Miss Cellania's Blog Posts

Attempts to Understand Sneezes

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!

Research about sneezes, sneezing, and those who sneeze
compiled by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff

Sneezing has defied, or successfully interrupted, many attempts to understand why it happens and what exactly it signifies. Here are some of those attempts.

Sneezing and the Full Stomach
“Autosomal Dominant Sneezing Disorder Provoked by Fullness of Stomach,” A.S. Teebi and Q.A. al-Saleh, Journal of Medical Genetics, vol. 26, no. 8, August 1989, pp. 539-540. The authors, at the Kuwait Medical Genetics Centre in Raas, report:

[The subject is a] phenotypically normal 32 year old man, fullness of the stomach immediately after meals invariably results in three or four uncontrollable sneezes. This phenomenon is also present in his three brothers, one of his two sisters, his father, an uncle and his son, and the grandfather. The index subject became curious when his daughter started to show the phenomenon at the age of one year.... The ‘stomach sneeze reflex’ in this family has no relation to the type of food and occurs only when the stomach is full to the extent that no more can be eaten. There are usually three or four sneezes but may be as many as 15 consecutive sneezes.

The Persuasiveness of Sneezing
“Sneezing in Times of a Flu Pandemic: Public Sneezing Increases Perception of Unrelated Risks and Shifts Preferences for Federal Spending,” Spike W.S. Lee, Norbert Schwarz, Danielle Taubman, and Mengyuan Hou, Psychological Science, vol. 21, no. 3, 2010, pp. 375–377. (Thanks to Rae Tazawa for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at the University of Michigan, report:

[We] arranged for participants in two field experiments to encounter a sneezing person before answering questions about perceived risk.... exposure to sneezing in a public space increased the perceived risk of contracting a serious disease as well as the perceived risk of unrelated threats, namely having a heart attack and dying from crime or accident (Study 1). Moreover, sneezing... shifted policy preferences from allocating resources to the creation of green jobs to allocating resources to vaccine development (Study 2).

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The 20 Best Small Towns to Visit in 2017

Your vacation should be a time to relax, unwind, and see something you don't see every day. If you're looking for a place to do all that, you might consider visiting one of America's more distinctive small towns. Smithsonian put together a list of 20 suggestions, all with populations under 20,000. In some cases, way under. Check out De Smet, South Dakota (pop. 1,090).  

The quiet town’s legacy has been shaped in no small part by its most famous residents: the Ingalls. As this year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder, it’s a great time to pay this quirky town a visit.

Wilder first came to De Smet as an adolescent and set the final five books in the Little House series there. Today, the family’s 157-acre homestead, “By the Shores of Silver Lake” where they put down roots in 1879 is still intact, and you can go on a guided tour of it and all things Ingalls with the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society year round. If you can, though, come to De Smet in the summertime to catch the beloved Laura Ingalls Wilder Pageant, which this year will reenact “The Little Town on the Prairie,” picking up Wilder’s story following the winter of 1880-81. Coinciding with the festival, the town will also throw big, birthday bash for Wilder on July 14-16, which will feature a who’s who of “Little House on the Prairie” aficionados.

In Harpers Ferry, West Virginia (pop. 293), you can catch the sesquicentennial of the first integrated school in America in October. In Bell Buckle, Tennessee (pop 512), you can attend the RC and Moon Pie Festival in June. Or you can go surfing in isolated Hana, Hawaii (pop. 1235). See the entire list at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: South Dakota Department of Tourism)


Complaints

Ah, Chris thought he was shutting himself off from all the demands and complaints. But there comes a time when even your own body has plenty to complain about! At my age, you have to keep track of how long you sit in one position (especially the position he is in) to keep your joints and muscles from locking up. This is the latest from Lunarbaboon.


Landline Users Now a Minority in the U.S.

A survey by the National Center for Health Statistics finds that the majority of Americans live in a home without a working landline. That doesn't mean the majority of homes no longer have a landline. Those most likely to be cell-only are renters, young people, and people living with unrelated roommates. You can figure those are greatly-overlapping groups. Read more about the survey at Geeks Are Sexy.

Do you live in a home that has a working landline phone?



Cookie Box Requires Two to Open

If you are struggling with the temptation to eat cookies too often, or you want to encourage sharing and cooperation in your kids, you might consider a cookie box that requires two people (three hands) to open. Thijs Sondag designed and built this nice-looking box in just that way.

