‌One

‌The Brain’s Behind

In brief

‘Would Bohr Be Born If Bohm Were Born Before Born?’

by Hrvoje Nikolić (published in the American Journal of Physics, 2008)

Some of what’s in this chapter: Dr Bean, man of international body parts • Einstein, Einstein, Einstein and other Einsteins • Improved scarecrow • The man who has Gorbachev’s number • His basic laws of stupidity, and theirs of incompetence • Speaking of hooked tongue • Criminal mentors • When Washington really counted • The man who really counts: Trinkaus • Strange seats for prominent minds • Kakutani’s bottled-up thoughts • Portfolio of a genius • One theory of everything • A number of genius numbering schemes

Bean: Counter of body parts

Dr Robert Bennett Bean took the measure of his fellow men almost fanatically. Women, too. He measured the parts, then published the copious details, and sometimes pictures, for all to see.

Bean worked at the University of Michigan, then at the Philippine Medical School, then at Tulane University, and finally at the University of Virginia. One of his first published papers, in 1907, was ‘A Preliminary Report on the Measurements of about 1,000 Students at Ann Arbor, Michigan’. After that, he turned more specific, looking at this or that particular organ, limb or bodily region.

Bean measured lots of innards. In ‘Some Racial Characteristics of the Spleen Weight in Man’, he wrote: ‘The white male spleen weighs about 140 grams, the negro male 115 grams, the white female 130 grams and the negro female 80 grams.’ Numbers abound also in his ‘Some Racial Characteristics of the Liver Weight in Man’, and ‘Some Racial Characteristics of the Weight of the Heart and Kidneys’.

He occasionally looked at the entire person, as in ‘Notes on the Hairy Men of the Philippine Islands and Elsewhere’.

Most often, though, he did piece work. In ‘Sitting Height and Leg Length in Old Virginians’, he instructed: ‘The sitting height, leg length, and sitting height index of several groups of Old Virginians is of some interest.’

Bean’s treatise on ears is divided into two parts: ‘Ears of the morgue subjects’ and ‘Ears of the living subjects’.

‌‘Characteristics of the External Ear’ collected by Robert Bennett Bean, including ears of a Filipino woman, a Filipino man and a Russian (gender unspecified)

He published ‘Note on the Head Form of 435 American Soldiers with Special Reference to Flattening in the Occipital Region’, and also ‘Three Forms of the Human Nose’. Sometimes he was very specific: ‘The Nose of the Jew and the Quadratus Labii Superioris’ (facial muscle).

In ‘Some Useful Morphologic Factors in Racial Anatomy’, Bean introduced the omphalic index, a new metric about the belly button. One obtains it by making two measurements and a calculation: ‘The distance of the umbilicus from the symphysis pubis is divided by the distance of the umbilicus from the suprasternal notch.’

By the time Bean died in 1944, he had recorded measurements of more partial people than almost anyone else ever had.

This was, obviously, not the same Dr Bennett Bean who, in 1980, published the study (described previously in This Is Improbable) entitled ‘Nail Growth: Thirty-Five Years of Observation’. That was Robert Bennett Bean’s son, William Bennett Bean, whose measurements were circumscribed, focusing exclusively on what he found at the ends of his own fingers.

Bean, Robert Bennett (1907). ‘A Preliminary Report on the Measurements of About 1,000 Students at Ann Arbor, Michigan’. Anatomical Record 1: 67–8.

—, and Wilmer Baker (1919). ‘Some Racial Characteristics of the Spleen Weight in Man’. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 2 (1): 1–9.

— (1919). ‘Some Racial Characteristics of the Weight of the Heart and Kidneys’. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 2 (3): 265–74.

Bean, Robert Bennett (1913). ‘Notes on the Hairy Men of the Philippine Islands and Elsewhere’. American Anthropologist 15 (3): 415–24.

— (1933). ‘Sitting Height and Leg Length in Old Virginians’. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 17 (4): 445–79.

— (1915). ‘Some Characteristics of the External Ear of American Whites, American Indians, American Negroes, Alaskan Esquimos, and Filipinos’. American Journal of Anatomy 18 (2): 201–25.

—, and Carl C. Speidel (1923). ‘Note on the Head Form of 435 American Soldiers with Special Reference to Flattening in the Occipital Region’. Anatomical Record 25 (6): 301–11.

Bean, Robert Bennett (1913). ‘Three Forms of the Human Nose’. Anatomical Record 7 (2): 43–6.

— (1913). ‘The Nose of the Jew and the Quadratus Labii Superioris Muscle’. Anatomical Record 7 (2): 47–9.

— (1912). ‘Some Useful Morphologic Factors in Racial Anatomy’. Anatomical Record 6 (4): 173–9.

Bean, William B. (1974). ‘Nail Growth: Thirty-Five Years of Observation’. Archives of Internal Medicine 134 (3): 497–502.

Terry, R.J. (1946). ‘Robert Bennett Bean, 1874–1944’. American Anthropologist 48 (1): 70–4.

