Home Subscribe Advertise JIR History Editors Favorites Links Advisors Critical Praise Questions Chemicals Fun, friendly JIR is a great escape from the harsh and the hassle. Benefits stretch far beyond the easy chair. Many items are perfect to post, or to show around, or to include in a presentation. Many spark new and interesting thoughts. Great gift for scientists, doctors, engineers, and professors. Subscribe www.wordsandunwords.com WILDWORDS board game! All the fun that Scrabble® should have been. More words, more strategy, more bluffs, more twists! Great gift! Top-quality tiles and trays. Including US shipping: $36.95. eMail or snail-mail your order. The stars above are beautiful, and so is The Stars Above starfinder! Gleaming, sturdy blue acrylic, 14 inches wide. Dome-shaped, like the real sky. Dial up any time on any date. Find the constellations, the Milky Way, planets, and major stars. Great gift! Little distortion between 30° and 50° North latitude. $99.95 includes base, booklet, and UPS ground shipping within US. eMail or snail-mail your order. Stretchable Graph Sheets! JIR exclusive! JIR was first to suggest them, way back in 1964, and now makes them real. Our graph sheets stretch a point so much you could be a politician. [not recommended] Each kit contains these 8.5 x 11 inch sheets: Stretchable Spandex grid Invariant transparent grid to use atop: Stretchable blank Spandex to draw your own curves on Suggestions Use your own clipboard and binder clips to anchor sides you don’t want to stretch. $9.95 including US postage. ß or snail-mail your order. Brian Malow Brian Malow performs widely on the comedy club circuit. He is a life-long fan of science and science fiction. His intelligent, imaginative comedy plays delightfully with language, and is spiced with a healthy dose of science. His clean, energetic style makes him a favorite at colleges and corporations (such as Apple, Dell, 3M, and Texas Instruments). www.sciencecomedian.com Astronauts aboard space shuttle STS-44, while in orbit, listened to his Neil Armstrong routine. And they laughed. Your group can laugh, too. A whole lot. eMail Brian Malow to arrange a performance for your own special event: brian@butseriously.com Geek Comic- Nerdo Capo Di Capi Tutti, accessible Geekiosity, family fun. Norm Goldblatt performs at nightclubs, comedy clubs, corporate events, private parties and fundraisers. His humor touches on technology, science, politics, and the human condition. Every show is different and peppered with jokes from the day’s news. His quips were quoted regularly by the late great Herb Caen in the San Francisco Chronicle and his jokes are heard on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Born with Asociotechnophilia, he redirected the ravaging effects of this disease toward developing skills as a physicist, teacher, engineer and entertainer. He has 2 head positions — towards the stars and towards his shoes — but get him onstage and power him with a spotlight, and his laser gaze will entrance you. www.normgoldblatt.com. Welcome to The Journal of Irreproducible Results In six funny issues a year, JIR offers spoofs, parodies, whimsies, burlesques, lampoons, and satires. JIR appeals to scientists, doctors, science teachers, and word-lovers. JIR targets hypocrisy, arrogance, and ostentatious sesquipedalian circumlocution. We're a friendly escape from the harsh and the hassle. JIR makes you feel good :-). Subscribe Anthology Recapitulates Hilarity: This Book Warps Space and Time JIR’s anthology is a fast-paced frolic of humorous and quirky tidbits in science, math, academe, bureaucracy, and witty wordplay. More than 250 entries ponder and pun the practical and peculiar. Edited by JIR’s Norman Sperling, published by Andrews McMeel. 289 pages, 6 x 6 inches (but only the dimensions are square), soft cover. A great gift! custom-inscribed any way the customer wants, $15.99 including US postage. eMail or snail-mail your order. Contest: The Funniest Graph The winner is All Theories Proven With One Graph by Don Grace of Florence, Alabama. Click the picture to see it in most of its glory. To get a copy professionally printed on paper suitable for a magazine cover, backed by page after page of more graphs and science humor, subscribe! Second Prize: Nate P. Leon's Trip to Las Vegas by Keith Sealy, Austin, Texas Third Prize: Comparing Apples and Oranges: Normalizing Competitive Eating Records across Food Disciplines by Mike Wooldridge, University of California, Berkeley And more ... JIR is now the biggest part of Everything in the Universe. Hi! I'm Norm Sperling, the editor since 2004. I've subscribed to JIR since the 1970s. I was assistant editor of Sky & Telescope magazine, and Science Editor of AltaVista.com. I teach astronomy in universities around San Francisco, wrote the book What Your Astronomy Textbook Won't Tell You, and co-designed Edmund Scientific's Astroscan telescope. Meet the Editor! In Person At: SiliCon, science fiction convention. Find JIR's table in "Science Alley". New and old JIRs, books, Spandex graphs, Bathsheba's math-art. Bring your camera: we have a JIR front cover that you can take your picture on! Wonderfest, the Bay Area Festival of Science. November 1 at Stanford in Palo Alto; November 2 at the University of California in Berkeley. Find JIR in the Science Expo. Norm also chairs the 1 PM Saturday discussion, "Does Anything Happen at Random?". New and old JIRs, books, Spandex graphs. Bring your camera: we have a JIR front cover that you can take your picture on! San Diego Science Festival. Performing "Irreproducible Results from the Journal" as well as exhibiting. New and old JIRs, books, Spandex graphs. Bring your camera: we have a JIR front cover that you can take your picture on! JIR Changes since 2004: Articles from new authors. Updated graphics. Subscribing teachers may reprint for free one JIR article per semester for their students, if they cite the author's and publication's names, starting with vol. 50 #5. A few ads. We really appreciate your tips on who would be appropriate advertisers. 