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2004 Ig Nobel Prizes Announced
ancice writes "The
2004 Ig Nobel prizes are out.
Article by New Scientist. An 'invisible gorilla has scooped the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize for Psychology'. And 'dropped food is safe to eat if it has spent no more than five seconds on the floor' - Public Health. Finally, there's proof for the 5 second rule! And for Engineering, 'Patenting of the combover'. Official page with
ceremony and
lectures."
The 5-second rule - if food product should land on the ground and if the dog doesn't eat said food product in 5 seconds than you can have it.
In conjunction with:
Read your town charter, boy. `If food stuffs should touch the ground, said food stuffs shall be turned over to the village idiot.' Since I don't see him around, start shoveling! - Homer.
Not to be pedantic about the poster's phrasing, but I would have though the proof went *against* the five-second rule (although this is the first I've heard of such a rule - up until now I've always thought of food on the floor as being garbage-fodder... Catching it in mid-fall is the thing to do, thus managing to foil the buttered-toast rule :-)
:-) One of Del's wheezes was to bottle the 'Peckham Spring' (IIRC) which of course was tapwater and sell to health-farm freaks - he couldn't believe people would pay *that* much for water :-)
For me, the Coca Cola one is the most amazing one - there was a UK sitcom called 'Only Fools And Horses' about an East-London wide-boy ("Del-boy") and family, often hilarious, especially where 'Trigger' was concerned
The fact that Coca Cola thought they could get away with for real makes me wonder what *other* "Del-boy" schemes have been put into practice!
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
The 2004 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
The 2004 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday evening, September 30, at the 14th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre.
MEDICINE
Steven Stack of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, USA and James Gundlach of Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama, USA, for their published report "The Effect of Country Music on Suicide."
PUBLISHED IN: Social Forces, vol. 71, no. 1, September 1992, pp. 211-8.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: James Gundlach.
PHYSICS
Ramesh Balasubramaniam of the University of Ottowa, and Michael Turvey of the University of Connecticut and Yale University, for exploring and explaining the dynamics of hula-hooping.
REFERENCE: "Coordination Modes in the Multisegmental Dynamics of Hula Hooping," Ramesh Balasubramaniam and Michael T. Turvey, Biological Cybernetics, vol. 90, no. 3, March 2004, pp. 176-90.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Ramesh Balasubramaniam and Michael Turvey.
PUBLIC HEALTH
Jillian Clarke of the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, and then Howard University, for investigating the scientific validity of the Five-Second Rule about whether it's safe to eat food that's been dropped on the floor.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Jillian Clarke
CHEMISTRY
The Coca-Cola Company of Great Britain, for using advanced technology to convert liquid from the River Thames into Dasani, a transparent form of water, which for precautionary reasons has been made unavailable to consumers.
ENGINEERING
Donald J. Smith and his father, the late Frank J. Smith, of Orlando Florida, USA, for patenting the combover (U.S. Patent #4,022,227).
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Donald Smith's son, Scott Jackson Smith, and daughter, Heather Smith.
LITERATURE
The American Nudist Research Library of Kissimmee, Florida, USA, for preserving nudist history so that everyone can see it.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Pamela Chestek, the daughter of ANRL director Helen Fisher.
PSYCHOLOGY
Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Christopher Chabris of Harvard University, for demonstrating that when people pay close attention to something, it's all too easy to overlook anything else -- even a man in a gorilla suit.
REFERENCE: "Gorillas in Our Midst," Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris, vol. 28, Perception, 1999, pages 1059-74.
DEMO:
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris.
ECONOMICS
The Vatican, for outsourcing prayers to India.
PEACE
Daisuke Inoue of Hyogo, Japan, for inventing karaoke, thereby providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Daisuke Inoue.
BIOLOGY
Ben Wilson of the University of British Columbia, Lawrence Dill of Simon Fraser University [Canada], Robert Batty of the Scottish Association for Marine Science, Magnus Whalberg of the University of Aarhus [Denmark], and Hakan Westerberg of Sweden's National Board of Fisheries, for showing that herrings apparently communicate by farting.
REFERENCE: "Sounds Produced by Herring (Clupea harengus) Bubble Release," Magnus Wahlberg and Håkan Westerberg, Aquatic Living Resources, vol. 16, 2003, pp. 271-5.
REFERENCE: "Pacific and Atlantic Herring Produce Burst Pulse Sounds," Ben Wilson, Robert S. Batty and Lawrence M. Dill, Biology Letters, vol. 271, 2003, pp. S95-S97.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Lawrence Dill, Robert Batty, Magnus Whalberg, Hakan Westerberg.