In brief

‘The Splenic Snood: An Improved Approach for the Management of the Wandering Spleen’

by Steven P. Schmidt, H. Gibbs Andrews and John J. White (published in Journal of Pediatric Surgery, 1992)

Other Einsteins

People say ‘There is only one Einstein’, but of course that is not so. Albert stands celebrated, but not alone.

Albert Einstein has a signature equation, e=mc², which predicts how energy relates to mass. M.E. Einstein of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, has a whole set of equations that predict the composition of a pork carcass.

M.E. Einstein and several collaborators published a series of studies – seven of them so far – in the Journal of Animal Science. Their ‘Evaluation of Alternative Measures of Pork Carcass Composition’ appeared in 2001. It is a minor classic in the history of pork-production prediction literature. This passage lists several of the parameters that Professor Einstein found ways to manipulate: ‘FFLM is fat-free lean mass (kg), TOFAT is total carcass fat mass (kg), LFSTIS is lipid-free soft-tissue mass (kg), STLIP is soft-tissue lipid mass (kg), DL is dissected lean in the four lean cuts (kg), and NLFAT is the non-lipid components of the fat tissue.’

M.E. Einstein also co-authored the doubly seminal ‘Utilisation of a Sperm Quality Analyser to Evaluate Sperm Quantity and Quality of Turkey Breeders’. It was published in 2002 in the journal British Poultry Science.

Outside a small circle of specialists, Einstein’s pork carcass composition equations and Einstein’s turkey sperm quality analyser analysis are not so well known as they perhaps deserve to be.

Anyone with access to certain libraries can also check out Einstein on cannabis. Albert Einstein never published any research papers about cannabis, at least not formally, but Rosemarie Einstein did. In 1975, she and two colleagues at the University of Leeds investigated the use of cannabis – and alcohol and tobacco, too – by three hundred young persons at a university.

Einstein and her team carefully protected the students’ confidentiality. In their study, which appeared in the British Journal of Addiction, no student is named. Even the university is not identified. The report speaks of it only as ‘a provincial university’, leaving readers to speculate, perhaps feverishly.

The scientists discovered exactly how many of those students used pot, alcohol, tobacco or any combination of the three. Or, to be more specific, they discovered what the students said they used. And how. According to the survey results, some students smoked their cannabis, others ate it, still others drank it. Some said they avoided cannabis altogether. Only a minority claimed to smoke tobacco, but none reported eating or drinking it. Almost everyone claimed to drink alcohol.

The scientists also discovered something they had expected: that students cannot be relied upon to answer surveys. The team says it sent questionnaires to exactly one thousand students, and that exactly three hundred of those questionnaires were returned. This 300/1,000 is a return rate of 33 percent, Einstein and her colleagues explain, using a brand of mathematics peculiarly their own.

There are many other Einsteins besides Albert, M.E. and Rosemarie. One analysed magical thinking in obsessive-compulsive persons. One did a comparison study of different kinds of barium enemas. One was a specialist in the history of television programmes. And so on. There is, I expect, an Einstein for everyone.

Schinckel, A.P., J.R. Wagner, J.C. Forrest and M.E. Einstein (2001). ‘Evaluation of Alternative Measures of Pork Carcass Composition’. Journal of Animal Science 79 (5): 1093–119.

Schinckel, A.P., C.T. Herr, B.T. Richert, J.C. Forrest and M.E. Einstein (2003). ‘Ractopamine Treatment Biases in the Prediction of Pork Carcass Composition’. Journal of Animal Science 81 (1): 16 Schinckel, A.P., 28.

Neuman, S.L., C.D. McDaniel, L. Frank, J. Radu, M.E. Einstein and P.Y. Hester (2002). ‘Utilisation of a Sperm Quality Analyser to Evaluate Sperm Quantity and Quality of Turkey Breeders’. British Poultry Science 43 (3): 457–64.

Einstein, Rosemarie, Ian E. Hughes and Ian Hindmarch (1975). ‘Patterns of Use of Alcohol, Cannabis and Tobacco in a Student Population’. British Journal of Addiction to Alcohol & Other Drugs 70 (2): 145–50.

Einstein, Danielle A., and Ross G. Menzies (2004). ‘Role of Magical Thinking in Obsessive-Compulsive Symptoms in an Undergraduate Sample’. Depression and Anxiety 19 (30): 174–9.

Davidson, Jon C., David M. Einstein, Brian R. Herts, D.M. Balfe, Robert E. Koehler, Desiree E. Morgan, M. Lieber and Mark E. Baker (1999). ‘Comparison of Two Barium Suspensions for Dedicated Small-Bowel Series’. American Journal of Roentgenology 172 (2): 379–82.

Einstein, Daniel (1997). Special Edition: A Guide to Network Television Documentary Series and Special News Reports, 1980-1989. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

An improbable innovation

‘A New and Useful Improvement in Scarecrows’

by Hugh Huffman and Ernest J. Peck (US patent no. 1,167,502, granted 1916)

The patent holders claimed that ‘Prior to our invention, the scare crows ordinarily used were crude affairs… One of the main objects of our invention is to provide a more efficient form of scare crow’.

