Wink Chosen to Receive Noble Piece Prize

Phil Shapiro writes "Wink, a beautifully written free program for creating Flash-format animated tutorials has been chosen to receive a Noble Piece Prize, the prize that honors the craftsmanship of Alfred Noble, who worked at the Jacquard Loom factory in France. Previous winners of this prize include the Digital Bicycle web site."

Comments

Re:This sounds fishy to me too.

[Tarcastil]

This isn't the Nobel Prize. It's the Noble Prize. There is no Nobel Prize category for this type of thing.

Re:You may be wrong...

[tomhudson]

Why is everyone saying there's no link to the article (which is an obvious joke)?

Alfred Noble worked as a loom designer in the Jacquard loom factory in France in the early 1800's. He was known for constantly sharing with his peers better ways of doing things and for the beauty of his inventions. When people tried to give him credit, he always passed along credit to others.

When Noble was focusing on a particular piece of ass, or task, he would often stay after work to get it just right. His reputation for producing things of beauty and inventiveness caused his factory co-workers to label anything beautiful or inventive as a "Noble piece."

One day the owner of the factory suggested that an annual prize be given to anyone who created something of great beauty or inventiveness. In honor of Alfred Noble, this prize came to be known as the Noble Piece Prize.

When Alfred Noble found out about this prize, he was so overjoyed he exclaimed, "That's dynamite."

The owner of the factory was so happy with the orgasmic development of the Noble Piece Prize, he told his factory workers that he would seek to have the prize given annually by the king.

Alfred Noble, who never said much, spoke up. "I'd much prefer that this prize not be given by a king, but that it given by any contributing member of our community. To me, the honor of giving the prize ought to be as great as the honor of receiving it -- and the people best suited to choose the prize giver are community members themselves. They know. Ask them."

He walked over to one of his co-workers and holding his forearm said, "Rudy, here, has dignity." He walked over to another co-worker and holding her forearm said, "Elizabeth, here, has dignity and hooters."

"Don't you see, it's dignity that matters, not status?"

A hush befell the factory floor. Even the looms fell quiet at the poignancy of the moment.

"And we cannot give this prize annually. Our days on Earth are limited. We must give this prize more often, for beauty and inventiveness exist everywhere if we just look for them. Twice a year is how often this prize must be given.

And we must have other Noble prizes beyond the Piece Prize. Do we limit our homage to one another because of words?"

And such is the origins of the Noble Piece Prize, which honors two people twice a year. Today the prize is most often given to people working on public-spirited software projects -- people who embody the spirit of Alfred Noble. By tradition, the giver of the Noble Piece Prize has no connection to software creation, but is a person who embodies great dignity in the community.

By all accounts, there can be no greater honor than the Noble Piece Prize.

February 2, 2005

"... all we are saying ... is give piece a chance ..." just doesn't work.

Re:What kind of bollocks is this?

[tomhudson]

The heathens. Next thing you know, they'll be saying there's no such thing as the ig Nobel Awards

Just in case, though .. the2004 winners were

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."

PHYSICS

Ramesh Balasubramaniam of the University of Ottawa, and Michael Turvey of the University of Connecticut and Haskins Laboratory, for exploring and explaining the dynamics of hula-hooping.

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.

CHEMISTRY

The Coca-Cola Company of Great Britain, for using advanced technology to convert ordinary tap water 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).

LITERATURE

The American Nudist Research Library of Kissimmee, Florida, USA, for preserving nudist history so that everyone can see it.

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 woman in a gorilla suit.

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.

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.

Even I couldn't make this shit up (well, maybe I could, if I was given a research grant like most of these people were)