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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.
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!
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!!
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.
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
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
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."
...simply butter the toast on the wrong side.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
You can summarize the first type of country as "God bless America and my family" and the second type of country as "Let's get drunk and have unprotected sex in a barn."
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
The 5 second rule has been covered by /. more than a year ago here.
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."
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.