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A very public break-up
Feedback is on a quest to find the most niche science-themed tourist attractions in the world – by being told about them, rather than by actually visiting anything, as that would require a budget.
Reader Earle McNeil advises us to explore Zagreb, Croatia. This city “must have the most museums per square kilometre of any town on the planet”, he says. “This then has to include the oddest.” Earle evinces two examples: the Museum of Broken Relationships and the Museum of Hangovers. We initially didn’t believe this, but we looked them up and they are indeed real.
The Museum of Broken Relationships was founded by two former lovers: film producer Olinka Vištica and sculptor Dražen Grubišić. After breaking up, they joked that they should set up a museum for all the personal items left over from their relationship, and a few years later, they did exactly that. Two decades on, the museum is described by visitzagreb.hr as “the most popular museum in Zagreb”, and there is now a second permanent site in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Feedback isn’t sure this really counts as science-themed, except in the absolute broadest sense of the word “psychology”, in which case is also scientific and should assign someone to review season two.
However, the Museum of Hangovers surely does count, filled as it is with chemistry and neurophysiology. Visitors can try crossing a tilted floor while wearing goggles that let you experience what it’s like to walk while drunk, or take the wheel of a drunk-driving simulator to see just how badly alcohol affects your ability to drive (spoiler: a lot).
While researching these two institutions, Feedback fell down a glorious Wikipedia rabbit hole. We first learned about the Museum of Failure, a touring exhibition most recently found in Paris, that collects failed and unpopular products like the Apple Newton, Betamax video cassettes and the Tesla Cybertruck.
From there, we wandered afield from our science-themed mandate, but we do have to tell you that there is a Museum of Bad Art and that it has, or at least had, a competitor: the Museum of Particularly Bad Art.
To quote or not to quote
In our 19 September instalment, we reported that there are now thousands of scientific papers that reference song titles or lyrics by the Beatles in their headings. This prompted readers to wonder which other artists are being heavily referenced by researchers.
Simon Shuel wonders if anyone has done a similar analysis for the work of musician Frank Zappa. Feedback prowled the internet for a while, to little avail. All we could find were some species named after him. For instance, the spider Pachygnatha zappa was so named because it has markings that resemble Zappa’s moustache.
Meanwhile, reader Jonathan Arch was recently alerted to a paper that uses a rather tortured Shakespeare reference in its title: “Through beta2 or not through beta2—That’s the question”. He first asked if Feedback might perform a systematic search for lines from Shakespeare in scientific papers. Readers are welcome to hope for this eventuality, but oft expectation fails.
Happily, Jonathan then flagged a 2005 paper from by Neville Goodman, “From Shakespeare to Star Trek and beyond: A Medline search for literary and other allusions in biomedical titles”. Between 1951 and mid-2005, Goodman found more than 1400 Shakespeare allusions in the titles of medical papers. There was a strong clustering effect in the allusions: “a third of them to ‘What’s in a name’ and another third to —mostly to ‘To be or not to be’. ” However, Goodman did find some gems, like “Much ado about the null hypothesis” and “All that is excreted does not glister: Or why do we keep on collecting urine to measure creatinine clearance?”.
Goodman was disappointed to find that no obstetrical papers were titled “Once more unto the breech”. Feedback is happy to report that this gap has since been filled by a 2015 paper: “Once More Unto the Breech: Planned vaginal delivery compared with planned Cesarean delivery”.
We await with interest reader examples of papers referring to the works of R.E.M., Dolly Parton, Dan Brown and other artists of various calibres.
Gold-standard material
The roots of nominative determinism run deep. Reader Peter Mayer was reading a story in entitled “Plumbing the Shipwrecks of an Infamous Pirate Cove“, about marine archaeology in the Bahamas. This mentioned “the godfather of Nassau’s pirates”, active in the early 1700s, one Benjamin Hornigold. Stop sniggering at the back there: the surname is apparently derived from an English place name.
Meanwhile, author Charlie Jane Anders took a break from writing her new comic to tell us about a recent episode of American Campus Podcast. This was built around “an interview with a British professor of pharmacology who studies the history of drugs going back to their earliest botanical roots. His name: Rod Flower”.
Feedback was shocked to learn that Flower was flagged in ‘s pick of the best popular science books in July. Once again, if only we read our own magazine with proper care, we would probably find writing this column a lot easier.
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