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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."
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 agree that very pure water (Mill-Q) tastes unusual, but I wouldn't say it tastes bad. I drink it at work all the time (one of the "benefits" of being a scientist). The best way to describe how it tastes is like air- you know that you have put something wet in your mouth, but it doesn't seem heavy enough to be a liquid.
I have always thought there would be a market for it - at least would taste different to all the other bottle waters.
Automated DNA sequencing software