Pisan Cant
Sep. 22nd, 2012 03:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
steepholmAs ever, there is much to admire in this year's Ig Nobel prizes. But the winners of the Psychology prize struck a particular chord with me.
This brought back vividly my one visit to Italy in 1995, or rather my departure from Pisa airport, when, looking casually from the plane window as we ascended, I saw the Leaning Tower pointing absolutely straight up, while the rest of Pisa slanted at a crazy angle. It was a most peculiar sensation. In accordance with Eerland et al's findings, I can confirm that the Tower also looked smaller than usual. But then, so did everything else.
PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE: Anita Eerland and Rolf Zwaan [THE NETHERLANDS] and Tulio Guadalupe [PERU, RUSSIA, and THE NETHERLANDS] for their study "Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller"
REFERENCE: "Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller: Posture-Modulated Estimation," Anita Eerland, Tulio M. Guadalupe and Rolf A. Zwaan, Psychological Science, vol. 22 no. 12, December 2011, pp. 1511-14.
This brought back vividly my one visit to Italy in 1995, or rather my departure from Pisa airport, when, looking casually from the plane window as we ascended, I saw the Leaning Tower pointing absolutely straight up, while the rest of Pisa slanted at a crazy angle. It was a most peculiar sensation. In accordance with Eerland et al's findings, I can confirm that the Tower also looked smaller than usual. But then, so did everything else.