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Sunday, November 21, 2004 #

The Journal of Irreproducible Results

The Journal of Irreproducible Results

Norman Sperling, the editor of JIR, the Journal of Irreproducible Results was so nice to send me an issue as part of the campaign to let people know JIR is back again.

JIR started in 1955 with Issue 2 when Alexander Kohn filled it with fake articles with references to the not existing issue 1. Many people liked it and it became a real journal with funny scientific articles. It was copied all around and you will find some stuff originating there within my own science jokes site.

Somewhere around the eighties it got so many subscribers that JIR needed a new publisher, but it seems the relation between the staf and the publisher was troublesome. About 10 years ago the editors of JIR walked out and started a new magazine called (Annals of Improbable Results (AIR). This left the original journal in a troublesome situation. The new publishers gave the journal back to the old publisher, Dr Scherr. The fact that the original publisher, now also editor, spent a lot of time suiing the AIR new journal did not help either. But there where still new issues coming out.

Now the Journal of Irreproducibe Results is back under new management and editor, Norman Sperling.

What about the contents? This issue has 34 pages. As before the JIR has pseudo scientific articles of one or two pages. For example there is an article that gives an explation for the fact that women see much more colors than men (wheat, tan, sand, khaki brown, cocoa, sable, chestnut, mocha, burnt sienna, mahogany, sepia, walnut, seal brown and chocolate versus brown, light brown and dark brown.) The explanation is given by a bigger part of the brain the Corpus Croyola for women. The author further speculates that this is because that boys get boxes with eight colors of crayons and girls boxes with 64 or even 128 colors.

If you are interested you can get more infomation and subscribe at the JIR webpage.

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