Fourteen years ago, I mailed some articles off to a magazine I'd never seen. A few weeks later, a message appeared on my telephone answering machine. It was from a man who said he was the publisher of the magazine, that they had received the articles, and would I like to be the editor.
That's the short version of how I got started. But everything I'm doing now is, one way or another, something I've been doing since about the age of 10: looking for things that might be a little different from what they seem; writing about science and things that are funny; and puzzling about what's real and what's not, what's good and what's not, what's important and what's not.
I went to college at Harvard and majored in applied maths. Bill Gates was in the class a year ahead of me, and I think majored in the same subject. He, like me, eventually started a software company. I, unlike him, made the mistake of graduating from college. You have never heard of my software company, but it's what I was doing before the magazine fell into my life, and what I continued doing simultaneously for a few years after that. Before starting that company, I had worked elsewhere on projects including a machine that could read printed books aloud to blind people, and another machine that the US government used to read rapidly mounds of begged, borrowed and stolen Russian-language documents.
One day in 1990, I wondered how upset I might become, say at the age of 90, if I never even tried to get some of my writing published. And so, to forestall future frustration, I gathered together a few of the many short articles I'd been inflicting on friends, and looked for a place to submit them.
The problem was I didn't know of any place that knowingly published funny things about science. The only person I could even think to ask for advice was Martin Gardner, by then a long-retired columnist for Scientific American, and the author of The Annotated Alice in Wonderland and many other ingenious, funny books. I'd never met Martin Gardner, and didn't even know if he was still alive, but he sent a kind reply that was encouraging about my writing and discouraging about publication prospects.
There was hardly any place, any more, he lamented, that published funny things about science. There used to be one magazine, though it was probably long dead. Why not try to find out what happened to it?
That's what he suggested, so that's what I did. I couldn't find a copy of the magazine itself, but eventually did dig up an address from an old directory in the public library, and mailed off my little packet. And later thanked Martin profusely.
That magazine was a magnificent odd duck with a bedraggled history. It was started in 1955 by two very funny Israeli scientists - Alex Kohn, who studied viruses, and Harry Lipkin, who did physics research. They did it for fun, but after about 10 years the magazine grew to the point where the paperwork was making them miserable. The publication fell into other hands, and many years later, having withered almost to nothingness, it was bought by a large publisher of science and medical journals. At which point, I wandered into the picture.
The publisher offered me part ownership if I could bring the magazine back to life without (a) any staff, or (b) any marketing or promotion, or (c) virtually any funding. This was clearly crazy, but it was also clearly so close to what I'd been doing (on a much smaller scale, and because I couldn't NOT do it) that this was irresistible. To me, anyway.
So I did software by day and magazine stuff by night. And knowing that I knew almost nothing about editing a magazine, I asked for lots of help. Alex and Harry, the founders, were delighted to get involved again after years of having been pushed away from their baby. The baby was in such wretched condition that it was easy to find all sorts of ways to improve it. I felt I had a licence to phone up anyone for advice, and did so. Soon all kinds of people, among them some celebrated writers and scientists, were offering suggestions and submitting articles. I started the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, which got quite a bit of attention that first year, and has become bigger every year since.
I edited that magazine for about four years. The first six months were heady. The publisher told me that this had become the fastest-growing journal of the hundred or so they published worldwide (the others were very serious science and medical journals). They offered to start giving me some funding and a staff.
Days later, the company's new president decided to stop publishing many of their journals, including this one, which he told me was worth "just about nothing". The promised funding and the staff vanished before they even existed. So for the next three years I worked to keep the magazine alive with even less support than before from the publisher.
When I offered to buy it from them, the president told me that "just about nothing" now meant about $1m. Eventually, the situation made so little sense that I left, and invited everyone to join me in starting up a brand new magazine: the Annals of Improbable Research, also known as Air. Everyone did. Air is now in its 10th year of publication.
Along the way, I've done several books - a best-of collection from the old magazine; a Best of the Annals of Improbable Research; a book called Ig Nobel Prizes, which is about some of the people who have won Ig Nobel Prizes. A new Ig Nobel book, tentatively entitled Why Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans, will be published this September by Orion Books.
I also write a little monthly email newsletter, called mini-Air, full of small curiosities and bleatings, and a five-times-a-week blog. And now there's the weekly column in the Guardian. The Guardian column turns out to be a good place to explore in more detail certain things that I can present only briefly in my own magazine, where the context - the entire surroundings are supposed to be funny, too - would sometimes dim or alter the flavour.
There's a constant influx of material. People send me all sorts of things, from professionally specialised corners of the world, that beg exploration.
The novelist Floyd Kemske once wrote a review of Air, in which he described the too-strange-to-be-fiction citations and the Ig Nobel Prize winners and all the other dauntingly genuine things there as "found satire". I've never seen a finer description. (By the way, I was doubly thrilled to run across Kemske's review, because I had read and admired several of his books, which are in a genre that he seems to have created and which my wife describes as "satirical corporate horror". Further by the way, my wife is a psychologist - not the kind who helps people; she just likes to study them.)
It's a little embarrassing that it took me about 12 years to describe what I do - I mean, to come up with a concise, clear way to describe it. Here's the description. Everything I collect and write about has this quality: it first makes people laugh, and then makes them think. (What people think is up to them.)
Much of it is about science, and much is not. Most of it, one way or another, is also about people and how they behave. Nothing in physics or chemistry or mathematics - at least nothing I've heard of - is as impressively complex, or as hard to truly, fully understand, as the way people behave.
