Nest: still abandoned
Brace yourselves. That abandoned bird’s nest is still seated in the mouth of the large, ancient, carved stone human face hanging high on a wall in the northernmost corner of the outdoor garden known as “Michelangelo’s Cloister” in the National Roman Museum in Rome, reports the University College London (UCL) professor who discovered it while visiting the museum this past April then reported it to a colleague who is the director of one of the Netherlands’s great natural history museums, who visited the National Roman Museum the next day and asked officials if he could remove the nest, saving them the trouble of destroying or discarding it, and bring it back to his museum in Rotterdam to add to a collection of biological curiosities, a request greeted with eager gratitude by two officials of the Rome museum but then refused with operatic rage by a third official who happened upon the scene when the first two officials fetched a ladder for the Dutch museum official to use to climb up and remove the until-then-unnoticed nest from the open mouth of the sculpture and who declared that not a twig, not a pebble, must ever leave his museum.
You can see a photograph of the offending nest in the Feedback of 8 May.
In early June, the UCL professor made a quiet return visit to the National Roman Museum, following which he immediately sent an “It’s still there” report to Feedback.
Feedback would now, more than ever, enjoy receiving reports from future visitors to Michelangelo’s Cloister to observe whether the empty nest (call it an “amuse-bouche”, if you like) is still cuddled in the statue’s mouth.
Not your way
Reader Ashok Khushalani sends a contribution to Feedback’s collection of inspirationally commendable organisation slogans that, not necessarily obviously to the public, were supplanted, superseded or apparently abandoned (18 May). The classic examples are IBM’s “THINK” and Google’s “Don’t be evil”.
Khushalani mourns the loss, in daily experience, of Burger King’s slogan “Have it your way”. This absence, he suggests, has implications.
If you know of a notable highly touted, now-warehoused, slogan, don’t be evil and keep it to yourself.
Instead, please send it, along with documentation, to “Mourning dead slogans”, c/o Feedback.
A limp theory
Two things – the North American fascination with rod-shaped items and the human habit of proposing theories then shooting them down – come together in a study called “Size matters? Penis dissatisfaction and gun ownership in America“.
Reader Matthew Hall sent a copy to Feedback.
“To our knowledge, this is the first study to formally examine the association between penis size and personal gun ownership in America,” write Terrence D. Hill and his colleagues in Texas and Florida. “Our findings fail to support the psychosexual theory of gun ownership.”
The same team, plus or minus two researchers, had at it in 2021 with a related study called “Sexual dysfunction and gun ownership in America: When hard data meet a limp theory”.
They threw cold water on an often-heated public discussion, saying: “Our key finding is that men experiencing [sexual dysfunction] are no more likely to own guns than men without SD.”
Basta, they seemed to say in the earlier paper. This didn’t prevent them from continuing to write about it. Basta: “Ultimately, these kinds of discussions are counterproductive for society because they distract us from the observable realities of penis dissatisfaction and gun ownership.”
Sense of smell
Mention of a celebrity pathologist’s inability to smell smells (12 June) aroused reader John Adams to think about his own medical-professional journey:
“Regarding Sir Bernard Spilsbury’s defective sense of smell, as a medical student I was told that this is common amongst pathologists because they are exposed to large quantities of formaldehyde vapour which destroys the olfactory nerves. This was one reason I avoided this speciality, the other being that I like my patients to answer back.”
A similar, though milder, preference for conversation, Feedback is told, leads some people to choose dentistry.
Telltale titles
Ideally, the title of a scientific report clearly summarises the whole thing. To encourage this practice, Feedback is compiling a collection called The Title Tells You Everything You Need to Know.
Savour, please, two examples. “Man’s fractured sternum was probably due to snake’s weight when it fell” appeared in the British Medical Journal in 1997. “Experimental replication shows knives manufactured from frozen human feces do not work” graced the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports in 2019.
If you find an equally striking example, please send it, with citation details, to: “Telltale titles”, c/o Feedback.
Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website is improbable.com
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