This is Improbable Too Read online

  Many others have imagined new ways to examine and change the eating habits of persons other than themselves.

  In 2008, Mariana Simons-Nikolova and Maarten Bodlaender of the Netherlands applied for a patent for an electro-mechanical process they call ‘Modifying a Person’s Eating and Activity Habits’. Their video/computer system would monitor an individual’s head and hands to detect when they were eating. It would then announce to them via the TV or computer, ‘You Are Now Eating’. Simons-Nikolova and Bodlaender explain: ‘By providing the feedback when the subject is still eating or drinking, the subject is helped to stop the eating or drinking sooner than if no feedback had been given.’

  A 2008 patent by three Israeli inventors describes ‘a sensor which detects: (a) the patient swallowing, (b) the filling of the patient’s stomach, and/or (c) the onset of contractions in the stomach as a result of eating’. Electric current can then, for dietary reasons, be ‘driven into muscle tissue of the subject’s stomach’. This ‘induces in the subject a sensation of satiation, discomfort, nausea, or vertigo’. The entire plan, they say, pertains to ‘appetite regulation, and specifically to invasive techniques and apparatus for appetite control and treating obesity’.

  ‌Fig. 1 of 15 from the 2008 patent ‘Regulation of Eating Habits’

  Three Indian inventors filed a patent application in 2010 for a ‘refrigerator for obese persons’. The fridge monitors ‘all eating and drinking’, and dispenses diet advice. Also, ‘a reflecting mirror film on the door makes the person to control overeating as soon as he stands before the fridge’.

  With these and related plans society becomes more equipped for ‘watching every mouthful’ of some of its members.

  Douglas, Mary, and Michael Nicod (1974). ‘Taking the Biscuit: The Structure of British Meals’. New Society 19: 744–77.

  Simons-Nikolova, Mariana, and Maarten P. Bodlaender (2008). ‘Modifying a Person’s Eating and Activity Habits’. European patent no. 1,964,011, 3 September.

  Aviv, Ricardo, Ophir Bitton and Shai Policker (2008). ‘Regulation of Eating Habits’. US patent no. 7,437,195, 14 October.

  Anandampillai, Aparna Thirumalai, Vijayan Thirumalai Anandampillai and Anandvishnu Thirumalai Anandampillai (2010). ‘Refrigerator for Obese Persons’. US patent application 12/799,645, 14 October.

  May we recommend

  ‘Exponential Nonnegativity on the Ice Cream Cone’

  by Ronald J. Stern and Henry Wolkowicz (published in SIAM: Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications, 1991)

  Gruel world

  Our relationship with cooked cereal owes much to Louis J. Lee of Rochester, New York. Thanks to him, we no longer need to chew the stuff as much as we once had to.

  Lee solved a problem that he described in 1963 in a US patent application. He explained that cooked cereals ‘tend to become pasty on cooking and to lose particle texture and flavor on prolonged heating … In many commercial eating establishments, particularly in cafeterias, it is customary to cook up a large batch of a cooked cereal … After several hours on a steam table it is not unusual for a batch of cooked cereal to become a congealed, gelatinous mass. As a result, the batch is unappetizing in appearance and taste and usually is dumped into a garbage can without further ado.’

  Lee also gave us a handy, professional definition of ‘cooked cereals’. These, he wrote, ‘are prepared foodstuffs of grain … which usually must be cooked for a short period of time in boiling water in order to be in a normally edible condition … cooking causes the dehydrated grain particles to absorb water and to soften, making the same palatable and digestible.’

  Mr Lee is an unsung hero of modern quick-cooking hot cereal. His innovation was, from a chemist’s point of view, simple (though some breakfasters may find it rather over-syllabic for their taste). The Lee method is to cook the cereal mixed together ‘with an edible monoglyceride of the chemically saturated type’.

  Three decades earlier, William C. Baxter of Newtown, Connecticut, looked at a different aspect of the cereal-chewiness problem. Baxter found out what happens when you combine shredded wheat with ice cream.