‌Illustrative diagram from ‘A New and Useful Improvement in Scarecrows’ from US Patent no. 1,167,502

Probability, by God

In 1988, Robert W. Faid of Greenville, South Carolina, solved one of the oldest and most famous problems in mathematics. Yet almost no one noticed. Cracking the nut that was nearly two millennia old, Faid calculated the identity of the Antichrist.

In the rarified world of mathematicians, certain problems become the focus of intense pursuit. The Four-Colour Map Problem was finally solved, by Wolfgang Haken and Kenneth Appel, in 1976. Fermat’s Last Theorem tantalized mathematicians until Andrew Wiles solved it in 1993.

Haken and Appel became instantly famous among mathematicians. Wiles became a worldwide celebrity.

But little academic or public acclaim came to Robert W. Faid, perhaps because no one had previously realized that the identity of the Antichrist was a mathematical problem.

The Antichrist problem has been on the books since about the year 90, when ‘The Revelation of St John’ brought it to public notice. Over the years, many amateur mathematicians joined the professionals in trying their hand at this delightful, yet maddening puzzle. Eventually it became a favourite old chestnut, something to be wondered at, but perhaps too difficult ever to yield a solution.

Then, after most had given up hope, Robert Faid solved it. In retrospect, his accomplishment seems almost absurdly simple: The Antichrist is Mikhail Gorbachev, with odds of 710,609,175,188,282,000 to 1.

There is no mystery to this. Faid is a trained engineer. He is methodical and rigorous. He wrote a book explaining every first and last tittle and jot: Gorbachev! Has the Real Antichrist Come?, published by Victory House. It tells where each number comes from and how it enters into the calculation. Professional mathematicians find it difficult to argue with the logic.

Outside the maths community, the book received little attention, but Robert. W. Faid was nonetheless awarded with the Ig Nobel Prize in mathematics in 1993 for his achievement.

More recently, another good and great mathematical problem was knocked off. Stephen D. Unwin wrote a book called The Probability of God. It is much celebrated.

Stephen D. Unwin has a PhD in theoretical physics. Like Robert Faid, he has methodically, rigorously and with faithful certainty chosen some numbers, then performed addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. The calculated result: that there is almost exactly a 67-percent probability that God exists. The book reveals all the technicalities and includes a handy spreadsheet for those anxious to try the calculations for themselves. After following his detailed instructions for using Microsoft Excel to replicate the maths, he notes: ‘You are now a mathematical theologist and can do things of which Aristotle, St. Thomas, and Kant only dreamed. Please proceed responsibly.’ Like all good statistical reports, he does point out the possibility that something is off. There is, Stephen D. Unwin carefully warns us, a 5-percent chance that his calculation is wrong.

Faid, Unwin and God knows how many others give mathematicians faith that every problem, no matter how hard, can have some kind of devilishly simple solution.

Faid, Robert W. (1988). Gorbachev! Has the Real Antichrist Come? Tulsa, OK: Victory House.

Unwin, Stephen D. (2003). The Probability of God: A Simple Calculation That Proves the Ultimate Truth. New York: Crown Forum.

May we recommend

‘The Desk or the Bed?’

by Robert Gifford and Robert Sommer (published in Personnel and Guidance Journal, 1968)

The authors, at the University of California at Davis and supported in part by a grant from the US Office of Education, concluded: ‘There is nothing in these data to support the recommendations for studying in a straight-backed chair at a desk.’

The basic laws of human stupidity, or: the gift of incompetence

The basic laws of human stupidity are ancient. The definitive essay on the subject is younger. Called The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, it was published in 1976 by an Italian economist.

Professor Carlo M. Cipolla taught at several universities in Italy and for many years at the University of California, Berkeley. He also wrote books and studies about clocks, guns, monetary policy, depressions, faith, reason and of course – he being an economist – money. His essay about stupidity encompasses all those other topics, and perhaps all of human experience.

Cipolla wrote out the laws in plain language. They are akin to laws of nature – a seemingly basic characteristic of the universe. Here they are:

1. Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
2. The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons, while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.

Cipolla’s essay gives an X-ray view of what distinguishes countries on the rise from those that are falling.

Countries moving uphill have an inevitable percentage of stupid people, yes. But they enjoy ‘an unusually high fraction of intelligent people’ who collectively overcompensate for the dumbos.

Declining nations have, instead, an ‘alarming proliferation’ of non-stupid people whose behaviour ‘inevitably strengthens the destructive power’ of their persistently stupid fellow citizens. There are two distinct, unhelpful groups: ‘bandits’ who take positions of power that they use for their own gain; and people out of power who sigh through life as if they are helpless.

Cipolla died in 2000, just a year after two psychologists at Cornell University in New York State wrote a study entitled ‘Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments’. Without mentioning any form of the word ‘stupidity’, it serves as an enlightening and dismaying supplement to Cipolla’s basic laws.