Now, about the Ig Nobel Prizes . . . The basic idea is to honour, or at least bring attention to, achievements that clearly deserve some sort of grand-and-glorious recognition but seem unlikely to get it. Achievements that have that quality of first making people laugh, and then making them think. Consider this selection of four recent Ig Nobel Prize winners:
· Yukio Hirose, for his chemical investigation of a bronze statue, in the city of Kanazawa, that fails to attract pigeons.
· Eleanor Maguire and her colleagues, for presenting evidence that the brains of London taxi drivers are more highly developed than those of their fellow citizens.
· CW Moeliker, for documenting the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck.
· The executives, directors, and auditors of Enron, WorldCom, and 26 other companies, for adapting the mathematical concept of imaginary numbers for use in the business world.
Observers may disagree as to which of these are good, which bad, which important, which trivial. Such distinctions are irrelevant to their winning a prize. What matters is that each has the basic quality of "makes you laugh, then makes you think".
I hope that when, in your daily meanderings, you run across such stuff, you'll drop me a line about it.
I was asked to make this a biographical piece. A man's biography probably ought to include mention of his time as a woman. Here's mine, in the form of a letter I couldn't resist sending to The Boston Globe, my local newspaper, a few years ago:
"Your February 20 article about the Registry of Motor Vehicles says that some people were sent multiple copies of their new licences. Please let me correct your statement that "the glitch is the first defect with the state's two-year-old, state-of-the-art . . . system".
"Last month I got my licence renewed. The new licence informed me that my sex is 'F'. In previous years, on the licence and elsewhere, my sex had always been 'M'. I am certain of it. My mother backs me up on this, and my beard lends further, if not conclusive, weight to my contention.
"I took the new licence to the clerk who had processed it, but she (he?) refused to talk to me. I then Xeroxed the licence and mailed the copy to Governor Weld, asking him to use his powers as governor to change me back. The governor did so without hesitation. A sex change in the commonwealth of Massachusetts costs $33.75, which these days is a bargain. But while it was interesting to see how the other half lives, I enjoy being a guy. So thank you, Governor Weld. You have made a man of me."
· Marc Abrahams is appearing at the Guardian Hay Festival on Saturday June 5. His column appears weekly in Education Guardian
Happiness is . . . Improbable research in the Guardian
The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists is, as the name implies, a club for scientists who have luxuriant flowing hair. The LFHCfS, as it is known unpronounceably to its members and their admirers, was founded in early 2001. Anyone can join, provided that she or he is a scientist and has luxuriant flowing hair. And is proud of it.
The "proud" part is important. The club is not for the morbidly shy, people-aversive scientist of stereotype and legend.
LFHCfS was founded by admirers of the famously curly mane of psychologist Stephen Pinker. Pinker, then a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and now head of the psychology department at Harvard, became the first member. He proudly lists the club on his academic web page.
December 2 2003
What do Fishes know? Quite a lot, it turns out. Here are some research reports by investigators who are, or at least are named, Fish.
Fish on flatfish. Opercular jetting during fast-starts by flatfishes, E Brainerd, B Page, and F Fish, Journal of Experimental Biology, 1997.
Fish on whitefish. Epidemic of febrile gastro-enteritis due to salmonella traced to smoked whitefish, SM Fish, et al, American Journal of Public Health and the Nation's Health, 1968.
Fish on fish oil. N-3 fatty acid incorporation into LDL particles renders them more susceptible to oxidation in vitro but not necessarily more atherogenic in vivo, JR Fish, et al, Arteriosclerosis and Thrombosis, 1994.
December 9 2003
At the age of 20, out alone panning for gold in the Canadian wilderness, Troy Hurtubise had some sort of an encounter with a grizzly bear. He has devoted the rest of his life to creating a grizzly-bear-proof suit of armour in which he could safely go and commune with that bear. The suit's basic design was influenced by the powerful humanoid-policeman-robot-from-the-future title character in Robocop, a movie Hurtubise happened to see shortly before he began his intensive research and development work.
Hurtubise is a pure example of the lone inventor, in the tradition of James Watt and Thomas Edison. Regarded by some as a half-genius, by others as a half-crackpot, he has unsurpassed persistence and imagination. Hurtubise is also very careful. The proof that he is very careful is that he is still alive.
March 9 2004
Will the Russians ever find happiness? If so, is it possible that some day they will become too happy? A study by David AF Haaga and his colleagues, which perhaps inevitably appeared in the Journal of Happiness Studies, seems to anticipate this concern. The researchers, who are at American University in Washington DC, called their paper "Are the Very Happy Too Happy?"
In it, they nod to a study by Ed Diener, of the University of Illinois, and Martin EP Seligman, of the University of Pennsylvania, who concluded, rather flatly, that "being very happy does not seem to be a malfunction".
April 6 2004
When guests come to dinner, a question may arise: "Do people chew delicious food faster than they chew distasteful food?" The answer seems to be yes, according to an experiment performed by the team of France Bellisle, Bernard Guy-Grand and J Le Magnen at Hotel-Dieu hospital in Paris, who published their mastication report in the journal Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. The scientists make three points:
* People chew delicious food more quickly than they chew horrible food.
* People race to put delicious food in their mouths, but with horrible food they hesitate.
* People enjoy a meal more when they are hungry than when they are full.
These are good things to know - and we now know it scientifically.
April 13 2004
· Read Marc Abrahams' columns at education.theguardian.com/higher/research/improbable, and The Annals of Improbable Research at www.improbable.com