from month 10/2016

Why would Japanese spirits haunt toilets and ghosts hitchhike? [Halloween special]

After getting lost in the meanders of the Internet—well, to be fair, of Wikipedia— a grayish Sunday morning, I ended up in the Urban legends section, and may have found some ‘blogpost’ material. That’s for you to judge, here’s my Halloween special! Several Japanese urban legends are ...

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Cow-tipping, and the strange performativity of ‘scientific studies’ – and cultural transmission

One of my all-time favorite scientific papers is the ‘Academic Urban Legends’ by Ole Bjorn Rekdal, published 2014 in the journal Social Studies of Science. Very briefly, the author goes through the story of ‘spinach containing (a lot of) iron’, and, even more interestingly, of its correct...

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Article for October: Pragmatic Choice in Conversation

In October we read the paper from Raymond W. Gibbs and Guy Van Orden, published in Topics in Cognitive Science in 2012, Pragmatic Choice in Conversation. The authors are discussing regularity and variability in human conversation and the (in)ability of pragmatics theories to explain both of them. ...

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