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."

Comments

Proper definition/clarification of 5-second rule

[stecoop]

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.

Re:5 seconds on the floor?

[savagedome]

What if it lands in dogshit?

There might be some common sense involved in that decision.

Prior art on combover?

[FerretFrottage]

Didn't they find cave drawings of cavemen that used combovers? The difference being that the combover covered most of their entire bodies.

Re:Winner

[Ford Prefect]

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.

Reminds me of something from a certain radio series I listened to last night..

The Somebody Else's Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what's more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people's natural disposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain. If Effrafax had painted the mountain pink and erected a cheap and simple Somebody Else's Problem field on it, then people would have walked past the mountain, round it, even over it, and simply never have noticed that the thing was there.

So, presumably to avoid detection, terrorists and other ne'r-do-wells should wear gorilla suits - invisibility is just too much effort. :-)

Country music and suicide rates

[scotay]

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.

Re:Text in case of Slashdotting..

[Ford Prefect]

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.

Please, not 'farting' - I believe the correct term is 'fast, repetitive ticks' (or, um, 'FRTs').

i knew i wasn't crazy.....

[to_kallon]

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......?