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Wednesday 21 December 2005

Nominative determinism 7 and other funnies






More nominative determinism, mainly from the Feedback column of New Scientist.

Vasectomy expert Dick Chopp has a colleague who specialises in penile prosthetics for sexual dysfunction. His name? Stephen Hardeman.

In an instance of quadruple nominative determinism, a book called "The Imperial Animal" was written by Lionel Tiger & Robin Fox.

The chair of aneaesthesiology and pain management at the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Illinois is one William J Tranquilli, while a climate scientist at Purdue University, Indiana who is predicting floods across the USA is named Noah Diffenbaugh.

Nothing to do with nominative determinism but I like singer Katie Melua's redrafted lyrics to the song "Nine Million Bicycles", rewritten after science writer Simon Singh of "Fermat's Last Theorem" fame complained the original was inaccurate:

"We are 13.7 billion light years from the edge of the observable universe, that's a good estimate, with well-defined error bars, and with the available information I predict that I will always be with you".

(See my other posts on nominative determinism.)


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4 comments:

ChickyBabe said...

Stephen Hardeman must be the one sending me spam lately! ;)

Krisco said...

My favorite one, a few years back, was at the Los Angeles Dept. of Water and Power. Two of the men on the board? Mr. Water and Mr. Powers. Not even making that up.

Improbulus said...

CB, yeah, sure, you need all that, right...

Krisco - great one, ta!

Anonymous said...

The British Journal of Urology once carried an article about incontinence by authors Splatt & Weedon.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&uid=870138&cmd=showdetailview