Improbable Research Collections

Have you long felt that the one thing the web video world has been sorely lacking is comic treatments of scientific studies on homosexual necrophilia? Well, you’re in luck! Improbable Research Collections is a weekly series produced by The Improbable Researchers, a ragtag band of scientists with an unusual sense of humor. The Collections, expected to run about three minutes each week, will be comprised of bits and pieces culled from the Researcher’s bi-monthly magazine, Annals of Improbable Research, as well as their live lectures and events dating back almost two decades. Improbable’s current plan is to distribute each episode (the first premiered last Thursday) via YouTube and MySpace, and to also make them available for hosting on other sites via Creative Commons.

If the first episode, titled The Net, the flea, the duck and its lover, is any indication, The Researchers’ concerns are improbable indeed. The clip begins with an excerpt from a lecture by Dutch ornithologist Kees Moeliker, which more closely resembles stand-up comedy than most science lectures I’ve seen. “I don’t like birds like this,” Moeliker says over a slide of a live duck on water. He flips the slide to show a table full of taxidermia. “I prefer them like this.”

The video abruptly cuts to a diagram and explanation of a patented invention designed to prevent bank robberies, “a nod to ancient methods of capturing animals in a forest, and also to the fanciful adaptations of those techniques in early cops and robbers movies.” We then skip directly to the “Solution to last month’s puzzler”––a guide to folding a drawing of a flea just so, until it becomes “a working replica of James Watts’ steam engine.” And then back to Moeliker and his ducks, and a completion of the backstory to his study, “The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard Anas platyrhynchos.”

There will certainly be an audience for this kind of thing––it’s deep nerdism with the pacing and absurdity of a classic Monty Python episode. There will also be an audience in which these unrelated ephemera, transitioned together with whiplash-fast disregard for logical connection, will induce nothing but a shrug.