Mission Improbable

[dracodraconis]

Improbable Research

Why you should hire a psychopath - It sounds like a great idea to hire a psychopath as long as they’re ambitious and will leave for another job after a couple of years.

LSD as a treatment for autism - Is LSD a good treatment for autism? There were some experiments to find out. But...

Graph: The hardness of a faux pas - Miss Conduct devised this simple graph to analyze a faux pas

How to pour ketchup - Robert Allgeyer’s "Pouring Ketchup - The full technical explanation" explains exactly that.

The British right to light - "Ancient lights" is a colloquialism for the "right to light", guaranteed under English law, whereby windows that have seen twenty years’ worth of uninterrupted daylight cannot be blocked by the construction of new buildings

ECONOMICS LESSON: supply & demand (machetes) - The price of machetes has halved in parts of Nigeria since the end of general elections in April because demand from thugs sponsored by politicians has subsided. The state-owned New Agency of Nigeria (NAN) surveyed prices in the north-eastern state of Gombe and found that a good quality machete was now selling for 400 naira ($3.50) compared with 800 naira ($7) before the elections, which were marred by politically motivated violence in many states.

The dump truck and the whale (and the squid) - Because things are only in perspective when compared to a dump truck.

Measured discovery about meetings - Of 1,037 full- or part-time workers polled, 27 percent ranked disorganized, rambling meetings as their top frustration, followed by 17 percent who said they were annoyed by peers who interrupt and try to dominate meetings.

Physics Ph.D. thesis, for children - Dr Hancock began writing children’s books on quantum physics theories last year after completing her thesis.

How to read a scientific report - E. Robert Schulman’s How To Write A Scientific Paper - (published in the Annals of Improbable Research, vol. 2, no. 5, 1996) is pretty darn funny, but funnier still is that it is cited in a published paper. See also Kaj Sand-Jensen’s recently published study How to Write Consistently Boring Scientific Literature.