  This hybrid foodstuff, Baxter pointed out in a patent obtained in 1936, ‘is really delectable only when the cereal pieces, when taken into the mouth with an intermingled mass of ice cream, are in fairly crisp condition, by which I mean a condition such that these cereal pieces are not yet soggy, although somewhat moist along and immediately below their superficies’.

  Baxter’s patent might, in the long run, be best remembered for one poetical passage. Read it aloud to your family each day over breakfast (or, even better, confide it to some stranger at your coffee shop): ‘In the ordinary eating of shredded wheat biscuit with milk or cream, if a thin milk is used and the biscuit is allowed to soak even for a comparatively short time in a pool of such milk, the disk is an unappetizing and highly unsatisfactory one, except to those who for lack of teeth or otherwise enjoy mush, whereas, if the lacteal fluid employed is a heavy or medium cream and if the biscuit and such fluid are together consumed even by a very slow eater, the pieces of the biscuits spooned off or otherwise segregated for each bite carry suitable portions of the lacteal fluid on their surfaces and within their interstices and yet there is a certain definite and desirable crisp-chewability retained by said pieces.’

  Lee, Louis J. (1963). ‘Process for Preparing a Cooked Cereal and the Resulting Product’. US patent no. 3,113,868, 10 December.

  Baxter, William C. (1936). ‘Food Product and Method of Making Same’. US patent no. 2,065,550, 29 December.

  Further cereal studies: milk, then water, then pliers, then milk

  After generations of humans had been pouring cows’ milk onto breakfast cereal flakes and then pouring that milk/flake mixture into themselves, a researcher named Luigi Degano fed breakfast cereal to twenty-one cows in Italy. Degano wanted to see how this might affect the milk that later issued from the cows.

  Degano, based at the Istituto Sperimentale Lattiero Caseario in Milan, published the results of this feed-flakes-to-cows experiment in 1993 in the journal Tecnica Molitoria.

  Degano called the study ‘Cereal Flakes in Milk Cows Diet: Effects on Yield and Milk Quality’. He reported that yes, mixing plenty of maize-and-barley flakes into the cows’ usual, unflaked maize-and-barley fodder did result in different milk. Slightly different. Those cows gave about 2 percent more milk (by volume), with about 2 percent richer protein content and about 2 percent greater creaminess. All this as compared with the milk-making of twenty-one cows that munched only the usual mealy mush.

  Degano’s monograph seems to have attracted little attention, at least in print, from other dairy scientists. And it garnered just about no acclaim from the general public in Italy or abroad.

  Scientists have, as a group, shown more interest in cereal’s crispness, especially as it interacts with liquid, than in how the flakes interact with cows or with human innards.

  The most famous report, ‘A Study of the Effects of Water Content on the Compaction Behaviour of Breakfast Cereal Flakes’, was published in 1994, in the journal Powder Technology. Three scientists at the Institute of Food Research in Norwich wrote it.

  In 2001, a student named Kunchalee Luechapattanapom, at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok, Thailand, submitted a master’s thesis entitled ‘Acoustic Testing for Evaluating the Crispness of Breakfast Cereals’. Luechapattanapom describes the basics, in this physico-mathematical passage: ‘Three brands of breakfast cereals, i.e. Kellogg’s corn flake, Honey Stars and Koko Krunch were evaluated their crispness using acoustic testing and mechanical testing. The sound was produced by crushing the samples with the spring loaded pliers. The original amplitude-time curves were converted to the power spectrum of frequencies by using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT).’

  Others, too, tried their hand at the flake analysis game, generally using either the Norwich or the Bangkok approach.

  ‌Steps for forming novel dry milk pieces

  But Lawren
ce Edward Bodkin Sr, an inventor in Jacksonville, Florida, may have circumvented such traditional worries about milk and breakfast cereal flakes, by combining the two elements into one. In 1998, Bodkin patented a foodstuff he calls ‘Breakfast Cereal with Milk Pieces’. Bodkin’s odd patent describes a ‘commingling and packaging of milk nuggets with cereal pieces … The milk pieces may be compact, or flattened and flake shaped and may generally be as variable as the shapes of the cereal’. Any strangeness in the milk’s flavour, he writes, ‘is unlikely to be noticed due to the typically more dominant flavors of the cereal’.

