“As with many areas of science, humans went into it assuming that they pretty much knew what they were going to discover, and that refining their instruments would just make their existing simplistic picture clearer. And as usual, they were wrong.” —Helen Czerski, on page 241 her book The Blue Machine (W.W. Norton, publishers, 2023) […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: Wrong, wrong, wrong — The Journal of Patient Safety has a new report called “Insurance claims for wrong-side, wrong-organ, wrong-procedure, or wrong-person surgical errors: A retrospective study for 10 years“. Something is a little off even with […]
Some things that are labeled as being facts are not facts. A good example appears on the web site called Facts.net, which says (as you can see in the screen grab displayed here): Momofuku Ando was awarded the Ig Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. In recognition of his contributions to world peace through his invention […]
The Today I Found Out blog has a nice appreciation of two—really three—people who shared an Ig Nobel Prize for (probably) giving Murphy’s Law it’s name. The appreciation is called “WHO WAS ‘MURPHY’ IN ‘MURPHY’S LAW’ AND THE AMAZING DR. JOHN PAUL STAPP WHO GAVE US THE EXPRESSION.” The 2003 Ig Nobel Prize for engineering […]
