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I expect to see this in the Annals of Improbable Research. Maybe they're bucking for an Ignobel Prize.

This belongs in the company of
"The Effect Of Country Music On Suicide" and
"Coordination Modes in the Multisegmental Dynamics of Hula Hooping"
---
The Ig Nobel Home Page

Prize for the craft that crashes most spectacular (without people, duh)

Prize for the most useless invention on (name your territory here)

Prize for the worst overshoot of a set target (wanted to the moon, went to Mars)
Any more ?

I'm expecting Mr. Murphy to visit me as soon as I open the case...

But if you want advice that goes beyond cute offtopic stuff like the above, you probably should check out the manufacturer's customer support site.

I'm also pretty sure they've proven Kansas is actually flatter than a pancake. It's actually not that difficult to be flatter than a pancake, you see, because pancakes usually aren't all that flat--they're more sort of slightly curved towards the edges.


Study: Kansas flatter than a pancake

For a scientific comparison of apples and oranges, see this improbable research article.

Those offerings from Rocketcalc are dual Operon boards with orginary clustering. The only difference is, they put them in one case. A 4 CPU or 8 CPU Opteron box is far more expensive. of course a 8 CPU Itanium2 is expensive too. But comparing a bunch of (commodity) dual CPU boards with one 8 CPU box is not fair. It's the often found apple-and-oranges-comparison comparison.

How many kids would be studying their asses off if they knew they could pilot a mecha?

I'm not disagreeing with you, but apples and oranges can be compared quite well ;-)

You've obviously never been to Kansas.

Just as an aside, this research won an Ig Noble award in 2000.

Read about it here.

One of the authors is at the school that I graduated from. In Psychology. Oh yeah, I'm proud.

Why does everyone still use the "apples and oranges" argument? It has been shown conclusively that they are very similar.

It's like comparing Apples and Oranges.

No, this is comparing Apples and Oranges.

Who needs special software for that? Everything you need to know about writing a scientific paper is right here.

Those aren't apples and oranges - THESE are!

Coconuts are OK. Bricks make the post office think you're mailing drugs. Dead fish, old seaweed, and rancid cheese will make it through, but won't earn you any friends.

I knew about the moron who created the bear suit, and also created fire paste. I didn't realize it was the same moron.

Anyway, he created this paste which can handle high tempuratures. He has even coated his head with it and then had someone put a torch to it. To demonstrate how effective and safe his product is.

He also claims that his product could have saved the Columbia shuttle had they used fire paste to patch up the whole.

Here is a link to an article

I've even seen him on the Canadian discovery channel (The show was: Daily Planet), where he was deomonstrating how amaizing his fire paste is. Where he even ate some saying how perfectly safe the product was. Afterwards, they took his stuff to the University of Toronto where they could analyze it. Which they found out that it contained large amounts of poisonous substances.

An interesting note. On the show he let people in on one of his secret ingredients, which was diet coke. It turns out that helps create a bunch of tiny bubbles in the paste when it hardens, helping it to be a good insulator.

This guys is an all around dolt, but for some reason he's insanely funny.

-asoap

No, this is comparing apples and oranges.

Reminds me of this.

The thing that worries me with your post is that you may well be 100% completely right, but what if you are not? Which is the path to God? How to tell?

Inside the Christian faiths there are lots of incompatible variants: Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherians, Southern Baptists & whatnot. What about the Jehovah Withnesses, or the Mormons? Or even the Scientologists? Is it enough to believe that Jesus is the son of God? some say yes, some say no. In past centuries it was common practice to burn at stake all the heretics without a single thought. What do you think of this practice?

What if the Jews are right? What if Islam is the one true religion? What if the Hindus are right?

Admit it is at least a little confusing.

Well at least this would be one government study that would be guaranteed to reap an international research prize :-)

I mean, we really needed an IgNobel prize for human ethology, didn't we ?

Thomas Miconi

It is commonly known that we are nowhere near running out of space on earth. That is not what overpopulation is about. Heck everyone can fit in Texas. The so called problem of overpopulation is that we can't feed everybody. This is also complete bullshit. If we wanted to we could produce enough foodstuffs every year to make "filling rations" (as oregon trail would put it) for every man womand and child on earth. The reason people are starving is two fold.

1) Things like farm subsidies where the US government pays farmers to make less food.

2) Poor distribution of food.

