synthetic chemicals are essential for life as we know it.

If, as the ASA says, the public believes materials can be “100% chemical free”, the RSC will soon be inundated with examples from people wishing to claim the £1 million pound bounty announced today by the RSC.

Dr Neville Reed, a director of the RSC, said today: “I’d be happy to give a million pounds to the first member of the public who could place in my hands any material I consider 100% chemical free.

“Should anyone do this, we will see thousands of years’ worth of knowledge evaporate before our eyes. We would have to tear up the textbooks, burn the degree certificates and retrain the teachers.”

Our suggestion to you, should you wish to claim the prize: consider the Celebrity Nicki 100% Chemical Free Manikin.

A report called The Development of the Attitudes to Chocolate Questionnaire, published in 1998, tells how three researchers at the University of Wales, Swansea, cooked up a new analytic tool.

Psychologists had long craved a way to assess someone’s craving for chocolate. Why chocolate? Because “chocolate is by far the most commonly craved food”. It tempts chocoholics, and also academics who hunger for knowledge and perhaps recognition.

The desired goal – the perhaps impossible dream – is to measure and compare any two people’s chocolate cravings as reliably as one can measure and compare the heights of two tables. But cravings are often intertwined with emotions, and table heights are not. This explains why table heights are easier to measure….

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

This week’s entry in our collection of authors whose family names are also simple English words is another harmonious pair: Else and Then.

Tobias Else, a Garry Betty Scholars in the University of Michigan Adrenal Cancer Program, is coauthor of

“Cooperative telomere protection provides evidence for correspondence of POT1/TPP1 to ciliate TEBP*/*,” Hockemeyer, D., Else, T., Daniels, J.-P., Palm, W., Ye, J.Z.-S., deLange, T., and Hammer, G.D., Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, 14(8): 754-61 (2007).

Florian Then, of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology, Department of Medicine, Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, Munich, Germany, co-author of

“Extracellular ATP and TNF-{alpha} Synergize in the Activation and Maturation of Human Dendritic Cells,” Max Schnurr, Florian Then, Peter Galambos, Christoph Scholz, Britta Siegmund, Stefan Endres and Andreas Eigler, Journal of Immunology, 2000, 165: 4704-4709.