[mini-AIR] mini-AIR: Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony webcast info / plus Pancake Flipping Research

Sat Aug 29 12:46:52 EDT 2020

mini-Annals of Improbable Research ("mini-AIR")
August 2020, issue number 2020-08. ISSN 1076-500X.
	<https://www.improbable.com/airchives/miniair/>
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  Research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK.
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01 TABLE OF CONTENTS

02 IN THE MAGAZINE ITSELF: Coffee Is Served
03 Flipping Pancakes is Hard
04 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony Webcast(s)—September 17
05 Limerick Challenge: Sorting Burnt Pancakes
06 Unappealing Species Winner
07 MORE IMPROBABLE: Horse's Ass, Happiness Equation
08 The Man Who Could Not Eat Poffertjes
20 SOME IMPROBABLE EVENTS
30 — Subscribe to the Actual Magazine! (*)
31 — How to start or stop receiving this little newsletter (*)
32 — Contact Info (*)
33 — Standard Gobbledegook (*)

	Items marked (*) are reprinted in every issue.

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02 IN THE MAGAZINE ITSELF: Coffee Is Served

	WHAT YOU ARE READING AT THIS MOMENT
	is just our monthly newsletter, (mini-AIR).
	This is overflow detritus from the actual magazine:
	Annals of Improbable Research (AIR). 

The special COFFEE, AND TEA issue of the magazine has arrived:
<https://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume26/v26i4/v26i4.php>

Tables of Contents: <http://www.improbable.com/magazine/>

	SUBSCRIBE to the MAGAZINE, 
	or get BACK ISSUES (there are more than 150 of them!):
	<https://gumroad.com/improbable>

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03 Flipping Pancakes is Hard

This month's maybe-random research item:

"Pancake Flipping is Hard," Laurent Bulteau, Guillaume Fertin and Irena Rusu, arXiv:1111.0434v1, 2011. (Thanks to Imke Fries for bringing this to our attention.) <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcss.2015.02.003> The authors, at Universite de Nantes, France, report:

"Pancake Flipping is the problem of sorting a stack of pancakes of different sizes (that is, a permutation), when the only allowed operation is to insert a spatula anywhere in the stack and to flip the pancakes above it (that is, to perform a prefix reversal). In the burnt variant, one side of each pancake is marked as burnt, and it is required to finish with all pancakes having the burnt side down. Computing the optimal scenario for any stack of pancakes and determining the worst-case stack for any stack size have been challenges over more than three decades. Beyond being an intriguing combinatorial problem in itself, it also yields applications, e.g. in parallel computing and computational biology. In this paper, we show that the Pancake Flipping problem, in its original (unburnt) variant, is NP-hard, thus answering the long-standing question of its computational complexity."

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04 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony Webcast(s)—September 17

The 30th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony will happen entirely online, on Thursday, September 17, 2020, at 6:00 pm (US eastern time), at <www.improbable.com>.

Ten new winners will be awarded Ig Nobel Prizes, for achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK.

The ceremony webcast will also have versions in Spanish (teaming up with Centro Cultural de la Ciencia), Japanese (teaming up with Niconico), and Chinese (teaming up with Guokr).

Details are at <https://www.improbable.com/ig-about/the-30th-first-annual-ig-nobel-prize-ceremony/>

Please spread the word!

	* * *

WE ASK FOR YOUR HELP: Normally, we fund the ceremony almost entirely from ticket revenues, plus a few small amounts from generous donors. But this year there will be no theater tickets, and so no ticket revenues. Our expenses will be lower (no theater rental!), but still substantial. If you or your organization would like to help, please donate to the Ig. <https://www.improbable.com/donate/>

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05 Limerick Challenge: Sorting Burnt Pancakes

This month's RESEARCH LIMERICK challenge — Devise a pleasing limerick that encapsulates this study:

"On the Problem of Sorting Burnt Pancakes," David Cohen and Manuel Blum, Discrete Applied Mathematics, vol. 6, no. 12, 1995. <https://doi.org/10.1016/0166-218X(94)00009-3> The authors, at the University of California, Berkeley, report:

"The 'pancake problem' is a well-known open combinatorial problem that recently has been shown to have applications to parallel processing. Given a stack of n pancakes in arbitrary order, all of different sizes, the goal is to sort them into the size-ordered configuration having the largest pancake on the bottom and the smallest on top. The allowed sorting operation is a “spatula flip”, in which a spatula is inserted beneath any pancake, and all pancakes above the spatula are lifted and replaced in reverse order…. We consider the conjecture that that the most difficult case for sorting n burnt pancakes is… the configuration having the pancakes in proper size order, but in which each individual pancake is upside down."

