Improbable Research

Miles Rzechowicz joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS). His brother Julian, who nominated him, says:

Due to following his supervisor around Miles managed to move away and disappear to Perth from Canberra.  Over this time he decided that his hair looked better not cut. As such, since 2007 when he first went to Perth, his hair has not been cut, and is not quite a display of ripples and waves. Thrice published in New Scientist he is also a fanatical cyclist who often out paces cars

Miles Rzechowicz, BSC (Hon), LFHCfS
PhD student in Physical Chemistry
Department of Sciences
University of New South Wales Duntroon, Canberra, Australia

In this third and perhaps final episode in our possibly-popular Curing Shyness in Dogs series, to entertain you and your dog, and perhaps cure one or both of you of various ailments, we see a video demo by Steve Snell, featuring a starter pistol and some striped gloves, and also sunglasses. Click on the image to go to the video.

Reuters columnist Amy Feldman of Reuters analyzes:

Estate taxes affect very few people [in the US], but for those with seven- or eight-figure estates that are impacted, the end of this [particular and very peculiar] year is a crazy, crazy time…

“Whether somebody dies December 31^st or January 1^st makes a huge difference because the rules changed so quickly,” [tax attorney Cheryl] Hader says. “In some situations it pays to live, and in some situations it pays not to. Its such a bizarre topic that you’re never going to see it come up again.”

In fact, all morbid jokes aside, academics Joel Slemrod and Wojciech Kopczuk found that when the estate tax rules are known in advance to be changing (as they were last year and are again now), people do, in fact, time their deaths so as to save their heirs money. Their paper won them the Ig Nobel Prize (for academic research designed to make people laugh as well as to think) back in 2001. But perhaps there aren’t so many people laughing now.

Nowadays, if you were to call someone a ‘Dried neat’s-tongue’ or a ‘Trunk of humours’ you might be met with a look of dismay rather than outrage. But things could have panned out very differently in 17th century Britain. Professor Jonathan Culpeper at the Department of Linguistics & English Language of Lancaster University, UK, tackles the way in which the power of insults can change over time in his article ‘Linguistic impoliteness : using English to cause offence’ (The Magazine for Advanced Level English, 2008, pp 20-22) [access via here – link at bottom of page]
Culpeper also touches on sarcasm – which can be thought of as ‘Mock politeness’ ,“Yeah, right”, and its opposite – ‘Mock Impoliteness’  e.g.
“… an advertising slogan used by an Australian butcher ‘Eat beef you bastards’.“

In this second episode in our deniably-popular Curing Shyness in Dogs series, to entertain you and your dog, and perhaps cure one or both of you of various ailments, we examine, distantly, this Master’s Voice Productions-produced set of CDs. This entertainment and/or cure is, the manufacturer says, “the result of two years of studies, planning and testing.” (Thanks to investigator Bill Maloney for bringing this to our attention.) The Gunshy Cure Audio 2-CD Set features these segments:

Gunshy Cure Features:
1. Introduction
2. Segment 1 – Conditioning Music Only
3. Segment 2 – Music with introduction of Gunfire
4. Segment 3 – Music with increasing Gunfire
5. Segment 4 – Music with increasing Gunfire