Noticed via New Scientist, which properly considered it as a candidate for the next Ig-Nobels.
You thought Altman’s soul-stealing Eyeball was intrusive? How about a new industry devoted to wearable fart detectors? The fartup sees an oppootunity in the well-known hianus of infartmation. Most people aren’t aware of their actual fartquency, either under or overstating it.
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To address this critical gap, we developed the Smart Underwear, a non-invasive wearable device that continuously monitors hydrogen in flatus, providing unprecedented temporal resolution of gut microbial metabolic activity. The Smart Underwear comfortably attaches to the exterior of the user’s underwear near the perineal region via a snap system, in which a small plastic snap on the inside of the underwear fabric fits into a corresponding hole on the Smart Underwear on the opposite side of the underwear. This sandwiches the fabric in place through friction, ensuring a stable but comfortable attachment of the Smart Underwear.
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The project has set up an Altmanish website called the Flatus Atlas where farticipants can sign up for rewards.
More seriously, this passage
illustrates one of my pété peeves. The fartmula is a threshold disguised by the standard continuous math notation. If you have to specify the important part outside the notation, you might as well skip the notation. Thresholds and decisions can be specified neatly and completely in program code, but academics are stuck in LaTeX.
Polistra's Mill 