By poor distribution means two things. First it means that food isn't doled out in proportion to where it is needed. Some places are difficult to send food to. Other places it is not economical to send food to. The food just isn't brought to where it needs to be. In conjunction with that some people eat more than their fair share. I'm no commy, in fact quite the opposite, but all these fat disgusting americans eating McDonalds two to three times a day is just sick. Eat when you are hungry and don't eat when you're not hungry. Eating is not an activity, that flabby gut of yours could be someone's atrophied muscle.

For anyone interested in following up on the origins of Murphy's Law (the similarities to the current NASA situation are very interesting), here's a great article is available on the Origin of Murphy's Law. This was listed here on /. several months back.

Speaking of comparing Apples to oranges...

From the man who brought you Star Trek Tea.

Every year the folks who put out The Annals of Improbable Research , formerly The Journal of Irreproducible Results, formerly The Worm Runner's Digest hands out ten IgNobel Prizes for scientific achievements "which can not or should not be repeated". It's sort of a Feast of Misrule for science.

If they can give an Ig for the first MRI images showing conclusively how men and women's bits fit together during coitus and a scientific study on the optimal way to dunk a biscuit in coffee, then by G-d this deserves one too!

I'd think that the cynical Slashdot crowd will not learn a great deal from this book... except perhaps gain some ammunition to educate others

Don't you think that much of the slashdot crowd actually would tend towards being a systems thinker? There's those the "virtues" mentioned by Larry Wall -- laziness, hubris, impatience -- and systems appeal to those traits within each of us. We like automating things for the sake of speed and not having to attend to them -- and for the satisfaction of having built the system. :)

But I think a systems thinker *can* be different from a systems person. Systems thinkers can be very aware of the likelihoods of breakdown and the problems inherent in a system and build tolerance for failure and worst case scenarious (as good engineers do). In this respect, while probably as much or more prone to the system siren call as anyone, the tech savvy may be much more likely to respect inherent problems, pitfalls, and limits.

This book is about as useful as 'The art of war', which is to say: not that useful to me. It is an insightful summary of the Blindingly Obvious

Perhaps instead of Blindingly Obvious you might say obvious to the "Beginner's Mind" in the eastern/zen sense. When you are uncluttered with predjudice and aware/attentive/observant, many things in Art of War are obvious. When you're intent on a prize and have come to count on certain assumptions for a long time, you're highly likely to miss many blindingly obvious possibilities and a few similarly obvious realities. The Art of War could be seen as a means to help you return to these sorts of insights again. :)

Murphy's law was never meant to be negative. It actually began as "whatever can happen, will happen." Murphy always gets a bad wrap, I suggest you read the true history here.

Work expands to meet the time and money that is available.

From the article:

Taiwan produces about a third of the world's chips, more than 60 percent of its laptop computers and 70 percent of the mother boards, among other things. Personal-computer giants Dell and Hewlett-Packard buy most of their products in Taiwan and China.

Sounds similar to the substantial position of some western corporations to me, only that the producer

• is a country
  
• is a country the size of which is merely the sixth part of Kansas
  
• is a country which has roughly ten times as many inhabitants as Kansas, which in turn is flatter than a pancake and thus should take precedence in producing wafers
  

On a side note: I would be grateful if one of our American friends could explain the fact that Taiwan is available through the CIA-factbook mentioned above, but cannot easily be found on the pulldown located on the main page.

Coming right up. Try this link.

The whole world's population could fit in the state of Texas...Amazing as it may seem, the entire population of the world can be housed in the U.S. state of Texas -- and very comfortably indeed, with each person enjoying a living far in excess of that now available to all but the most wealthy.

Consider these facts: The land area of Texas is some 262,000 square miles* and current UN estimates of the world's population (for 12 October 1999) are about 6 billion.** By converting square miles to square feet -- remember to multiply by 5,280 feet per mile twice -- and dividing by the world's population, one readily finds that there are more than 1,217 square feet per capita.

A family of 5 would thus occupy more than 6,085 square feet of living space. Even in Texas, that's a mansion.

There has to be some force acting on the ink to get it to move at all. With a pen held upright, gravity and surface tension are acting in concert to get ink onto the ball. Invert the pen, and gravity is now opposing surface tension. At some critical value of g, the surface tension and gravity will be exactly equal and the ink will stay where it is. With stronger g, as on Earth, gravity will win over surface tension and the ink will be pulled away from the ball. With weaker g, surface tension will be stronger than gravity and the ink will flow normally.

Determining this critical value probably is the sort of thing likely to win you an Ig Nobel Prize

University College London completed a study which demonstrated that London cabbies have larger brains that the ordinary Joe: a larger hippocampus in particular, implying superior spacial abilities. Study results here, but 403'd for the moment. Award for study published here.

Iq Nobel Prize this.

