Pet participation
What exactly can dogs offer cities? The answer is coming soon.
Reader Dorothy Sheckler informed Feedback that Brad D. Lee of the University of Kentucky will be presenting his views at the Soil & Water Conservation Association conference in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, on July 22, 2024. What will Lee’s presentation topic be?Nutritional contributions of pet dogs in urban peri-urban environments” “.
Tensions may be palpable during the talks, as the host city announced that dogs will only be allowed on beaches this summer before 10 a.m. and after 5 p.m., and owners “must pick up and properly dispose of their feces.”
Mussel-bound Death
Through investigation and international cooperation, two preserved bodies that had long been forgotten were rediscovered.
Keith Moeliker, a biologist who studies surprising animal behavior (he discovered homosexual necrophilia in mallards, according to feedback on February 10, 2024), tells us what happened.
“The fate of Denmark’s black-headed gulls is dramatic.Chroicocephalus ridibundus“In 1952 a seagull stepped on a freshwater clam,” he writes, “and the clam closed its valve and refused to let go. The proof, of the seagull (now dead) with the clam still attached to its right foot, was found in an old photograph I found in the depths of the Internet.”
Mölliker learned that the photo was taken at the Hunting and Forestry Museum in Hörsholm, eastern Denmark. In 2017, the museum moved to and became part of another institution, the Green Museum in Auning, western Denmark. As is often the case with large and diverse museum collections, some treasures were safely stored but largely unnoticed. Mölliker got in touch with the Green Museum curator, who picked up the twin objects (officially named JSH 05542) from their resting place on a long shelf in a heavily refrigerated building.
“In April 2024, I was allowed to observe the black-headed gull in the museum’s collection storage facility and was able to take this photograph,” Moeliker continues (see below). “There I learned more: the gull had not died embracing the mussels, but had been shot together with the mussels near Solo on Zealand. [Denmark]Another special item from the same Danish collection is JHS 05924, the leg of a herring gull that was found trapped inside a half-open tin can in 1954.”
Mustache denial
Feedback consulted with native Iranian (or, in the ChatGPT era, human, if you prefer) translators to solve this puzzling mystery. Several recent studies published in Iranian research journals use strange wording in their titles. Here are three examples:
“Analysis of the economic diplomacy of the Islamic Republic of Iran in international relations with emphasis on the rule of negation of the moustache“, published in Strategic Studies of Jurisprudence and Law.
“A jurisprudential explanation of the show of force and the build-up of Iran’s military defense capabilities, approaching the rule of mustache negation“, published in Protection and Security Research.
“The role of the moustache ban in the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy and international relationsPublished in ” Iranian Journal of Political Sociology.
Each paper is written in a mixture of Persian and Arabic, and includes a synopsis written in English, which includes a reference to “Moustache” as well as each title.
Why the moustache? Feedback’s language consultant was astonished. “Because the translator of the paper is a complete idiot!! The word for “path” in Arabic is [of doing something]’ is sometimes called SavilePersian [Farsi], Sybil It means “mustache.” The translator might just be Google.
The world will now find out what impact these moustache-twirling papers will have on international diplomatic relations.
Mustache measurement
While pursuing the intricacies of mustache negation rules, Feedback stumbled upon a (possibly unrelated) study published in 1982:Survival curves and growth rates of mustache populationsThe paper, written by Cliff Frohlich and Ruth Buskirk, reports measurements of “three previously unstudied characteristics of mustaches: hair length distribution, hair growth rate, and rate of hair shedding or weathering,” all of which were measured on “unshaven mustaches of 30-year-old Caucasian men.”
Eleven years later, Frohlich cited Mustache’s paper, studyPublished in Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earthdiscussed the subtle mathematical aspects of measuring earthquake strength. He noted that, like mustache growth, “earthquakes are just one of many phenomena for which a logarithmic plot of number versus magnitude is approximately a straight line.”
Marc Abrahams is the founder of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founder of the journal Annals of Improbable Research. He previously worked on unusual uses of computers. His website is Impossible
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