Window pains
When you donate your future former self “to science”, your generosity might open a door (and, as you will see, close a window) to adventure.
A 2012 paper titled used the index, middle, ring and little fingers of 10 cadaver hands to “simulate real events in which a finger is jammed between the glass and seal entry of the window of a current motor vehicle”.
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That study was cited most recently in a paper called , presented at the 2021 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Intelligence and Safety for Robotics. The aim was to study catastrophes that happen to humans, to learn how robots could be endowed with superhuman resilience.
After a relatively cheery introduction (“Only [a] few experiments were done with alive human volunteers to determine tighter tolerance levels for mild injury or pain thresholds”), the IEEE paper lurches into a parade of horror highlights about things done to cadavers. Small female elbow joints .
Behold how it also praises a : “a realistic setup with a modified car door was used. The participants exerted the closing force on their fingers by themselves till their maximal pain tolerance was reached. Using an artificial setup the force could be exerted to a particular bone or joint.”
As a donor, one must consider opportunity costs. Particular experiments have their day, but thereafter are seldom repeated; scientific curiosity moves on to other intriguing questions. So, if you want to lend a hand to power window-closing experiments, volunteer sooner rather than later. Don’t let the window of opportunity close on your chance to be parts of digital history.
Hamburger and Fries
Rob Eason went on an intellectual snack run through the library, where he snagged two nominative determinism treats.
“Inheritance of mixed cryoglobulinemia”, a paper by Max Hamburger, Louis Fries and colleagues, was . Eason says: “Cryoglobulins are abnormal proteins in the blood. Maybe their presence is due to the contributions from the Hamburger and Fries involved?”
Eason also discovered “An experimental study of the effects of sheep grazing on vegetation change in a species-poor grassland and the role of seedling recruitment into gaps”, by J. M. Bullock, B. Clear Hill, M. P. Dale and J. Silvertown, in a 1994 issue of the .
The pastoral picnic aspects don’t end with Hill and Dale, sheep and a Bullock. Bullock was based at the Open University’s Oxford Research Unit in the hamlet of Boars Hill, UK. And the researchers cite an earlier essay by J. C. Bacon about livestock.
Stone on Stone
Further nominative determinism. Eric Bignell sends word that: “The Stone Masons Livery Company in London has just . The book is written by Ian Stone.”
Annikan Flycatcher
Superior athletic abilities – running, gymnastics or scoring goals, to name three – can result in the winning of medals, championships and romantic offers, any of which many people would consider to be non-trivial. Therefore, athletic abilities aren’t usually considered to be trivial superpowers, a list of which Feedback is compiling. Here is a trivially stupendous exception – one unlikely to win an Olympic medal, but certain to inspire awe.
Laura Connell says: “Your listings of trivial superpowers put me in mind of a student I knew when I was teaching. Annika, while chatting, was able to casually reach up and pick flies off her face. They never got away, or even tried. And she never rushed or tried the sneaky stealth approach. Teachers and students alike were gobsmacked, but she often was not even aware that she had done it, so habitual was it. And she never understood our amazement.”
A fly-catching superpower has , but this human counterpart remains poorly understood.
Storied superpower
Mark Hessler says that he has a trivial superpower: “I like telling stories and I think my most notable ability may be the special instinct I have about who’s already heard which story. When I have an impulse to speak with someone or in a group it’s nearly always accompanied by a corresponding sense of who present may have heard it before. It’s become a point of pride for me over the years to avoid letting the same person hear the same story twice. When I repeated one once in the presence of a friend from college years afterwards when we were in our 40s, he said, “I’ve been listening to your stories and waiting 20 years for this moment: you’ve finally repeated one, I’ve witnessed it, I almost can’t believe it.”
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