Gonzolabs

We’ve got another Ph.D. dance in the running: The Isotope Square Dance, by geologist Anna Henderson.

That is definitely the most convincing dead plant I’ve seen in a long time…

Can humor be studied scientifically? Yes, it turns out. I hosted a panel discussion on this at the 2010 ESOF conference in Turin, Italy last week. Here is the entire 1-hour video.

Some highlights: Stanford neuroscientist Allan Reiss discovered a neural basis for humor gender differences while studying cataplectic patients–people who are literally paralyzed by emotional stimuli such as a funny joke. UCLA anthropologist Tom Flamson has a new theory of the evolutionary roots of humor based on his study of a remote village in Brazil. And University of Texas linguist Salvatore Attardo describes the oldest known jokes, such as a fart joke etched in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. The oldest jokes are all potty humor, he says. Go figure.

Warning/apology: I was extremely sleepy due to the conference media party the night before. It was a struggle to be coherent, let alone funny…

As the summer wears on, the curve of dance submissions will probably grow nonlinearly. So far the physicists are showing the most moxie…

The next Ph.D. dance is online–in physics of course!

In an email, Shalm writes:

For years I have been trying to explain to my mother what it is I do. This video was aimed at her. She now finally understands what the point of my research is. If I had known that all it would take was a little dancing, I would have done this a long time ago : )

You hardly need to read his explanation of the dance, since Shalm subtitled it. Personally, I find that distracting, and I wish the video opened right on the dancing rather than a title slide… That said, they guy can dance! But well, I’m not one of the judges.

Leave it to the physicists to get on the dance floor first! Should’ve expected that.

The first Ph.D. dance contestant has arrived. Australian physicist Steven Lade dances his thesis, “Directed transport without net bias in physics and biology.”

You should read Lade’s explanation of his dance. (He has clearly spent a lot of time imagining what these molecular transporters look like in action.)

The dreaded question. “So, what’s your Ph.D. research about?” You take a deep breath and launch into the explanation. People’s eyes begin to glaze over…

At times like these, don’t you wish you could just turn to the nearest computer and show people an online video of your Ph.D. thesis interpreted in dance form?

Now you can. And while you’re at it, you can win $1000, achieve immortal geek fame on the Internet, and be recognized by Science for your effort.

Science presents…
The 2010 “Dance Your Ph.D.” Contest!

Doing science can have unforeseen consequences. This happened to me:

1. I write an article for Science about the similarities between pâté and dog food.
2. I publish the results of an experiment showing that people can’t distinguish samples of pâté from dog food. (PDF file)
3. Stephen Colbert eats cat food on television:

Colbert is a comic genius, but in this case he missed the point.  That the subjects were not able to tell which one was the dog food isn’t really so surprising.  That was the prerequisite for showing that this was a truly unbiased taste-test. The real result is that people *hated* the taste of the dog food sample, and yet did no better than random at identifying it as the dog food. Now there’s a mystery.

Here’s some media commentators who got it right: CBS News, LA Times. This month a peer-reviewed version of my dog food study was published in Chance, the journal of the American Statistical Association.

-Gonzo Scientist

400 years ago, Galileo  pointed a telescope up at the night sky. What he saw amazed him. The Moon is covered with mountains. Jupiter has its own moons. Venus waxes and wanes in a crescent shape. All of this added up to a crazy idea: Our little planet is not the center of the universe.

It shook people up in a big way. But it also shook the Church’s unquestionable authority. So Galileo was forced to deny his discovery (under threat of torture) and spend the rest of his life under house arrest.

Thought experiment: What if instead of being persecuted, Galileo had been sent to distant lands as a missionary? Instead of bibles, he would put his new telescope in the hands of people with little or no contact with Western science. What would that look like?

Results:

Make sure you hit that “FULL SCREEN” button so you can see the expression on people’s faces.

This experiment is described in full in this Gonzo Scientist article.

You can probably guess who this is.

But can you guess what he’s made of…?
Continue reading »

(For the introduction to this experiment, see the previous post.)

Goal:  Quantitatively describe the “Jenga Effect”, a meme that seems to have popped into existence just 4 years ago and radiated into several new cultural niches.

Results… Continue reading »

Congratulations are in order for Erez Lieberman-Aiden. The paper describing his PhD research, which made the cover of Science last week, was nominated yesterday for Nature’s 2009 Method of the Year contest! And here’s why I think his genome origami-detecting method (known as Hi-C) should win.

Lieberman-Aiden’s method is the one and only method in the running that was originally described in dance form. You might think that I’m joking. But no, here’s the YouTube video of Lieberman-Aiden leading a team of other scientists in a Hi-C dance last year:

What’s crazy is that the dance turned out to work even better as an experiment in the laboratory… A great piling on of awesomeness, after the jump