In the Cornell study, David Dunning and Justin Kruger supplied scientific evidence that incompetence is bliss, for the incompetent person. They staged a series of experiments, involving several groups of people. Beforehand, they made some predictions, most notably that:

1. Incompetent people dramatically overestimate their ability; and
2. Incompetent people are not good at recognizing incompetence – their own or anyone else’s.

In one experiment, Dunning and Kruger asked sixty-five test subjects to rate the funniness of certain jokes. They then compared each test subject’s ratings of the jokes with ratings done by eight professional comedians. Some people had a very poor sense of what others find funny – but most of those same individuals believed themselves to be very good at it, rather like David Brent of the television comedy The Office.

Another experiment involved logic questions from law school entrance exams. The logic questions produced much the same results as the jokes. Those with poor reasoning skills tended to believe they were as good as Sherlock Holmes.

Overall, the results showed that incompetence is even worse than it appears to be, and forms a sort of unholy trinity of cluelessness. The incompetent don’t perform up to speed; don’t recognize their lack of competence; and don’t even recognize the competence of other people.

Dunning explained why he took up this kind of research: ‘I am interested in why people tend to have overly favorable and objectively indefensible views of their own abilities, talents, and moral character. For example, a full 94% of college professors state that they do “above average” work, although it is statistically impossible for virtually everybody to be above average.’ In 2008, he and his colleagues revisited their findings with ‘Why the Unskilled Are Unaware: Further Explorations of (Absent) Self-insight among the Incompetent’, in order to show that their assessment was not a statistical artifact.

Participants in Study 3 (top) and Study 5 (bottom) to understand ‘Why the Unskilled Are Unaware’

If you have colleagues who are incompetent and unaware of it, Dunning and Kruger’s research is a useful and convenient tool. I recommend that you make copies of their reports, and send them – anonymously, if need be – to each of those individuals. (Professor Cipolla used that same method, minus the anonymity, to distribute his essay The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity among his closest friends.)

A copy might, too, be a helpful gift for any national or other leader to whom it may pertain.

For celebrating incompetence and unawareness, Dunning and Kruger won the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize in the field of psychology.

Cipolla, Carlo M. (1976). The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity. Bologna: The Mad Millers/Il Mulino.

Dunning, David, and Justin Kruger (1999). ‘Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77 (6): 1121–34.

Ehrlinger, Joyce, Kerri Johnson, Matthew Banner, David Dunning and Justin Kruger (2008). ‘Why the Unskilled Are Unaware: Further Explorations of (Absent) Self-insight among the Incompetent’. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Process 105 (1): 98–121.

In brief

‘A Story about a Stupid Person Can Make You Act Stupid (or Smart): Behavioral Assimilation (and Contrast) as Narrative Impact’

by Markus Appel (published in Media Psychology, 2011)

May we recommend

‘A Lucky Catch: Fishhook Injury of the Tongue’

by Karen A. Eley and Daljit K. Dhariwal (published in Journal of Emergencies, Trauma, and Shock, 2010)

Dastardly development

Is our criminals learning?

The question is a natural follow-on to one raised by George W. Bush during his first campaign to become president of the United States. On 11 January 2000, looking down at a select audience in the city of Florence, South Carolina, where the crime rate was 3.4 times the national average, Bush asked: ‘Is our children learning?’

For Bush, it seemed, learning was a lifelong challenge. In the journal Criminology, Carlo Morselli and Pierre Tremblay, of the Université de Montréal, and Bill McCarthy, of the University of California at Davis, explore how that challenge applies to 268 prison inmates in the Canadian province of Quebec. Their report, called ‘Mentors and Criminal Achievement’, echoes the thoughts and findings not only of George W. Bush, but also of earlier researchers and criminals.

They offer up a nugget from Indiana University criminologist Edwin H. Sutherland’s 1937 book The Professional Thief, By a Professional Thief. ‘Any man who hits the big-time in crime, somewhere or other along the road, became associated with a big-timer who picked him up and educated him’, the thief told Sutherland, adding: ‘No one ever crashed the big rackets without education in this line.’

Mentors, say those who study the development of great executives, inventors, artists, sports figures and entrepreneurs, are crucial if one is to have a successful career. But aside from those highly celebrated professions, and from some obvious high-skill specialties, do people really need mentors or can they generally find success on their own? Do mentors make a measurable difference?

‘Our analysis’, write Morselli et al., ‘focuses on the effects of mentors on two aspects of criminal achievement: illegal earnings and incarceration experiences … Protégés with lower self-control attract the attention of some criminal mentors who provide the structure and restraint that lead to a more prudent approach to crime. This approach involves fewer and more profitable offenses that lower the risks of apprehension and, perhaps, promote long-term horizons in crime.’

The researchers used a painstaking protocol: ‘We collected information on monthly illegal earnings and on the number of days that respondents were incarcerated. After calculating the total for criminal earnings and incapacitation experiences for the period, we applied logarithmic transformations to create our dependant variables.’

