Yell at the umpire, nozzles (ice cream, chocolate, bevelled), crypto-emojis

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Berate the refs — There is new evidence that it can pay to scream at referees in sports stadiums. That evidence appears in the study ‘Verbal aggressions against Major League Baseball umpires affect their decision making”… Your ice […]

Baseball / Medical Skills: The Hidden Ball Trick

This decades-old medical report has received surprisingly little attention from the baseball community. Baseball season is about to begin again, in the USA. Please alert anyone to whom this study could be useful: “An Unusual Foreign Body in the Rectum—A Baseball: Report of a Case,” M.P. McDonald and D. Rosenthal, Diseases of the Colon and […]

Baseball mud deglossing machine: A Quixotic quest?

“This application claims benefit of U.S. Provisional Application No. 61/066,848, entitled ‘Baseball Deglosser Machine For Mudding a Baseball‘ and filed on Feb. 22, 2008, which is specifically incorporated herein by reference for all that it discloses and teaches,” says US patent application US 2009/0214792 A1, filed in 2009. The application describes a machine that attempts […]

Improbable Research