(Roughly) Daily

David Freidman ponders scientific satire…

I first encountered the scientific paper simply titled “Strapless Evening Gowns” four years ago, when I was flipping through a collection of magazines that once belonged to the cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener.

Among his magazines was the May 1960 issue of Voo Doo magazine, which was MIT’s “only intentionally humorous campus publication” going all the way back to 1919.

I got a chuckle out of this article, which attempted to semi-seriously analyze what exactly keeps a strapless dress from falling down:

Scientists have a long history of amusing themselves with humor. In addition to Voo Doo, other science humor magazines include the Annals of Improbable Research, the Journal of Irreproducible Results, and the Worm Runner’s Digest which included both satirical and serious scientific papers, much to the confusion of their readers – a problem eventually solved by printing the satirical articles upside down.

And then there are the quasi-serious scientific studies meant to be amusing, such as this study on the effectiveness of tin foil hats in protecting you from government surveillance (spoiler: tin foil hats can actually amplify certain radio frequencies, so the authors speculate that the government has been behind promotion of tin foil hats all along).

And back in 1974, the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis published a paper by clinical psychologist Dennis Upper called “The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment Of A Case Of Writer’s Block” [pictured at the top]. And lest you question the veracity of the author’s finding, I should note that the author’s failure to treat his writer’s block has been successfully replicated…

Read on for more on the engineering of the formal dress, both the social (largely sexist) context and the (interestingly meaninful) scientific content– and the art it has inspired: “Science And The Strapless Evening Gown” from @ironicsans.com.

More seriously: “a Nature analysis signals the beginnings of a US science brain drain“: “Researchers in the United States are seeking career opportunities abroad as President Donald Trump’s administration slashes science funding and workforce numbers, finds an analysis of Nature’s jobs-board data…”

* Roald Dahl

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As we play, we might recall that it was on this date in 1961 that Robert Noyce was issued patent number 2981877 for his “semiconductor device-and-lead structure,” the first patent for what would come to be known as the integrated circuit.  In fact another engineer, Jack Kilby, had separately and essentially simultaneously developed the same technology. Ineligible (as a new Texas Instruments empoyee) for a vacation over the summer of 1959, he gave himself the “assignment” of creating “a body of semiconductor material … wherein all the components of the electronic circuit are completely integrated.”

Kilby’s design was rooted in germanium; Noyce’s in silicon and had filed a few months earlier than Noyce. But Kilby’s invention was not a true monolithic integrated circuit chip since it had external gold-wire connections, which would have made it difficult to mass-produce– an obstacle Noyce overcame. Still, Kilby’s contribution was recognized in 2000 when he was Awarded the Nobel Prize– in which Noyce, who had died in 1990, did not share.