About your sig, if you haven't read this article, you should.

Perhaps you were in the panhandle. Take a trip along I-44 sometime. Tulsa, in northeast Oklahoma is in an area known as green country. Sure there's plenty of red clay soil, but there are also trees from Tulsa to OKC as far as the eye can see, also the other way up and out to Missourri.

If you want barren, go down to southern Texas. If you want flat and desolate go around Kansas, which is officially flatter than a pancake.

Actually, it's been proven that the area is flat, and damn flat too...

See this article

it's too bad the link is posted before all 4 parts of the article are finished.

... you just have to follow a simple pattern:
http://www.improb.com/airchives/paperair/volume9/v 9i5/murphy/murphy4.html

Enjoy!

If you post it on your web site, it's available even if you don't directly link to it.

Part 4 early for your viewing pleasure.

SD

No need to wonder about who will reap the next IGNobel prize in biology... :-)

Thomas Miconi
=============

I keep this link in my bookmarks for times like this: Apples and Oranges -- A comparison

Just looked this up because the claim that the entire popluation could live in Texas sounded funky and found that it's actually 1217 sq feet per person.

Testing the limits of the U.S. Postal Service:
http://www.improb.com/airchives/paperair/volume6/v 6i4/postal-6-4.html

Worth the read.

the Annals of Improbable Research group do. Quite interesting if your extremly bored i might say.

It has been scientifically proven. I refer you to The Annals of Improbable Research, for research that can not, or should not, be reproduced.

Don't you mean the Ignoble Prize? I mean, he's right up there with that guy who invented airtight underwear with a charcoal filter - not to mention he's neck-and-neck (in my books, anyway) with Ron Popeil, who came up with the Inside-The-Shell Egg Scrambler. Incredible!

Seriously, it doesn't take a genius to come up with the idea of making something smaller so you can put it in your pocket - now, a real genius would just get a bigger pocket...

Complaints will be handled by people too slow to work at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

I repeat the following story every time I hear someone insult a postal worker.

One day I needed to get something in the mail THAT day, and I wasn't able to get down to the post office. I caught the mailman as he was driving up to the mailbox, and handed him the letter. Except I didn't have enough postage- I had forgotten about the rate increase that had happened recently.

Now, if the guy had wanted to be an asshole, he could have refused it- but he said "you got any change? I'll put the extra postage on it when I get in" I had a quarter on me, gave it to him, and was happy that I had probably still spent less money than the gas it would have taken to get to the post office and back.

What bowled me over was that the next day, he parked, came to the door, and handed me change. I was blown away that he bothered for such a small amount, and had expected him to (rightfully, far as I was concerned) pocket the 15-20 cents for the trouble of having to 'buy' and slap on an extra stamp for me.

NOW, if you want to see how patient postal employees are, see what these guys did. It is incredibly funny(the part about the sender trying to argue they should get money BACK for shipping a balloon is hilarious), but there's a serious message in their absurd little experiment(which involved shipping bricks, hammers, dead fish+seaweed, etc), and I'll include their conclusion here:

First, this experiment yielded a 64% delivery rate (18/28), an almost two-thirds success rate. (For our purposes, "delivery" constituted some type of independent handling by the USPS and subsequent contact regarding the object, regardless of whether we got to see or keep the object or whether it arrived whole.) This is astounding, considering the nature of some of the items sent. This compares with a 0% rate of receipt of fully wrapped packages from certain countries of the developing world, such as Peru, Turkey, and Egypt. Admittedly, those were international mailings, and thus not totally comparable; nevertheless, the disparity is striking.

Second, the delivery involved the collusion of sequences of postal workers, not simply lone operatives. The USPS appears to have some collective sense of humor, and might in fact here be displaying the rudiments of organic bureaucratic intelligence.

Finally, our investigation team felt remorse for some of its experimental efforts, most particularly the category "Disgusting," after the good faith of the USPS in its delivery efforts. We sought out as many of the USPS employees who had (involuntarily) been involved in the experiment as we could identify, and gave them each a small box of chocolate.

We, and all scientists, owe a debt of gratitude to these civil servants. Without them, we would have had but little success in pushing the envelope.

This sounds like an Ig Nobel Prize candidate to me. To quote the website, "Every Ig Nobel Prize winner has done something that first makes people LAUGH, then makes them THINK. Technically speaking, the Igs honor people whose achievements 'cannot or should not be reproduced.'"

Sounds like we have a real winner, unless they've ported NetBSD to a toaster yet.

Perhaps McBribe might wish to trade his pinstrip for one of these