Prediction has something to do with the future. The character Criswell in the epic film Plan 9 From Outer Space summed this up masterfully:

UPDATE: Well, Criswell did sum it up masterfully. But now he has been silenced, by whoever yanked the video from YouTube. We may never again know what he said, or be able to see and hear how perfectly he said it. Alas, poor Criswell!

Today we look at a psychology professor’s inside-the-profession look at papers published by his peers in the American Psychological Association (also known as the “APA”). The professor’s paper is:

“The demise of the increasingly protracted APA journal article?” Gregory D. Webster, American Psychologist, vol. 62, 2007, pp. 255-257.

The professor is University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Professor Gregory D. Webster, author of the noted study “Playboy playmates, the Dow Jones, consumer sentiment, and the Doomsday Clock: A critical examination of the Environmental Security Hypothesis,” [Journal of Social, Evolutionary & Cultural Psychology, vol. 2, no. 2, 2008, pp. 23-41], which we highlighted here recently.

BONUS: Here’s the journal editor’s discussion of this phenomenon.

AFC reports on a controversy involving luak coffee, the subject of a 1995 Ig Nobel Prize. Under the headline “Indonesian clerics drop plan to ban civet coffee“, AFP says:

JAKARTA — Indonesia’s highest Islamic body on Tuesday abandoned a proposal to ban Muslims from drinking the world’s most expensive coffee, which is extracted from the faeces of a small mammal called the civet. It had considered issuing a fatwa against the rare coffee, made using beans picked out from the waste of the nocturnal, cat-like creature, on the grounds it was unclean.

“After a long discussion among clerics here, we decided that it’s not sinful for Muslims to drink the Luwak coffee,” the Indonesian Council of Ulemas (MUI) chairman Ma’ruf Amien told a press conference. “It’s not haram (forbidden in Islam) as long as you wash the beans with water to remove the civet cat’s droppings,” he said.

Locally known as Kopi Luwak, the beans come from the ripest fruits eaten by the civet, which are digested before being excreted and roasted. It is highly prized for its smooth flavour….

(Thanks to investigator Lou Lippman for bringing this to our attention.)

Perhaps it was the title: ‘Acquired preferences for piquant foods by chimpanzees.’ but whatever the reason, Paul Rozin, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, found it very difficult to get his research paper published. It was inspired by observations he had made in Mexico, when he noticed that -

“…virtually everyone in a Mexican village over 5 or 6 years of age liked the burn of chili pepper, but that none of the animals in the village showed a preference for it, even though they ate the pepper daily as they consumed the leftovers of the day in the garbage”

To find out why, the professor devised an experiment – along with chimp specialist Keith Kennel – in which two domesticated chimps at the University of Pennsylvania Primate Facility were offered -

“…a series of increasingly piquant crackers by their caretaker, and gradually came to prefer these crackers to unseasoned crackers. The preferences were stable over months, and generalized to a different piquant cracker.”

Although humans frequently develop likings for innately unpalatable substances, it is very rare in animals – but not, as the study showed, unknown.

“This nonobvious and previously unappreciated finding turns out to be important in understanding the conditions under which innate aversions are reversed.”

The paper was eventually published in the journal Appetite. 1983 Jun;4(2):69-77.

A big boat skims oil from the sea by collecting metaphors and mixing them, it appears from a CNN report:

New Orleans, Louisiana (CNN) – A ship billed as the world’s largest skimming vessel has begun testing its effectiveness in the Gulf of Mexico, a spokesman for its owner, Taiwanese company TMT Shipping, said Saturday.The A Whale has been assigned a 5-mile-by-5-mile area to test its capability, spokesman Bob Grantham said, citing Coast Guard Rear Adm. Paul Zukunft…. The skimmer works by “taking in oily water through a series of vents, or jaws, on the side of the ship and then decanting the intake,” Grantham said. “In many ways, the ship collects water like an actual whale and pumps internally like a human heart.”

BONUS: TMT, the company that owns the boat, says of itself:

We believe everything, which is the reason we chose our name “Today Makes Tomorrow”.

(Thanks to investigator William J. Maloney for parsing the spokesperson’s flotsam.)

Gloves? Check. False numberplates? Check. Perrier...?

International master criminals, spies, investigative journos, subversives, rebels and others who may find government agencies trying to monitor your movements: take note.…