(The Archies : 1968) If you type the phrase “Jingle Jangle” into your favourite internet search engine, there’s a good chance that the first result will be a link to the video above. Or maybe this book from Axel Scheffler. Less likely in the top-ranking results is a mention of a pair of scientific time-wasters […]
Tag: mistake
Improbable products (with mistakes) increase product preferences (research study)
“[…] we find that consumers actually prefer products that were made by mistake to otherwise identical products that were made intentionally.” – explain the researchers behind a new study to be published in the Journal of Consumer Research. The research team performed a series of experiments which described to participants various mistake-prone scenarios, e.g. one […]
Group laughter at the social insect conference
“At a social insect conference, the whole room broke into laughter,” writes Myrmecos about the moment someone displayed this chart: Myrmecos explains: “Pachycondyla, among the most common ants in tropical regions worldwide, turns out to be a motley assortment of unrelated species. While the taxonomy of the world’s 12,000 or so ant species is obviously still […]
A sheepish admission about my new book
My new book — This Is Improbable — has its official UK/US publication date this Thursday. September 6. Before it comes out, I have to make an embarrassing admission. Foyles bookstore asked me to do up a little essay for their blog. I decided to write the confession as part of that essay. Here’s the […]