Improbable Research

AIR Vents (Part 2 of 3)

Exhalations from our readers

NOTE: The opinions expressed here represent the opinions of the authors and do not necessarily represent the opinions of those who hold other opinions.

Mailing Mössbauer

A colleague of mine just came back from the “International Conference on the Applications of the Mössbauer Effect” in Oxford where he met some Italian and German physicists and chemists who printed a series of Mössbauer stamps with a picture of Rudolf Mössbauer and a spectrum corresponding to different Mössbauer isotopes. Obviously, those stamps were from the “Kingdom of Nuclear Gamma Resonnance,” where the currency is the “mm/s.” Too bad I don’t have a scanner here to send you the pictures. Dr Lorenzo Stievano from the Universita’ Ca’ Foscari was one of the main “authors.”

Anyway, the funny thing is that they tried to mail postcards using those stamps in various countries. One hundred percent of them got through the mail system in Britain and Italy. Would these countries be more Mössbauer-friendly than others? This seems a nice sequel to the postal experiments described in your July/August 2000 issue.

~ Nicolas Sabourin
   Department of Physics
   University of Ottawa
   Ottowa, ON

Mel and Al and Great-Granddad (2)

Here is another historical photograph of Mel, and my great-grandfather, and Einstein, and some other people. My grandfather is the one standing next to Mel.

~ Paloma McMartin, Ph.D.
   East Hampton, NY

Sleep Datum

James Otis Francis Tolland Richardson says (AIR 8:6) he is looking for people who fall asleep while watching black-and-white movies but do not fall asleep while watching color movies. I am such a person, and would be happy to volunteer to be one of his research subjects. I fall asleep only if the movie has sound — I hope this does not disqualify me.

~ Wen-Hua Kauang, M.D.
   Tienjin, China

Mel Under Scrutiny

For years you have been publishing all those photographs of the little man named Mel. Are all of those the same photograph? And am I, as a subscriber, the subject of some very obscure research you are doing about exposure to these photographs?

~ Humberto Sousa
   Miranda do Douro, Portugal

 

© Copyright 2003 Annals of Improbable Research (AIR)

This HotAIR feature first appeared in AIR Volume 9 Issue 1. For a complete list of strangely fascinating featured articles elsewhere on this web site, see What's New.