Strange stuff

WHAT: Ponytail motion
WHO: Joseph Keller (USA), Raymond Goldstein (USA and UK), Patrick Warren and Robin Ball (UK)
DISCOVERY: Why does a ponytail move from side to side when you jog

Scientists compared a ponytail to a pendulum and used the Hill equation (refers to oscillations in a solution) to show that pendulum (ponytail) will grow over time, causing the ponytail to swing from side to side even though the head is only going up and down. This is particularly true when the ponytail frequency is half of the jogging frequency, which it generally is.

WHAT: Beer (bar) goggles make people more attractive
WHO: Professors at University of Manchester, England
DISCOVERY: The professors came up with a formula ß=(An)²×d(S+1)/square root of L multiplied by (Vo)² that used the following factors:
An: number of drinks consumed, limited only by your bodily fortitude
d: distance in metres between you and the object/person you find attractive
s: smokiness of the room, rated between 0 and 10
l: brightness of the room, rated between 1 and 150
Vo: measure of your visual acuity, 6/6 being normal and 6/12 being “maced in the face”

They concluded that if the result was less than 1, there was no beer goggle action at all. “With 50 and higher, we begin to see a clear effect. If we test this with a single drink, a half-metre distance, clear air, good lighting and perfect vision, then the object appears in all its horrible glory”.

Incidentally, in a research paper titled, ‘Beauty lies in the eyes of the beer holder’, scientists from the UK, US, the Netherlands, Poland and France found that those who think they are drunk, also think they are attractive. They won the Psychology Ig Nobel prize in 2013 for their discovery.

WHAT: Why we procrastinate
WHO: Canadian academic named Professor Piers Steel — a chronic procrastinator
DISCOVERY: He came up with a formula U = EV/ID using:
u: desirability of the task
e: confidence that you will succeed at it
v: value of completing it
i: task’s immediacy or availability
d: your sensitivity to delay.

WHAT: The perfect group photo
WHO: Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization
DISCOVERY: They calculated the number of photographs you must take to (almost) ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed.

They found that the average number of blinks made by someone getting their photo taken is 10 per minute. The average blink lasts about 250 milliseconds and, in good indoor light, a camera shutter stays open for about eight milliseconds.

Using probability, they formulated that the number of shots taken should be 1/(1 – xt)n, where
x: expected number of blinks for one person
t: time during which the photo could be spoilt
n: number of people in the group.

WHAT: Is your cow going to lie down soon? (2013)
WHO: Bert Tolkamp (UK, the Netherlands), Marie Haskell (UK), Fritha Langford (UK, Canada), David Roberts (UK), Colin Morgan (UK)
DISCOVERY: The longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely that cow will soon stand up.

No correlation between the two. If a cow has been standing for hours, it is most likely that it will continue to stand for hours.

DISCOVERY: Once a cow stands up, you cannot easily predict how soon that cow will lie down again.

The scientist concluded that the amount of time the cow was lying down did increase the probability of its standing up. Why? Because cows get hungry and it cannot graze lying down.

WHAT: What makes a movie scary
WHO: Researchers at Kings College, London
DISCOVERY: Mathematicians found a solution, and it has nothing to do with the use of ‘The’ in the title. They came up a with a ridiculously complicated formula (es+u+cs+t)²+s+(tl+f)/2 sin x-1 using:
Es: escalating music
u: the unknown
Cs: chase scenes
t: sense of being trapped
a: character being alone
dr: how dark the film is
fs: film setting
tl: stands for true life
f: fantasy
n: number of people
sin: blood and guts
s: shock

The “1” is thrown in there as “stereotype”. Reportedly, using the formula and plugging all numbers, The Shining turned out to be the perfect horror movie.

WHAT: Weighing The Soul
WHO: Doctor called Duncan MacDougall

Discovery: Bodies weighed less than they did in the last few days that people were alive.

MacDougall recruited participants who were in their last few days of dying from tuberculosis. He took his six participants, laid their beds on a large scale, and closely monitored their weight before and immediately following their passing. He discovered that the subjects lost, on an average, 21 grams in body weight when they died. With no other possible explanation, MacDougall concluded that this must be the exact weight of the human soul. He claimed that the weight drop couldn’t be a result of evaporation, sweat or loss of bowels because of how rapidly the drop occurred. He also claimed that it could not have been loss of air in the lungs, because when he attempted to force air back into the patients, the scale didn’t change.

WHAT: Best time for a marriage proposal
WHO: Professor Tony Dooley from the University of New South Wales School of Mathematics and Statistics
DISCOVERY: Dooley came up with a very complicated formula — which looks more like an intimidating mess — but assured all that the perfect answer is 0.368.

The formula is based on established equations in financial and medical sectors that pinpoint maximum rewards and minimal costs: all terribly romantic, and exactly what every girl wants to hear in a candlelit restaurant. As are Dooley’s words: After reaching your Optimal Proposal Age, “you should prepare to pop the question to the very next girl you date — as long as she’s the best of the bunch so far!”.

WHAT: Odds that Mikhail Gorbachev is the Antichrist
WHO: Robert Faid of Greenville, South Carolina
DISCOVERY: Faid, who was an agnostic in his early life and converted to Christianity after recovery from a cancer, calculated the exact odds that Mikhail Gorbachev, a former Soviet statesmen, is the Antichrist. According to his calculations, in 1998, there was “an 860, 609, 175, 188, 282,100 to 1 chance that Gorbachev is the Antichrist who will return to power by overthrowing Boris Yeltsin (first president of Russian Federation) and who will then overwhelm the West by violence”. Faid’s prediction was based on numerology involving the spelling of Gorbachev’s name in several languages and combinations of the Number of the Beast, 666, with its opposite 888, the Number of Jesus.

ALSO

In January, The New York Times published a story about what makes a story go viral. Jonah Berger, a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, with another Penn professor, Katherine Milkman, analysed just under 7,000 articles that had appeared in the Times in 2008, between August 30 and November 30, to try to determine what distinguished pieces that made the most-emailed list. After controlling for online and print placement, timing, author popularity, author gender, length, and complexity, Berger and Milkman found that two features predictably determined an article’s success: how positive its message was and how much it excited its reader.