Submit your perfectly formed, delightfully enlightening limerick to:

	BURNT PANCAKES LIMERICK COMPETITION
	c/o <MARC aaattt IMPROBABLE dddooottt COM>

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06 Unappealing Species Winner

The judges have chosen a-winner in last month's Competition, which asked for a limerick to explain this patent:

"Effects of Amusing Memes on Concern for Unappealing Species," Magdalena Lenda, Pjoter Skórka, Błażej Mazur, William Sutherland, Piotr Tryjanowski, Dawid Moroń, Erik Meijaard, Hugh P. Possingham, and Kerrie A. Wilson, Conservation Biology, epub 2020. <https://tinyurl.com/y46js3mu>

INVESTIGATOR DAVID MARPLES writes:

If you’re ugly but need some more cash,
Something funny can make a big splash.
  Make it into a meme,
  Get it spread by a team:
Donations will come in a flash!

This month's take from our LIMERICK LAUREATE, MARTIN EIGER:

We humans are all ill-behaved,
Distasteful, disgusting, depraved.
  All our memes being viewed,
  Long-nosed monkeys conclude
That we do not deserve to be saved.

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07 MORE IMPROBABLE: Horse's Ass, Happiness Equation

Recent improbable research bits you may have missed...

BLOG: <http://www.improbable.com/>:
* Study: A Cup of Hemp Coffee by Moka Pot
* You Can Lead a Horse’s Ass to wonder, But You Can’t Make Him Think
* International Bat Night is Not Bat Day at Yankee Stadium
*…and much more

LUXURIANT FLOWING HAIR CLUB FOR SCIENTISTS (LFHCfS) 
<https://www.improbable.com/category/lfhcfs-hair-club/>

PODCAST: 
<https://www.improbable.com/category/the-weekly-improbable-research-podcast/>:
  Pocket-Sized #1027 "The Happiness Equation"
  Pocket-Sized #1028 "Ruck in a Rug"
  Pocket-Sized #1029 "Abnormal Blinking"
  Pocket-Sized #1030 "Microwave Oven Astronomer"
  Pocket-Sized #1031 "Another Look at Who Can Touch Whom"
  Pocket-Sized #1032 "Ice Cream and Dr. Land"

FACEBOOK: <http://www.facebook.com/improbableresearch>

TWITTER: @ImprobResearch, @MarcAbrahams, #IgNobel

INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/improbable_research/

PATREON: <www.patreon.com/ImprobableResearch>

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08 The Man Who Could Not Eat Poffertjes

"Slapend Allergisch Geworden voor Poffertjes door Boekweit in het Hoofdkussen" [Sensitisation to 'poffertjes' as a result of sleeping on a pillow containing buckwheat] [article in Dutch], C.J.van Ginkel, Nederlands tijdschrift voor geneeskunde, vol. 146, no. 13, March 2002, pp. 624–5. The author, at Universitair Medisch Centrum Utrecht, reports:

"A 19-year-old man suffered an anaphylactic reaction after eating 'poffertjes' (small Dutch pancakes). This reaction appeared to be the result of an IgE-mediated allergy to buckwheat, a principal ingredient of 'poffertjes'. It is highly likely that the patient was sensitised by sleeping on a pillow stuffed with buckwheat husk."

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FIND (MUCH) MORE IMPROBABLE STUFF.

	SUBCRIBE TO THE ACTUAL (PDF) MAGAZINE!
	<www.improbable.com/magazine/>

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20 SOME IMPROBABLE EVENTS

30th First Annual Ig Nobel ceremony		—Sep 17, 2020
Ig Informal Lectures					—Dates TBA
Gothenburg, Sweden (online)				—Oct 2, 2020
Harvard Club of Cape Cod (online)			—Nov 19, 2020
2021 Ig Nobel EuroTour (we hope)			—March-April 2021

For details and additional events, see
<http://www.improbable.com/improbable-research-shows/complete-schedule/>

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30 — Subscribe to the Actual Magazine! (*)

The Annals of Improbable Research is a 6-issues-per-year magazine, 
in PDF form. 
It's packed with research that makes people laugh, then think.

	<www.improbable.com/magazine/>
	SUBSCRIPTIONS	($25, for six issues) 
	BACK ISSUES 	($5 each)

(mini-AIR, the thing you are reading at this moment, is but a tiny, free-floating appendix to the actual magazine.)

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31 — How to start or stop receiving this newsletter (*)

This newsletter, Mini-AIR, is just a (free!) tiny monthly *supplement* to the big, bold six-times-a-year magazine Annals of Improbable Research.

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32 — CONTACT INFO (*)

Annals of Improbable Research (AIR)
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EDITORIAL: <MARC aaattt IMPROBABLE dddooottt COM>
SUBSCRIPTION QUESTIONS: <subscriptions AT improbable.com>
Cambridge, MA, USA
Twitter: @ImprobResearch

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33 — Standard Gobbledegook (*)

EDITOR: Marc Abrahams
CO-CONSPIRATORS: Kees Moeliker, Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Gary Dryfoos, Nan Swift, Stephen Drew
PROOFREADER: Ambient Happenstance
AUTHORITY FIGURES: Nobel Laureates Dudley Herschbach, Sheldon Glashow, Richard Roberts

Key words: improbable research, science humor, Ig Nobel, AIR, the
(c) copyright 2020, Annals of Improbable Research

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