When scientists decide to troll each other, things can get messy. The Wikiworm trawls the weirdest Wikipedia articles on the web to find out more... The Sokal affair, also called the Sokal hoax, was a publishing hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural ... Read More...
Society
One of those very divisive bits of folklore gleaned from the wonderful world of Wikipedia for today's Wikiworm - which side are you on? The five-second rule is a widely repeated belief that food dropped on the ground will not be significantly contaminated with bacteria if it is picked up within five seconds of being ... Read More...
Even looking at the picture above sets my teeth on edge. This week's weird Wikipedia article looks into the science behind the world's most annoying noise... Scraping a blackboard with fingernails produces a sound which most people find extremely irritating. The basis of this innate reaction has been studied in the ... Read More...
Sadly not a story about football supporters meeting their maker, but instead a bizarre superstition from South Korea in this week's trawl through the weirdest articles on Wikipedia... Fan death is a a widely believed urban legend in South Korea. Despite there being no scientifically verified cases, the phenomenon posits that sleeping in ... Read More...
As America debates race yet again, Rita recalls an incident in racial profiling that occured close to home... America is going through another one of its periodic Rorschach tests on race. The O. J. trial, Rodney King, now Trayvon Martin. Not to mention the long litany of names going back through ... Read More...
Fortunately I am too young to have faced any prolonged exposure to this thoroughly besmirched foodstuff. Perhaps you dabblers have a particularly piquant memory of these curly triangles of terror? In British humour, the phrase British Rail sandwich refers to sandwiches sold for consumption on passenger trains of the former British ... Read More...
This week's wikipedia wierdness is indeed rather trivial, and made even more unusual by the voluminous amount of data devoted to serious discussion of something so meaningless. There are many thousands of words written on this nonsense so I have attempted to condense the key points for you here... Toilet paper ... Read More...
In a week where the papers are full of columns warning that the EU is out to pilfer everyone's bank accounts, I thought it topical to look at the world of straight bananas and Sun Newspaper headlines. Turns out there's a word for such Brussels-based brouhaha... A euromyth is the word ... Read More...
A couple of weeks ago an issue of Sunday Times Style Magazine appeared to be dedicated to the feminist cause. There was an article by Camilla Long on the relevance of feminism today, accompanied by comments from Caitlin Moran and a number of media-savvy younger women involved with female causes. ... Read More...
In the true spirit of the Wikiworm Manifesto I decided this week to look into St Vitus' dance, which I had previously always thought to be a term for epilepsy. Turns out I was wrong again... St. Vitus' Dance was a social phenomenon that occurred in mainland Europe between the 14th ... Read More...