What if it lands in dogshit?
Is there a formula to work out the exact 'safe time' based on what food lands on when it falls?
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
For endeavouring to manufacture a machine implementing a method of establishing a tally of votes for public-office candidate without the usage of a paper-trail???
We brits loved the Dansai saga and I'm delighted to see that they got an award for it. It's a shame they didn't mention Peckham Spring, surely the inspiration behind the inovation!
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
Didn't they find cave drawings of cavemen that used combovers? The difference being that the combover covered most of their entire bodies.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
On Brainiac (on Sky ONE in the UK) last week, they did a demonstration of the 'Invisible Gorilla' expirement, which one.
Basically, they had about 7 or 8 poeple on the screen, and told us to watch how many times a particular parcel was passed around.
The answer was 12 (for anyone who wanted to know).
During this time, someone dress in a bee suit walked onto the screen, stood there for about 10 seconds, and walked off the far side. The parcel even passed across this person.
I didn't see the bee at all, until it was played back. The bee was on the screen for a full 20 seconds in total.
It was quite amazing. Almost as good as trying to get your right foot to rotate clockwise, and your right hand to rotate anti-clockwise...
T.
Obligatory Simpsons Quote:
"mmmm floor pie" - Homer Simpson
and the worst comb-over I've ever seen:
My Congressmen
Get your Unix fortune now!
...if you see a piece of food lying on the ground, pick it up.
Hell, I work in food science. If it hits the floor, it gets inedibled, period. Of course, the floors in your average slaughterhouse...no, wait, I've seen the kitches of some of my friends. The floors in a slaughterhouse are downright clean compared to some of them. Why do I suddenly feel the need to pull out a mop and bucket?
If using Linux is about choice, how come people complain when I choose to use Windows?
I'm sure Country Music has increased the rate of suicide, while thrash metal and rap have increased the number of homicides.... I know I want to kill the little punks who drive around with this crap blasting out of their car at all hours of the night!
I saw this one on TV, on a pop-psychology programme. The guy said that he was going to play a short video, and that you should watch it carefully.
The video consisted of about eight people standing in a circle. Some of them were wearing white t-shirts and some of them were wearing black t-shirts. They had two basketballs and people were engaged in passing basketballs to others wearing the same colour t-shirts. Occasionally two of them would swap places.
It went on for a couple of minutes, and was pretty hard to follow, what with people changing places and everything.
But it was only on the second play-through that I noticed a guy in a gorilla suit, halfway through the video, walk on from one side of the screen, slowly stroll through the circle of ball-passing people, and off the other side of the screen.
Truly astonishing.
evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation!
I know it's bad form to reply to your own comment, but there was a race between my current congressmen a few years back and we approached his opponent at Oktoberfest. Someone I know give him this tidbit:
Friend: Why don't you ask Chabot in the next debate why he is trying to mislead the people of the first district on a daily basis?
Candidate: What do you mean? (Excited)
Friend: Well, he's been trying to convince us that he has a full head of hair. I've seen that combover, it's not fooling anyone.
Get your Unix fortune now!
But 80's rock is feel good music. It makes you want to live life, not end it.
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
I am still amazed that they tried to sell this and expected not to get caught. It's beggars belief. But then again look at coke, it can't be any better for you (probably much worse) than water from the thames. My dad recently used some to clean an oil spill off his drive, think I will stick with real drinks, like orange and apple juice, that aren't just processed drugs.
If at first you DON'T succeed, Skydiving is NOT for YOU!!
Donald Trump?
He's got the worst combover of any celebrity.
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
A disturbing study showing that the suicide rates for whites in US metropolitan areas is higher in cities where more country music is played on the radio earned the Ig Nobel prize in Medicine for Steven Stack of Wayne State in Detroit and James Gundlach of Auburn University in Alabama.
I think some further study is needed here. My theory is that country music is not actually the culprit, but Southern Baptists are. Country music is more likely to be played in areas infested with Southern Baptists and other fundamentalist Christians. These groups are able to place stricter social controls on anything fun and are constantly harping on homosexuals and on anyone that might be having a good time and not constantly worried about damnation. This denial of the reality of free American lives eventually leads to higher suicide rates. I think we would need to start playing country music in more liberalized areas and see if that might increase the rates of buzzkill before we can blame country music exclusively.