  ‌Drawing: ‘a quantity of prepared cereal, in a popular shape containing milk aggregates or milk pieces of a size and shape comparable to those of the cereal’

  For their rigorous analysis of soggy breakfast cereal, Georget, Parker and Smith were awarded the 1995 Ig Nobel Prize in physics.

  Degano, Luigi (1993). ‘Cereal Flakes in Milk Cows Diet: Effects on Yield and Milk Quality’. Tecnica Molitoria 44 (1): 5–14.

  Georget, Dominique M.R., Roger. Parker, and Andrew C. Smith (1994). ‘A Study of the Effects of Water Content on the Compaction Behaviour of Breakfast Cereal Flakes’. Powder Technology 81 (2): 189–95.

  Luechapattanapom, Kunchalee (2001). ‘Acoustic Testing for Evaluating the Crispness of Breakfast Cereals’. Thesis submitted in the partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of master of science, Asian Institute of Technology, School of Environment, Resources and Development, Bangkok, Thailand, August.

  Bodkin Sr, Lawrence Edward (1998). ‘Breakfast Cereal with Milk Pieces’. US patent no. 5,827,564, 27 October.

  Meticulously spirited handwriting

  A research project in Turkey examined whether and how drinking affects the quality of one’s writing. This was ‘hard’ rather than ‘soft’ science – it ignored anything fuzzy and hard-to-measure, such as the literary quality of the writing, or its emotional content. The experiment focused, with great discipline, on something that can be gauged more objectively: the extent to which drinking makes people’s penmanship go wobbly.

  The goal: to establish that a sometimes-suspect criminal justice tool is dependable, accurate and precise.

  Faruk Acolu, at the Council of Forensic Medicine, in Istanbul, and Nurten Turan, at the University of Istanbul, published their study in the journal Forensic Science International. It is called ‘Handwriting Changes Under the Effect of Alcohol’.

  They describe going to the annual party of one of Turkey’s most prominent companies, soliciting volunteers from among the attendees. Each volunteer took a breath test and then filled out a questionnaire. ‘Two of the participants’, the report reveals, ‘could not complete the text after consumption of alcohol, and therefore they were excluded.’

  ‌Handwriting, when sober (top) and under the influence (bottom)

  Seventy-three volunteers did go through the full rigours of the experiment. Each sat at a well-lit desk and copied out a standard passage of text onto an unlined pad of paper. They did it when sober, and then again when intoxicated.

  To achieve intoxication, the report explains, ‘The participants consumed ethyl alcohol without limitation’. Each individual was permitted to select and guzzle his or her favourite kind of drink. Twenty-three of them attained a condition of moderate tipsiness (with alcohol-in-their-blood levels of less than fifty milligrams per one hundred millilitres – 50 mg/100 ml). Twenty-four became middling tipsy (with levels between 51mg/100ml and 100mg/100ml). The other twenty-six got sloshed.

  Acolu and Turan then compared the writing samples done while sober with those produced under the influence of drink. They used good equipment – an Olympus X-Tr stereo microscope, with direct and oblique angle lighting, and a VSC 2000 Foster and Freeman video spectral comparator. Each handwriting sample yielded up a twenty-six-item checklist full of data: word length, height of upper-case character bodies, variation in spacing between words, number of visible ‘tremors’, number of misspellings and so on. The published report includes, with the statistics, some lovely photos of before-and-after samples.

  Acolu and Turan found pretty much what they had hoped to find – evidence that most people’s handwriting gets worse and worse as they become more and more intoxicated. However, they write – with perhaps just a hint of disapproval or maybe even disappointment – that ‘the writing quality of a few seemed to get better after alcohol consumption’.

  Drunk handwriting, by the numbers

  Why go to all this trouble? Because, Acolu and Turan say, the results of previous studies done by other people ‘are mostly not based upon statistical data and [are] therefore unsatisfying’.

  Does the report constitute proof that handwriting analysts can reliably discern the relationship between penmanship and drunkenness? No. But for anyone who takes drunken handwriting seriously, it’s a step in the right direction.