‌The authors note that ‘For clarity… age at first crime on criminal earnings… and parents’ full-time employment… were removed from the model.’

Their calculation resulted in a big payoff. As they put it: ‘Our findings suggest that strong foundations in crime offer an advantageous position for continuous achievement and the presence of a criminal mentor is pivotal for achievement over one’s criminal career.’

Morselli, Carlo, Pierre Tremblay, and Bill McCarthy (2006). ‘Mentors and Criminal Achievement’. Criminology 44 (1): 17–43.

Sutherland, Edwin H. (1937). The Professional Thief, By a Professional Thief. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

The president who counted

‘Of all the presidents we have had, George Washington was the only who really counted.’ That single sentence with its double meaning comes at the end of a four-page monograph published in 1978 in the Alabama Journal of Mathematics. The report’s title is ‘George Washington: He Liked to Count Things’. The author, Pete Casazza, a mathematician who writes under multiple pen names, adds fuel to a tiny fire of his own creation, suggesting that the number one number one official of the United States of America was a little obsessed. (Casazza, now a maths professor at the University of Missouri, wrote this under the pseudonym Cora Green, back when he was at Auburn University in Montgomery, Alabama.)

Casazza/Green specifies more than forty specific things that America’s first president counted. They are mere examples, he emphasizes, plucked from a myriad: ‘First, and foremost, he liked to count things on his plantation at Mount Vernon. He counted and recorded his horses, cataloging them by color, working mares and others, unbroken or not, as well as recording their height, age and weight. He counted ewes, hogs, calves, yearlings, spades, axes, and knives.’

In war time, as commander of the rebel American army, General Washington counted ‘soldiers and armies (as well as the distances between them), guns, ships, horses, mortars, batteries … the number of casualties suffered by his army … listing time periods, killed and wounded, and separating it into colonels, Lt colonels, majors, captains, lieutenants, sergeants, and privates’. In peace time, President Washington counted how many bushels of wheat were sown on his farm and how many trees – oak, yew, hemlock, aspen, magnolia, elm, papaw, lilacs, fringe, swamp berry – were planted.

He counted nuts. He counted seeds. He counted miles travelled, and compared them with the sometimes inaccurate distances marked on maps.

‌President Washington’s diary of Sunday, 11 May 1788, when he ‘counted the number of the following articles’. He says he was ‘home all day’.

Washington was originally a surveyor by profession, and perhaps also by inclination. Casazza/Green writes: ‘He recorded in his diary on May 11, 1788, that he had spent the entire Sunday at home counting different kinds of peas and beans … He found it took exactly 3,144 of the small round peas known as gentleman’s peas to fill a pint, 2,268 peas of the kind he brought from New York, 1,375 of the peas he had brought from Mrs. Dangerfield’s, 1,330 of those he had been given by Heziah Fairfax, 1,186 of the large black-eyed peas, and 1,473 bunch hominy beans. Having arrived at his count, he next calculated the number of hills a bushel of each kind of peas and the beans would plant, allowing five to a hill.’

The monograph supplies no clear evidence as to whether Washington actually enjoyed totting. Who, under any circumstances, can say for sure what was in another person’s mind? But neither does it try to persuade us that this was a psycho-medical problem, an undiagnosed case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. And for that, we might choose to count our blessings.

Green, Cora (1978). ‘George Washington: He Liked to Count Things’. Alabama Journal of Mathematics 2 (2): 43–6.

Research spotlight

‘President Obama’s Coronary Calcium Scan’

by Andrew J. Einstein (published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, 2010)

Trinkaus: An informal look

‘Too little known’ is the common verdict about John W. Trinkaus’s research. Some say this of his discoveries, which are proudly and surprisingly unsurprising. Most, though, are referring to the very existence of Trinkaus’s published reports, which are numerous (nearly one hundred so far, with more on the way) and pithy (with few exceptions, each is a page or two in length), and which concern a wide range of common behaviour that Dr Trinkaus finds annoying or anomalous.

For decades, Dr Trinkaus, at and then retired from the Zicklin School of Business in New York City, has conducted research on attitudes about Brussels sprouts; on the marital status of television quiz show contestants; on bakery wrapping-tissue usage; and on how many people wear baseball-type caps with the bill facing backwards. And on many other things. What percentage of pedestrians wear sports shoes that are white rather than some other colour. What percentage of swimmers swim laps in the shallow end of a pool rather than the deep end. What percentage of car drivers almost, but not completely, come to a stop at one particular stop sign. What percentage of commuters carry attaché cases. What percentage of shoppers exceed the number of items permitted in a supermarket’s express checkout lane.

To sense the flavour of Trinkaus’s research and writing, one might dip into his somewhat celebrated Brussels sprouts paper. Published in 1991 in the journal Psychological Reports, it is entitled ‘Taste Preference for Brussels Sprouts: An Informal Look’. The professor writes: ‘As to the apparent greater acceptability of Brussels sprouts by older students, two possible explanations may be suggested. First, being older, they may have more experience with the vegetable, for example, having actually tried it, rather than classifying it as repugnant simply because of its name or reputation. Second, being older, they may have eaten more Brussels sprouts and found that after a while they began to like the taste.’ (This, by the way, is one of Trinkaus’s few co-authored papers. Generally, the man went solo.)

