Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
Do cats give you the blues?
LAST week we reported on the Ig Nobel prize awarded to David Hanauer and colleagues for their finding that patients suffering from cat bites were more than four times as likely to be depressed as other patients (27 September). Just as that page was going to the printers, a colleague said: “Maybe they are depressed because the cat they love bit them.”
The Ig Nobel prize is given for scientific work that makes us laugh, then think… and this made us think even harder than usual. Were these people depressed before the bite? Or may mind-altering toxoplasmosis have been involved? It’s hard to tell.
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We described Hanauer’s research as “data-mining”, and some readers will have caught a note of scepticism from that phrase; but we should spell it out. If you trawl the records of 1.3 million patients to see what correlates with what, you will get results. Whether they mean anything is another matter. Equally, if you jointly trawl the records of US presidential elections and sporting results, you will find a between the outcome of the last Washington Redskins football game before an election and its outcome. So?
Sanity checks are always required. The traditional rule of statistics – that we must always formulate a question before crunching the numbers – may seem philosophically mysterious, but it guards against a data mine becoming a pit of despair.
Inspired by discussions of cats and cakes, Roland Curtis asks: “May I humbly propose Schrödinger’s cake, which one can both have and eat?”
Fancy dress in Svalbard
SANITY seemed, as it happens, to have been the theme of this year’s Ig Nobel awards. It arose as an issue when biologists dressed up as polar bears to fool reindeer. The serious purpose was to discover whether reindeer in the Svalbard islands recognised polar bears as predators.
Failing sufficient polar bear participation in the experiment, the researchers dressed in white and approached reindeer themselves. The reindeer backed off between 1.6 and 2.6 times as far as they did from humans wearing usual, dark clothes. Thus Eigil Reimers and Sindre Eftestøl earned the Ig Nobel prize in Arctic science ().
As ever, alternative explanations should be considered. What if reindeer turn out to possess the concept “barking-mad human” and so avoid those in fancy dress?
Salt pork to the rescue
HUMANS may fear for the sanity of anyone who approaches them with the intention of stuffing salt pork up their nose, and decide to avoid such people on those grounds. All the same, the Ig Nobel prize for medicine went to Ian Humphreys and colleagues of the Detroit Medical Center for recalling this folk remedy for a nosebleed – and finding that it works ().
A child suffered from a rare bleeding disorder. Modern techniques had failed, leaving her in critical condition in intensive care. The senior doctor on the case, Walter Belenky, thought back decades, sent someone to the market, and stopped the bleeding almost immediately.
Like seeing sausages made
MODERN food, meanwhile, seems to be all about microbes called “probiotics”, touted as improving your digestive fauna and thus your health. Now food producers want to put them in sausages.
So they seek microbes that can survive the salt and acidity of curing – and the human digestive tract. Raquel Rubio and colleagues in the in Spain earned the Ig Nobel nutrition prize for isolating such microbes – from the faeces of human infants ().
Here Feedback agrees with the belief, popularly attributed to , that wanting not to know how sausages are made is axiomatic. It thus illustrates the horror of seeing how laws are made.
More Ig Nobels than we can fit
YOU can find the rest of the Ig Nobel prizes at .
But is it food?
HAVING discussed food, or objects claimed to be food, and sanity, where else can we go but to consideration of tax law? This field of human endeavour frequently makes quantum mechanics appear as intuitively plain as a very plain thing.
A friend forwards that in June, Scotland’s first-tier tax tribunal ruled that “Snowballs” – gooey, coconut-covered globs of marshmallow – are, in law, “cakes”. They thus attain parity with their quintessentially Scottish chocolate-covered cousin, the “teacake”; and their makers avoid a multimillion pound bill for value added tax, because they are officially food (not biscuits or cookies, which are classed as candy) and taxed at 0 per cent.
This follows a famous old case that went to the House of Lords when it was the UK’s supreme court. that Jaffa Cakes are indeed cake. We await with interest the trajectory of the Scottish case through higher tribunals.
Your own piece of Scotland
FINALLY, a colleague forwards an email offering the chance to “Own a piece of Scotland” – sent just before the independence referendum there. For £14.99, Highland Titles will sell us “one square foot of Scotland… delivery included!” or 10 square feet (1 square metre, near as) for £24.99.
The colleague is “thinking of going for the 10 square feet if delivery is included. I could have a small Scottish garden in my London flat.”