1-liner ads - 1 line, all the way across the page - for just $39. 1-liners are a great way to tout a website or a briefly-described product. Subscriptions to JIR make great gifts! Guidelines for Authors JIR is always pleased to receive submissions. We can accept them by snail-mail on paper, CD-ROM, or 3.5-inch floppy, or by eMail to normsperling@gmail.com. JIR articles should be humorous. Appeal to scientists, doctors, and engineers. Make your points in good humor. Make readers feel good about having read them. Minimize bitter aftertaste. The rule for length is simple: write it for what it's worth. Include everything that ought to be there, and then stop. Don't leave out anything that helps the article, but don't pad, either. Parts of articles that deal with real science should be valid both in technicalities and in sense of proportion. 70% of JIR readers have doctorates - they can spot problems. Many readers don't enjoy slogging through complex equations in unfamiliar specialties, so use only as much math as your points require. Use the citation format appropriate for the topic. Please include appropriate illustrations. Each article is distinctive. Do what makes your article the best it can be. We look forward to reading your submission. Let us produce your publications We get the science right - and the wording - and the graphics. We target your audience. We produce brochures, newsletters, magazines, reports, books, and website contents. We write, edit, proofread, lay out, format, illustrate, specify printing, print, and bind. We pay attention and work quickly, at reasonable prices. Tell us what you have, and what you want it to become. JIR makes conventions unconventional! Would your professional convention benefit from some humor? JIR can co-host a humor session, blending our half-century trove of articles with your society's wittiest presenters. JIR's session was a huge hit at FASEB. All we need are expenses from San Francisco*, and a sales booth. We will consider any proposal or relationship that seems good for us all. *Near San Francisco, "expenses" are little more than a parking pass. Few Thrills Compare to Weather at its Worst Extreme Weather by Christopher C. Burt We often hear that the day was the hottest, coldest, wettest, or snowiest on record. Is the climate really becoming more extreme as a result of global warming? The facts are in this book, along with bizarre weather events: heat bursts, electrified dust storms, snow rollers, pink snowstorms, luminous tornadoes, falls of fish and toads, ball lightning, and super bolts. Great gift! Revised edition, 320 pages, 110 photos, 47 maps, 66 tables and graphics, extreme weather data for >300 US cities. Soft cover. 2007. $29.95, custom-inscribed by author Chris Burt any way the customer wants, including US postage. eMail or snail-mail your order. What Your Astronomy Textbook Won’t Tell You by Norman Spering Textbooks don’t tell all they should, and sometimes inhibit learning. Norm Sperling teaches what textbooks won’t tell: Too sure of things? Learn which Unknowns still stump us. Outdated viewpoints? Reset your mindset. Need to weed out bunk? Bigtime debunking explains why science can tell how nature works. Overly serious? Chuckle at bloopers. Fresh, intriguing ideas and viewpoints, many of which apply to other sciences as well. From the review in JRASC: "a rollicking read. It is fun! The language is down-to-earth and jargon-free. The writing style is straightforward and friendly. The book does not take itself too seriously. You will find it hard to put down because it just keeps going, like the Energizer bunny, with interesting topic after interesting topic." 183 pages, paperback, 2002. $26.95 custom-inscribed by the author any way the customer wants, including US postage. eMail or snail-mail your order. Creation/ Evolution Satiricon by Robert Dietz and John Holden Witty, hard-hitting satire, delightfully illustrated with many droll cartoons. A classic book, long out-of-print. Paperback. $39.95 while the co-author’s last box of new copies lasts, including Holden’s custom-inscription any way the customer wants, and US postage. 8.5 x 11 inches, 140 pages, 1987. eMail or snail-mail your order. Scientific Curiosities and Anomalies Compiled by William R. Corliss, The Sourcebook Project Ancient Infrastructure: Remarkable Roads, Mines, Mounds, Stone Circles. 412 pages, paperback. $21.95. Mysterious Universe: Astronomical Anomalies. 716 pages, hardback. $19.95. Biological Anomalies: Birds. 486 pages, hardback. $27.50. Neglected Geological Anomalies. 333 pages, hardback. $18.95. Remarkable Luminous Phenomena in Nature: A Catalog of Geophysical Anomalies. 419 pages, hardback. $24.95. Science Frontiers: Some Anomalies and Curiosities of Nature. 1977-1994. 356 pages, paperback. $18.95. Science Frontiers II: More Anomalies and Curiosities of Nature. 1994-2004. 340 pages, paperback. $21.95. Prices include US shipping. Canada: add $3/book; overseas, add $10/book. eMail or snail-mail your order. The Journal of Irreproducible Results 2625 Alcatraz Avenue #235, Berkeley, CA 94705 +1 650-200-9211 · normsperling@gmail.com Journal of Irreproducible Results and JIR are trademarks of Norman Sperling. Copyright 2004, 2005, 2006 Norman Sperling. 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