For a full appreciation of Trinkaus’s body of work, one must read the original reports in their full detail. For those who have yet to enjoy that experience, we provide a somewhat haphazard index of a haphazard sampling of his work:

• Baseball-type caps, manner of wearing
• Brussels sprouts, taste preference for
• Business students’ feelings about the academy and themselves
• Buzzwords in political commercials
• Doors, open versus closed, behaviour of peole regarding
• Elevators, communications in
• Expensive versus inexpensive cars, behaviour of owners of
• Fads of yesteryear
• Fruits and vegetables, business students’ consumption of
• Gloves, lost
• Husbands with working wives
• Integrity, the word
• Looks, another
• Look, final
• Look, follow-up
• Look, further
• Look, an informal
• Manners, business
• Mobile phones, drivers’ use of
• Multiple choice test questions, opinions about whether to change answers of
• Queasiness
• Railroad departure service, varying quality of
• Santa, children’s perceptions about visiting
• Santa, parents’ perceptions about visiting
• Sirens, use of
• Sports shoes, colour preference for
• Supermarket checkout, counting of items at
• Supermarket checkout, delays at
• Uncooked minced beef, shoppers’ perceptions about
• Vision tests for driver licensing, honesty of people taking
• Winter storms, weather persons’ predictions of
• Work arrival time
• Work departure time
• Women driving vans
• Yes, the word

While John W. Trinkaus sometimes suggests possible ways to look at his findings, interpretation is something he mostly – and proudly – avoids. When he notices something that can be tallied, he tallies it. In a profession ruled by the famous dictum ‘publish or perish’, he counts.

Trinkaus has become at least slightly better known since he was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in literature in 2003; he, together with his research, was symbolically donated (by this author) to the BBC radio programme The Museum of Curiosity in 2012. On 10 May 2013, Professor Trinkaus gave his last lecture at the Zicklin School, after fifty years on the faculty.

Trinkaus, John, and Karen Dennis (1991). ‘Taste Preference for Brussels Sprouts: An Informal Look’. Psychological Reports 69 (3): 1165–6.

Kaswell, Alice Shirrell (2003). ‘Trinkaus: An Informal Look’. Annals of Improbable Research 9 (3): 4–15, http://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume9/v9i3/trinkaus0.html.

Call for investigators

The Strange Seat Taxonomy, announced here, is searching for specimens of unusual academic chairs (in other, grander, words: endowed faculty positions, which in many cases do include actual pieces of furniture on which the faculty member can physically sit).

Definition: For the purposes of the project, a Strange Seat is an actual academic chair at a university or college that is memorable or unusual or that has a particularly curious cogno-intellectual story behind it. As a model specimen, consider: The Streisand Professorship in Intimacy and Sexuality at the University of Southern California, generously funded by the Funny Girl-cum-Funny Lady herself since 1984.

Purpose: To identify and catalogue the chairs and, were applicable, their endowments.

If you know of a unique specimen to add to the collection, please provide:

• The name and a twenty-word description of the chair, unless the name of the chair is twenty words longer, in which case the description should be reduced by a factor.
• A photograph of the current chair, if available.
• Several Internet URLs pointing to clear, unarguable documentation of the chair’s existence at the assigned institution of higher learning.

Send to marca@improbable.com with the subject line:

STRANGE SEAT TAXONOMY

Floating ideas

Almost nothing is more romantic than a mathematical theorem – if that theorem is stuffed into a bottle and cast adrift during a perilous sea voyage in wartime, and if the person who wrote it is one of the world’s top mathematicians. Shizuo Kakutani, who died in 2004, just a few days before his ninety-third birthday, threw many such bottles – call them hundred-proofs, if you will – into the ocean when he was a young man. The fate of those bottles is a complete mystery.

Kakutani went on to become a legendarily great mathematician. Like most famous mathematicians, his fame is mostly limited to those in his profession.

Indirectly, though, the public is almost aware of Kakutani for two reasons. The book A Beautiful Mind was about the mathematician John Nash, who won a Nobel Prize in economics. Nash’s most famous concept, a Nash Equilibrium, is based on the Kakutani Fixed Point Theorem. And Shizuo Kakutani’s daughter, Michiko, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book reviewer for the New York Times.

Although Shizuo Kakutani was a gregarious sort for a mathematician, the story of his bottled theorems was only told outside the tight circles of those who really, truly, deeply understand the nature of, well, circles, shortly after his death. Stanley Eigen, a mathematics professor at Northeastern University in Boston, wrote an appreciation of his longtime collaborator and friend for the Annals of Improbable Research. Eigen explains:

At the start of World War II, Kakutani was a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. With the outbreak of war he was given the option of staying at the Institute or returning to Japan. He chose to return because he was concerned about his mother.

