Prologue
Without Ducks
There are no homosexual, necrophiliac ducks in this book.* There wasn’t room. Too many other improbable stories require space here.
It can be tempting to assume that ‘improbable’ implies more than that – implies bad or good, worthless or valuable, trivial or important. Something improbable can be any of those, or none of them, or all of them, in different ways. Something can be bad in some respects and good in others.
Improbable is, simply: what you don’t expect.
I collect stories about improbable things, things that make people laugh, then think. The research, events, people, and pages in this book defy any quick attempt at judgement (bad-or-good? worthless-or-valuable? trivial-or-important?). But don’t let that stop you from trying. See what you make of these:
Measuring how cats skulk. Mechanically plucking and packaging a hijacker, then ejecting and delivering him by parachute to authorities on the ground below. Making people read inappropriately highlighted textbooks. Determining a person’s natural hopping frequency. Watching volunteers as they listen to fingernails scraping on a blackboard. Monitoring the brain of a pianist as he repeats a short song non-stop for twenty-eight hours. Strolling with one shoelace untied, in country after country. Engineering a bra that can quickly convert into a pair of protective face masks. Placing a cat on a cow, then exploding paper bags every ten seconds. Optimizing the packaging for a large hollow chocolate bunny. Applying the thoughts of the French philosopher Foucault to the lives of Australian Rules football players. Adapting Jesus’s strategic leadership principles for the US Army. Plumbing the psyche of fruit machine gamblers. Classifying the kinds of boredom felt by mid-level administrators in the British Empire. Surgically altering a Belgian so he resembles singer Michael Jackson. Examining porcupine copulation. Discovering that electro-ejaculation is difficult to perform on the rhinoceros.
Most of what you’ll read here first appeared, in some form, in my weekly ‘Improbable Research’ column in the Guardian. But the plod of science does go on, and so for this book I’ve dug up more details, added updates, and tossed in extra improbable titbits.
There’s more to each of these stories than I could fit into these pages, of course. That’s partly why I give you citations. Surprises await you, should you choose to follow those leads.
There’s another, more demanding reason to include the citations. Some people think these stories are fictional or exaggerated. No, friend: these are nonfiction. I have tried hard to exaggerate nothing.
Sincerely and improbably,
Editor and Co-founder,
Annals of Improbable Research
* Now, about those ducks. If you want to read about them, or find out what’s happened on the several scientific research fronts that grew up in the wake of their discovery, you’ll have to go look on your own. The place to start is Kees Moeliker’s now-historic report ‘The First Case of Homosexual Necrophilia in the Mallard Anas platyrhynchos (Aves: Anatidae)’, published in 2001 in the Dutch biology research journal Deinsea (see volume 8, pages 243–47; no translator needed). Or take the special tour at the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam where Kees, the museum’s curator, one afternoon (a) noticed a sudden loud sound that turned out to be a duck fatally crashing at high speed into the museum’s glass wall, then (b) took up his notebook and camera to document how the event played out over the next seventy-five minutes. Or you could skip ahead to watch videos of the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony at Harvard University, where Kees was awarded that year’s Ig Nobel in the field of biology. Alternatively, you could read the book De eendenman (the title translates as The Duck Guy), which Kees wrote a few years later, after a publisher nagged him to do it; the book became so popular in the Netherlands that it was reprinted five times during the first two weeks. Or you could read some of the reports Kees subsequently wrote for the Annals of Improbable Research, for which he now serves as European Bureau Chief. His reports cover many topics. Birds that spend their days repeatedly hurling themselves against a particular window. Historic murders of sparrows by cricket players and television producers. International biomedical concern about the possible disappearance of pubic lice. And more.
Many of the people described in this book are like Kees Moeliker, in at least one way. When they give their attention to a particular question, they can be entertainingly focused about it.