The hair to be used as covering is brushed over the bald area in alternating folds using hair spray to hold the hair in place. The uppermost section can be styled to the person's personal teste.
That certainly seems novel to me.
Oddly a large fraction had not noticed a woman in a gorilla suit walk through the scene
for years i've been seeing this big rabbit, and everyone thought i was nuts. but who's laughing now......?
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
-Oscar Wilde
Well if my dog doesn't eat said food product in 5 seconds, you bet there something wrong with it
Not to be pedantic about the poster's phrasing, but I would have though the proof went *against* the five-second rule (although this is the first I've heard of such a rule - up until now I've always thought of food on the floor as being garbage-fodder... Catching it in mid-fall is the thing to do, thus managing to foil the buttered-toast rule :-)
It depends on which part of the claim you are looking at. If you take the claim as "Food that has been on the floor less than 5 seconds is safe to eat" then the claim holds up, mostly because he proved that the time doesn't matter much at all. What he seems to have demonstrated is that most of the floors he looked at were clean enough to eat from. He did disprove that the time is the relevant factor, however.
There's always a difference between clean and sanitary. Relevant to this is that we may actually be too clean.
Never confuse volume with power.
I have been told since I was a kid that this is the three second rule! I can't believe for all these years I've been throwing out two seconds worth of perfectly good food!
I wonder if they ran this experiment by gender. When I'm watching the guys on TV throw the ball between themselves and at the hoop I never seem to notice my wife walking into the room and talking at me.
She, OTOH, notices everything. And remembers.
Milo
You have the pussified pap From The Garth Brooks School that infests the airways. Full of caterwauling of how great god and America are and lots of sappy rumination of how great families are and raising kids and going to Sunday school. And then you have Hank Williams Jr. and the like that is more about rebellions and a hearty "Fuck off" to those that have a problem with it. The former promotes suicide, the latter, promotes life.
But 80's rock is feel good music. It makes you want to live life, not end it.
Unless it's Judas Priest
http://harridanic.com
I'm shocked and amazed that my former professor won an Ig in Physics.
I graduated from UCONN in 1990 with a Bachelor's in Psychology. Dr. Turvey taught perhaps the most interesting class in my experience at UCONN: Learning Theory. The department at that time was in split into factions, one espousing the usual sensation drives perception while the other (led by Dr. Turvey) held that direct perception was a better model. Interesting note, the direct perception group was using hard science and mathematics to prove their theories, something very unusual for what is perceived to be a "soft science".
BTW, does anybody know why the Ig ceremony is off schedule this year? They are usually held on the first Thursday of October, but in this case were held on the last Thursday of September.
"I'm The Bounty Bear. I will find him anywhere. I'm searching."
This is hardly original work... I think it was well established by Douglas Adams, though he refered to it as a "Somebody Else's Problem Field". If you're busy counting balls, the gorilla must be Somebody Else's Problem, and thus goes unnoticed by you. http://www.artpolitic.org/infopedia/se/SEP_field.h tml explains the concept nicely.
They claim they made Thamnes river-water unsafe, which requires doing nothing. They took London tap water (Thamnes river water made safe) and made it unsafe and (according to blind trials) less tasty.
In soviet russia stale jokes recycle you!
...simply butter the toast on the wrong side.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Living after midnight! Now there's a fist in the air feel good song :)
I'm no germ-freak idiot, and have no problem, say, eating a slice of pizza that fell topdown on the floor. Wipe the big crunchy dirt off and it's as good as new... unless your shit don't stink.
I with Carlin and Kramer. :)
--
Power to the Peaceful
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
...does Donnald Trump own them a licensing fee for using it while on TV?
>> Practice Safe Hex
If this is true than it is probably discussed in Combover the Movie.
You sly dog: you got me monologuing! - Syndrome
... "you must be new here" remark.
Sean
The 5 second rule has been covered by /. more than a year ago here.
... but here's another anecdote just the same
A friend of mine grew up in Colorado (floridated tap water) and moved to Utah (not floridated tap water)
As soon as she went to the dentist in Utah, he asked her where she grew up. She explained, and he said that he could tell by the health of her teeth that she wasn't local.
--
Free gmail invites
So, when Lance Armstrong has someone go down on him, does he say, "oh, yeah, baby, suck my...ball..."?
It's not water from the Thames, it is water from a company called "Thames Water" that provides water in the UK (originally from the Thames river valley) I would imagine that none of this water is from the Thames itself, and certainly the catchment area and resevoirs are much more widely distributed than just the Thames.