So he was put on a Swedish ship which sailed across the Atlantic, down around the Cape, and up to Madagascar, or thereabouts, where he and other Japanese were traded for Americans aboard a ship from Japan.

The trip across the Atlantic was long and hard. There was the constant fear of being torpedoed by the Germans. What, you may wonder, did Kakutani do. He proved theorems. Every day, he sat on deck and worked on his mathematics. Every night, he took his latest theorem, put it in a bottle and threw it overboard. Each one contained the instruction that if found it should be sent to the Institute in Princeton. To this day, not a single letter has been received.

Are some of those missing proofs startling and important? Is there any real chance of finding them? No one knows.

There is precious little scholarship about messages found in bottles. Devoted scavengers will find three little piles. Robert Kraske’s too-slim (at only ninety-six pages) book The Twelve Million Dollar Note: Strange But True Tales of Messages Found in Seagoing Bottles. The messages-in-bottles collection at the Turks and Caicos National Museum. The rubber-duckies-and-other-things-that-wash-up-on-beaches research of Seattle-based oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer. These, our greatest chronicler/gatherers of such materials, have so far disappointed us in the case of Kakutani.

Still, still, in the combined vastness of the oceans and of time, some of Kakutani’s theorems might come into the possession of persons who can both read and appreciate their value.

Kraske, Robert (1977). The Twelve Million Dollar Note: Strange But True Tales of Messages Found in Seagoing Bottles Nashville: T. Nelson.

Sadler, Nigel (2001). ‘Essay on Messages Found in Bottles’. The Astrolabe: The Newsletter of the Turks and Caicos National Museum (autumn): n.p.

Portfolio of a genius

I’d been awaiting the arrival of the latest edition of Portfolio of a Genius. For the better part of fifteen years, I had been receiving the laboriously crafted, increasingly thick versions of this wondrous work. They arrived in my mailbox, always surprising by their very existence.

The author, James E. Shepherd Jr – the subject and author of the Portfolio – switched from paper to CD just before the turn of the millennium, perhaps at the request of the heavily burdened postal workers of the world. Each new paper version was thicker than its predecessor, and weightier, too. ‘Mighty thick and mighty heavy’ would be a good way to describe the later pre-CD incarnations.

The CD versions were of course svelter, but also fuller than ever with documentation of the life, the correspondence and especially the correspondence about the correspondence, of Mr Shepherd. Each new version contained all that was in its predecessors, and also copies of all subsequent correspondence sent and received pertaining thereto. In the 2009 edition, Shepherd included a photo of his MENSA membership card, which was due to expire on 31 March of that year. It was a new item in the Portfolio.

A web version existed for several years, but then vanished. I am intending to schedule time to schedule time to begin reading a new version, in whatever form it may take, if and when it appears. Perhaps you will, too.

Shepherd is a nonpareil – but he is not the only genius who has no match or equal, and no real rival. Somehow, though each is unique, they are legion. They seem, most of them, not to acknowledge, or maybe not even to see, the presence of the others. It’s almost as if each exists in his or her own universe. Nearly every one of these peerless peers has his or her own theory about their particular universe, and about how and why he or she is peerless. In my experience, with what seems a large number of such geniuses, hes outnumber shes.

Here is a sampling of their books. The public may scoff, but it’s possible that somewhere in the midst of this list is a theory that really does explain everything.

• Theory of Interaction: The Simplest Explanation of Everything by Eugene Savov.
• A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science, and Spirituality by Ken Wilber. Wilber writes that ‘the leading edge of consciousness evolution stands today on the brink of an integral millennium …’
• And Now the Long Awaited – “THEORY OF EVERYTHING” by Eugene Sittampalam. The book’s back cover makes a calculatedly interesting offer: ‘The author welcomes a refutation from any reader and offers hereby all his profits from this work – UP TO ONE MILLION US DOLLARS – to the first reader to successfully do so.’
• The Theory of Everything: The Origin and Fate of the Universe by Stephen W. Hawking
• The Power and Freedom of the Human Spirit: Introducing Another Theory of Everything by Earle Josiah, offers ‘A coherent theory of everything that presents a new understanding of the wondrous world that extends beyond the barriers of normal life.’
• Unitivity Theory by Leroy Amunrud claims that: ‘To the knowledge of the author, this is the first book to contain a derived theory that treats the whole universe in a unified way, and discloses that the universe is simple as one, two, four.’ The author, who says he previously worked on the Apollo Project at Honeywell Inc and Montana State University, has also ‘been involved in ranching through out his entire life where he studied the logic of the cowboys’.
• The Scientific Theory of Everything by Pacifico M. Icasiano has a cover photo of Mr Icasiano holding his chin. The publisher says, ‘Pacifico M. Icasiano presents A Scientific Theory of Everything and unifies all sciences, both physical and metaphysical, including religion!’

There are many other such books. In theory – and, I expect, in fact – there will be many more.

Savov, Eugene (2002). Theory of Interaction: The Simplest Explanation of Everything. Sofia, Bulgaria: Geones Books.

