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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."
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!
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.
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.
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 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!!
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."
No, I caught that... I'm just paranoid enough that I'm not ready to consider floors on the U of I campus necessarily representative of all floors. Now, what'd be really interesting, to me, is testing for bacteria and fungus on the floors in the kitchens of various restaurants around the country -- where lots of food is prepared, and, from what I've heard, the five second rule comes into play anyway, valid or not.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Combining this with earlier articles I've read, one could conclude its safe to eat food dropped on the floor, but not on your desk. Of course, based on those stories, about the best place to accidently drop your food is on the toilet seat.
A couple choice quotes from here.
"Surprisingly, toilet seats consistently had the lowest bacteria levels of the 12 surfaces tested in the study."
"We don't think twice about eating at our desks, even though the average desk has 100 times more bacteria than a kitchen table and 400 times more bacteria than the average toilet."