(YouTube link)

See more pictures of the box and its mechanism, and if you want to build your own, the instructions are at Google Drive. -via Laughing Squid


Serial Killer to be Exhumed

H. H. Holmes was a serial killer in Chicago who was publicly hanged in 1896. You can read the story of his crimes in a previous article. Holmes, despite (or maybe because of) years of dismembering his victims, was deathly afraid of grave robbers, and requested that his casket be filled with concrete. And so it was. However, rumor has it that Holmes was not the man hanged that day.

Following the hanging, rumors spread far and wide that Holmes – a master con man and manipulator – had paid off prison guards to hang a cadaver or some unsuspecting fellow inmate in his place and let him slip off into hiding in South America. Now, almost 121 years later and following a request from a descendent of Holmes, a Pennsylvania court has issued an order to have the alleged remains of the murderer dug up from his unmarked grave in Holy Cross Cemetery outside of Philadelphia.

“Why are we still fascinated by him?” John Russick, vice president for interpretation and education at the Chicago History Museum, told Fox News. “Part of it is the morbid curiosity in his crimes, but part of it is the effort to confirm that he is dead and was not actually able to outwit the law. There is the desire to confirm that legend is not true.”

We can all assume he is dead, whether or not he is buried in that specific grave. The University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Anthropology will do the forensics to identify whether the remains are those of Holmes. I'm sure the exhumation has nothing to do with the upcoming movie about Holmes. -via reddit


10 Fascinating Facts About the Easy-Bake Oven

Kids in the 1960s were fascinated with the Easy-Bake Oven. I know, I was one of them. What could be cooler than making tiny cakes with the power of a light bulb? Never mind that my mother already had me making tiny cakes and pies in tiny pans alongside hers in a full-size oven. Fifty-four years later, Easy-Bake Ovens are still popular, although they have changed.  

1) The first Easy-Bake Oven was very expensive

Today’s versions of the toy oven can be purchased at major retail stores or online at a reasonable $45.00, but the original 1963 version was much more expensive. In fact, it cost a hefty $15.95.

That might not sound like a lot, but adjusting for inflation, it amounts to $127. Despite the price, the Easy-Bake Oven sold half a million units in its first year on the market.

2) Working toy ovens were around for decades before the Easy-Bake

It might sound like an impressive feat for Kenner to have created a mini oven back in the 1960s, but other companies had already released similar toys decades earlier. Model train manufacturer Lionel created a gorgeous porcelain electric stove and oven combo in 1930 that featured a cooking surface the perfect height for kids, aged 6 to 9. The appliance, which the company claimed was built “as substantially as the one Mother uses,” sold for $29.50 ($430.00 today), according to an ad in a 1930 Playthings magazine.

Whether you ever had one or not, you'll want to read the list that tells us more about the Easy-Bake Oven at the Daily Dot.


15 Secrets of Forensic Artists

Among other tasks, forensic artists take a verbal description from a witness and render a sketch that may help identify a criminal. It's a particularly specific job. Mental Floss talked to three forensic artists (one we've featured here before) to get some insights into what they do. Here's a sample:

2. THEY NEED TO SUPPRESS THEIR CREATIVITY.

It's easy to imagine that forensic artists might remain hunched over a sketch for hours, trying to insert every last dimple and laugh line they could tease out of a witness. Wrong. According to Cooper, trying to create an exact likeness might make a sketch less likely to resonate with the public. “With a highly realistic portrait, someone might see it who knows the person, but if there’s one thing wrong, one detail, they’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s not my buddy,’” Cooper says. “When it’s more sketchy, more scribbled, you’re leaving more open to interpretation.”

7. BIRD NESTS CAN BE A BIG HELP.

For cases where artists are called to help reconstruct the likeness of a decomposed or otherwise de-featured body, Cooper says that a good reference source for bodies found in the woods can often be found in a very unlikely place. “When dealing with a decomposed body, we’d like to get the color of the hair, and a good place to find that is in a bird’s nest nearby,” she says. “Birds love hair.”

Read the other interesting tidbits from forensic artists at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Ryan Hodnett)


That Time the French Aristocracy Was Obsessed With Sexy Face Stickers

People have worn patches on their faces since ancient times, often to cover up scars or pockmarks. In the 17th and 18th centuries, artificial moles and birthmarks became fashionable, especially in France. The stickers were beauty marks, meant to bring distinction to a face that might otherwise look like everyone else's face.   