  Acolu, Faruk, and Nurten Turan (2003). ‘Handwriting Changes Under the Effect of Alcohol’. Forensic Science International 132 (3): 201–10.

  Scientists down the pub

  To answer the question, ‘What happens when people drink alcohol?’ one can read through thousands of research studies published in respected scholarly journals. One must look a bit harder to answer a different question: ‘What, exactly, did some of those researchers hope to learn by doing that research?’

  Let’s take a quick hop through the literature in one publication – the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, which boasts of being ‘the oldest alcohol/addiction research journal currently published in the United States’. It started life in 1940 as the Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, then adjusted and re-adjusted its name as research funders changed their focus or preferred vocabulary.

  A study called ‘Observational Study of Alcohol Consumption in Natural Settings: The Vancouver Beer Parlor’ appeared in a 1975 issue. Authors Ronald Cutler and Thomas Storm, at the University of British Columbia, say they visited ‘approximately 25’ Vancouver beer parlours, wherein they observed the patrons. They distil what they learned into three thoughts: 1) people drank at a ‘relatively constant’ rate; 2) the longer people spent drinking, the more they drank; and 3) in bigger groups, people spent more time drinking, and so drank more drinks. Cutler and Storm explain that ‘these findings are consistent with’ those reported ten years earlier in a study called ‘The Isolated Drinker in the Edmonton Beer Parlor’. Cutler and Storm say the Edmonton researcher behind that report, R. Sommer, ‘found that patrons drinking alone ordered an average of 1.7 glasses of beer, while patrons drinking with a group ordered an average of 3.5 glasses. This difference was accounted for by the length of time solitary and group drinkers spent in the beer parlour and not by the rate of drinking.’

  Cutler and Storm performed additional research. Perhaps their most ambitious work, called ‘Observations of Drinking in Natural Settings: Vancouver Beer Parlors and Cocktail Lounges’, published in 1981, says: ‘The question that, to a great extent, motivated this study was: how much do people actually drink in drinking establishments which are most heavily patronised by ordinary social drinkers? The answer is, in qualitative terms: a fair number of people drink quite a lot, especially in beer parlours, and particularly when the group is large.’

  Jump ahead to July 2012 and one finds a study, entitled ‘Daily Variations in Spring Break Alcohol and Sexual Behaviors Based on Intentions, Perceived Norms, and Daily Trip Context’, by Megan Patrick, of the University of Michigan, and Christine Lee, of the University of Washington in Seattle. Patrick and Lee gathered information from 261 American university students, from which they learned this: ‘Students who went on longer trips, who previously engaged in more heavy episodic drinking, or who had greater pre–Spring Break intentions to drink reported greater alcohol use during Spring Break. Similarly, students with greater pre–Spring Break intentions to have sex, greater perceived norms for sex, or more previous sexual partners had greater odds of having sex.’

  Cutler, Ronald E., and Thomas Sto
rm (1975). ‘Observational Study of Alcohol Consumption in Natural Settings: The Vancouver Beer Parlor’. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs 36 (9): 1173–83.

  Sommer, R. (1965). ‘The Isolated Drinker in the Edmonton Beer Parlor’. Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol 26 (1): 95–110.

  Storm, Thomas, and Ronald E. Cutler (1981). ‘Observations of Drinking in Natural Settings: Vancouver Beer Parlors and Cocktail Lounges’. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs 42 (11): 972–97.

  Patrick, Megan E., and Christine M. Lee (2012). ‘Daily Variations in Spring Break Alcohol and Sexual Behaviors Based on Intentions, Perceived Norms, and Daily Trip Context’. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs 73 (4): 591–6.

  May we recommend

  ‘The Influence of Bars on Nuclear Activity’

  by Luis C. Ho, Alexei V. Filippenko and Wallace L.W. Sargent (published in the Astrophysical Journal, 1997)

  The authors, at the University of California, Berkeley, and Palomar Observatory, report that: ‘The presence of a bar seems to have no noticeable impact on the likelihood of a galaxy to host either nuclear star formation or an active galactic nuclei.’

  ‌Seven

  ‌Some Things Stick Out

  May we recommend

  ‘Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Bang-Bang Control’

  by H. Fujihira (published in the Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, 1978)