As the original paper points out, tap water is actually validated to a much higher standard than all of that bottled crap people pay for.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
There is some 70's stuff by ELO with backwards lyrics in it. There's an obvious backwards mask in 'Fire on High' that says "The music is reversible, but time isn't. Turn back, turn back, turn back!"
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
As a long time dog owner I know that any food that touches the floor is the legal property of the dog.
Soda makers (and breweries, for that matter) spend a significant portion of their process on purification/standarization of their water supply.
You can like soda or hate it, (you can like Bud Light or hate it) but wherever you go in the north american continent, a bottle of coke will always taste exactly like every other bottle of coke, and that's a phenominal feat.
A glass of tap water from NYC will be different from tap water in Miami, different from Santa Fe, etc. But a bottle of Dasani each each of those places will taste exactly the same.
What cracks me up is that Dasani (one of the ingredients in Coke) is selling for a higher per-ounce price than Coke (Dasani + sugar + flavoring, etc) but I guess that's just the market for you.
--
Free gmail invites
Inattentional blindness...now when that idiot in the SUV mows me down while I'm crossing the street, they can say it wasn't their fault....
If God had had a computer it would have taken him 7 months to create the earth...if he even bothered to do it at all.
Yeah, right!
Here's a scenario for you stecoop. You're standing in the crowded men's room - late into the evening - at your favorite local bar knowing these people can't pee straight sober much less drunk. You brought your beer with you; because, God forbid, someone steal your drink.
As you're waiting in line to pee, some drunk opens the door into you causing you to spill your drink.
Here's your question: Which puddle do you lick up? You have four seconds to decide.
Hmm, that would fall under Section 1 paragraph II - heading A - The Village Idiot.
The owner would be the village idiot for these reasons:
1) You're standing in front of the door
2) You brought your beer to the bathroom
3) You didn't finish your drink *before* going to the bathroom
4) You are walking in pee
5) You're in crowded men's room
Possible Remedies
1) Pee in your beer bottle to rectify anyone from stealing your beer in the future
2) Finish drink before going to bathroom
3) Plan on going to the bathroom before ordering drink
4) Don't walk in Pee
5) Don't take drink to bathroom.
6) Don't stand in front of a bathroom door
7) Let the dog have it - or you're the village idiot.
Oh, its the same thing in the US- Dasani is probably NYC tap water.
However ANY other tap water is vastly superior to Washington DC tap water, which will KILL YOU (between harmful levels of bacteria, to all the lead in the water). Even my tap water in Montgomery County, Maryland (right outside of DC) is so chlorinated that it smells like a swimming pool.
Even if they add a few impurities here or there, it sure beats DC's water!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Once again, science fiction becomes science fact.
Remember... ZG9uJ3QgZm9yZ2V0IHRvIGRyaW5rIHlvdXIgb3ZhbHRpbmU=
I dunno, if I had to listen to country music all day, I'd probably want to kill myself too.
I have a very hard time believeing that dentists would say such a thing. The flouride that some cities add to drinking water is orders of magnitude lower in concentration than that in toothpaste. Flouride has no systematic benefits (from swallowing), only in the topical application to the teeth. So basically, the only possbile benefit anyone would see from flouridated water is if you never brushed your teeth with toothpaste, and even then it's so minute that brushing once a month would give better results. Any dentist who would say such a thing wouldn't be my dentist long. If such a dentist really was concerned about tooth decay, he'd be recommending brushing your funky teeth, not drinking flouridated water.
But 80's rock is feel good music. It makes you want to live life, not end it.
:-)
Yes, remember all that bright, happy 80s music? Like Depeche Mode's "People are people" bouncy little anthem for peace? Don't forget, the 80s weren't all sunshine & roses. There was music with depth as well, and it wasn't all happy.
Depeche Mode also wrote a song called: "Blasphemeous rumors" which contained the less than uplifting lines: "I think that God has a sick sense of humor/And when I die, I expect to find Him laughing". In "Flies on the windscreen", they sang a dissonant dirge that contains the lines: "Death is everywhere/There are lambs for the slaughter" as an unhappy chorus. But it wasn't just Depeche Mode that had depressing music.
In the 80s, in general, I found that there was a lot of bouncy, upbeat sounding songs about unpleasant or downright depressing topics.
Phil Collins sang "Invisible Touch", about how an infatuation with a controling woman was ruining his life: "She takes control, and slowly tears you apart". It had a happy little beat, though.
Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" is an indictment of the state of existance there. Lines like:"You end up like a dog that's been beat too much,/And you spend half your life just to cover it up" isn't "feel good" music. You have to listen to more than the chorus to realize that, though.
U2's "With or Without You" is a song about a man who is fundamentally unhappy, both when he is in a relationship and when he is apart.
One hit wonder pop stars like Tiffany (remember her?) were chock full of teen angst music, with songs like "All this time", about a tearful little breakup. Debbie Gibson sang: "I will never love again now that we're apart".
Belinda Carlisle sang about divorce ("Band of Gold"). Rush urged people not to commit suicide ("The Pass"). Maddonna sang about teen pregnancy ("Papa don't preach"). Band Aid sang about famine. "By the Berlin Wall" is about as politically themed as a song can get. Midnight Oil's "Blue Sky Mine" warned about corporate exploitation of the working classes. "Diamond Sun" argued for native rights.
It wasn't all feel good music. If it didn't sound depressing, maybe you missed what some of the lyrics implied. Or maybe you have cheerier tastes in 80s music than I do.
--
AC
I remember playing Queen backwards and heard "smoke marajuana". (*)
:)
;)
I was only a kid and I didnt feel an urge to go and do what they say.
Now I am older on the other hand I know exactly where they were coming from
(*) may be banned in USA due to draconian laws
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
(lame joke elided)
Do you not know what the word metropolitan means?
Granting patents for hairstyling? The USPTO is ridiculous.
I've read about Ig Nobel before on
If my girlfriend/wife is eating it: -1 point
Unless I have recently had a fight/plan on breaking up/have not received oral sex in more than 4 months:+1 point
If I am serving it to customers: +1 point
Unless the kitchen manager saw me drop it: -1 point
Unless he's an asshole too: +1 point
If it lands on dogshit: +2 points
Unless it was a Shit-Tzu: +1 point (because, you know, their name sounds like poo)
The dish is liquid, such as soup or creme brulee: +1 point
The dish has flecks of spices on it that could easily disguise dirt and/or e. coli: -1 point
Add everything up, and then serve it to others anyway. Exercise your own judgement if you need to eat it. But remember: a day off spent vomiting and peeing out of your ass is still a day off, particularly if you work for the government.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
nt
Ah, poor rural whites. The last group that it's okay to be racist to.
Thank goodness there's one group left! Well, two, if you count Polacks.
I have a friend who grew in Hong Kong. He has brown spots on his teeth that he claims are the result of Hong Kong having had *too much* floride in the municipal water supply when he was little?
Does anyone know about the potential effects of too much floride?
These guys get funnier and funnier as the years go by.
:-)
I actually posted so i could save the link...
Ciao with tongue in cheek!
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
I moved to america a couple of years ago.
I hated the teaste of the tap water
(it drove me nuts, different from europe).
I started drinking bottled water.
The taste also drove me nuts,
but, the bottled water was kept in the fridge
so it tasted awsome (cold, refreshing, no discernible taste).
Now I can't stand ANY kind of tap water,
and if I do drink it, i mix in some
Aloe Vera juice (gives it that bland no-taste taste, which doesn't drive me nuts)
....well,they would be ...white?
Part of the point is if you say,"Poor rurals" it has no effect....and if you said "Poor black rurals" well, you spoke negitively about black people...tsk tsk.
I think it is "ok" because the general feeling is if your white and your poor your worthless,you had all the chances and still failed.
Frankly,I dont think it is a probelm becuase it isn't like poor white trash own a computer or can even read.
(i think i am going to burn in hell for that last comment)
What do you say to the man that has nothing? Cast it away!!
Which is a common belief but totally untrue.
The osmotic pressure of your fluids is hormonally regulated. Thus if you drink hypotonic fluid, simply less water will leave the body as urine and at the same time toxins and waste produced is enough to sustain the proper osmotic pressure.
The real problem is the intake of hypertonic solution, because there is not really any other way to get those salts out of the body than diluting them in more water which leads to dehydration. Just my 2c
One time on a road trip I tried to purchase a bottle of water.
It accepted my money OK, but wouldn't give me any water.
It wouldn't give me back my money either, and curiously enough, after a couple minutes the credit went away.
It was the bottled water produced by cocacola.
I was pissed.
I wrote a note that the machine stole my money.
Since then I purchase my bottled water at the supermarket getting 2 dozen bottles at a time and keep them in my trunk.
I hate Liberals and Conservatives.
If you are a Liberal or a Conservative, then HAVE A NICE DAY!
Courage.