Wilber, Ken (2000). A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science, and Spirituality. Boston: Shambhala.

Sittampalam, Eugene (2008). And Now the Long Awaited – “Theory of Everything”. New York: Vantage Press.

Hawking, Stephen W. (2002). The Theory of Everything: The Origin and Fate of the Universe. Beverly Hills, CA: New Millennium Press.

Josiah, Earle (2007). The Power and Freedom of the Human Spirit: Introducing Another Theory of Everything. Charleston, SC: BookSurge Publishing.

Amunrud, Leroy (2007). Unitivity Theory: A Theory of Everything. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse.

Icasiano, Pacifico M. (2003). The Scientific Theory of Everything. Pittsburgh, PA: Dorrance Publishing.

May we recommend

‘An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything’

by Antony Garrett Lisi (published in arXiv, 2007)

The author finishes his detailed report by stating that if his ‘theory is fully successful as a theory of everything, our universe is an exceptionally beautiful shape’.

Brilliant early explanations of brilliance

Psychologists still grind away (sometimes at each other) at explaining what genius is, and where it comes from. The effort, now weary and tendentious, was exciting in its earlier days. In 1920, Lewis Terman and Jessie Chase of Stanford University published a report called ‘The Psychology, Biology and Pedagogy of Genius’, summarizing all the important new literature on the subject.

Those early twentieth-century psychologists showed a collective genius for disagreeing about almost everything.

J.C.M. Garnett, in a study called ‘General Ability, Cleverness, and Purpose’, offered a formula for genius. Measure a person’s general ability; then measure their cleverness, then square both numbers and add them together, then take the square root. Genius.

We learn about C.L. Redfield, who ‘cites 571 specially selected pedigrees to prove his theory’ that ‘rapid breeding inevitably leads to the production of inferior stock’, but that ‘inferior stock can be transformed into superior stock in 100 years, and into eminent men in 200 years.’

James G. Kiernan wrote a monograph called ‘Is Genius a Sport, a Neurosis, or a Child Potentiality Developed?’ Terman and Chase tell us that ‘Kiernan, after a description of the ability of various men of genius, arrives at the conclusion that genius is not a sport nor a neurosis.’ Kiernan’s paper hints, right at the start, that its author knew neurosis intimately. The byline lists a few of his credentials, beginning with: Fellow, Chicago Academy of Medicine; Foreign Associate Member, French Medico-Psychological Association; Honorary Member, Chicago Neurologic Society; Honorary President, Section of Nervous and Mental Disease Pan-American Congress; Chairman, Section on Nervous and Mental Diseases, American Medical Association; and continuing on at some length.

A book by Albert Mordell explains that ‘the literary genius is one who has experienced a repression, drawn certain conclusions from it, and expressed what society does’, and that ‘By making an outlet for their repressions in imaginative literature Rousseau, Goethe and many others have saved themselves from insanity.’

Bent on being thoroughly inclusive, Terman and Chase mention a book called Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology, by G. Stanley Hall. ‘In two volumes’, they write, ‘Hall has given us an epochmaking study, chiefly from the psychological point of view, of the greatest moral genius of all time.’ Terman and Chase seem to carefully dodge a bullet (or maybe a firing squad or even a massive artillery bombardment) of criticism, remarking only that ‘It is impossible even to characterize such a monumental work in the few lines here available, much less to summarize it’. There’s much more.

All told, Terman and Chase describe ninety-five scholarly and semi-scholarly papers and books, devoting a sentence or three to each of them. The exception, the lengthiest section of their report, is a lavish description of Terman’s own recent studies, commencing with the words ‘Terman devotes 102 pages of his latest book to . . . ’. Terman’s writings, reportedly, are filled with insights ‘of special interest’.

Terman, Lewis M., and Jessie M. Chase (1920).‘The Psychology, Biology and Pedagogy of Genius’. Psychological Bulletin, 17 (12): 397–409.

Garnett, J.C.M. (1919). ‘General Ability, Cleverness, and Purpose’. British Journal of Psychology 9: 345–66.

Redfield, Casper Lavater (1915). Great Men and How They Are Produced. Chicago: Privately pub., p. 32.

Kiernan, James G. (1915). ‘Is Genius a Sport, a Neurosis, or a Child Potentiality Developed?’. Alienist and Neurologist 36: 165–82, 236–46, 384–95.

— (1916). ‘Is Genius a Sport, a Neurosis, or a Child Potentiality Developed?’. Alienist and Neurologist 37: 70–82, 141–57.

— (1919). ‘Is Genius a Sport, a Neurosis, or a Child Potentiality Developed?’. Alienist and Neurologist 40: 114–18.

Mordell, Albert (1919). The Erotic Motive in Literature. New York: Boni & Liveright, p. 250.

Hall, G. Stanley (1917). Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology. New York: Doubleday & Page, p. 733.

In brief

‘Images of Madness in the Films of Walt Disney’

by Allen Beveridge (published in Psychiatric Bulletin, 1966)