The beauty patch took off at a time when French men and women alike wore extensive makeup, including white powder in their hair and white paint on their faces, accented with rouge on the cheeks and bright vermillion lipstick. Religious conservatives and other cultural critics, particularly those in more pious England, frequently denounced the dishonesty of cosmetics like patches.

In his 17th-century book, Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transformed; Or, The Artificial Changeling, British author and physician John Bulwer took an anthropological approach to popular body modifications in various cultures around the world. Bulwer included an illustration in the 1653 edition comparing the European affinity for face patches with tattoos, henna, masks, veils, and piercings in other locales, deliberately exaggerating the trend by depicting a woman wearing a patch in the shape of a horse-drawn carriage.

Men wore face patches, too. Shown here is Charles Cathcart, who wore a crescent-shaped patch under his eye to cover -or possibly accentuate- a battle scar. Read about the fad of beauty patches and the different ways they were used at Collectors Weekly.


His Millionth Passenger

Southwest Airlines pilot Captain John Richie has been hauling passengers for the carrier for 22 years. He knew how many people he flew each day, and recently made a special presentation for a milestone in his career.  


(YouTube link)

A bottle of champagne and a paid ticket go a long way toward making a flight less painful, but it's not enough to make the other passengers want to flight you for the prize. It's also small enough so that you know Richie did it out of his own pocket. -via Uproxx


A Flat-Out Sculpting Mishap

This is what happens when your clay sculpture rolls forward and onto the floor face-first. He looks plenty angry about it. No, they didn't do it on purpose. Tefallio tells the story.

So, full disclosure (because I know redditors have hawk eyes), the original sculpture and the flat face one are different. The original was mine, the flat face one was my classmate's (we had the same model).

When he was bringing his work to our teacher for grading, the face slipped for the wooden board and met the ground with a perfect "thud". The sight itself was quite funny, because it looked like a third of its face was in the ground, but the result upon detaching it from the ground was hilarious. Even our teacher shed a few tears of laugh.

To answer your question, the unlucky sculptor received a good grade on the project, because the teacher saw his work before the disaster. -via reddit


Snow Clearing In Trollstigen

A drone caught the footage for this dramatic video of a snow-clearing machine working its way through the mountain road called Trollstigen (Troll's Path) in Norway. The road has a 10% incline and eleven hairpin curves. Trollstigen is closed in the winter (you can see why), but since the area depends on tourism, the road is cleared every spring, usually in May.

(YouTube link)

The machine must go forward and back, several times, as it inches forward. That's because the snow is deeper than the machine is tall! And to clear both lanes, and make sure it stays on the road. That can't be simple. The videographer with the drone is Jo William Boman. -via Digg


Can You Solve the Pirate Riddle?

Five pirates found a treasure chest of gold! How do they divvy it up? It's up to the captain, but he has to have cooperation from the other pirates. Once you find out the circumstances here, you'll decide that no, you can't solve the pirate riddle. These pirates are too smart.

(YouTube link)

But if you decide you want to solve this on your own before the answer is explained to you, good luck and we'll see you much later. This is a TED-Ed lesson from Alex Gendler. -via Geeks Are Sexy


Quirky Cardboard Cat Furniture

Sure, your cat loves any cardboard box, but wouldn't you rather see a TARDIS in your home? Or the Taj Mahal? Or a medieval castle? Or a Maya pyramid? A Bulgarian family makes these elaborate constructions from recycle cardboard and sells them through their Etsy store CacaoPets.

We are a small family of engineers which likes to think extraordinary. Ten years ago we got ourselves a cat – Shusha. Ever since, she has been a member of our family. Once while we were unpacking Shusha started playing in a cardboard box and thats when it came to us. Why not instead of throwing the cardboard, could we turn it into something much more useful. …The designs of the houses were thought in order to be liked not only by cats, but also by their owners. We have created beautiful designs that also match any kind of peoples interior.



They aren't cheap, especially when you have a cat that eats cardboard. But you'll never take the time to make one of these yourself, and they could make a great gift. -via Laughing Squid


Finding the Perfect Password

My family did an audit once to find the wifi hot spots in our house. It became clear why one kid was always using the next door neighbor's wifi. The neighbor's signal was much stronger in her bedroom than it was anywhere in his house! Our signal was spotty, and completely dead where I put the family's shared computer only ten feet from the router. Wifi can be completely eccentric. Steve just went with the password that always comes to mind when these eccentricities are encountered, in the latest comic from Megacynics.


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