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2006 Ig Nobel Prizes Awarded
davidwr writes "The Ig-Nobel Peace Prize went to Howard Stapleton for his groundbreaking research in teenager-repellent technology. D. Lynn Halpern won an award for research into why fingernails on a chalkboard are almost as annoying as teenagers. Ivan Schwab garnered his award for research into avian headacheology. Two french researchers cooked up a medal for spaghetti research. Read more about these and other prizes here and at the Improbable Research official web site. To those Slashdotters who were expecting an award, better luck next year."
I thought my death clock would win this time... Maybe if I make a Smelloscope...
Maybe he started out researching injuries due to woodpeckers pecking out human eyes and one thing lead to another....
Unfair mod. Should be +5 fucking brilliant.
Now, if we can just herf all those thumpmobiles
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Give it five years, and you'll be wondering how you can possibly get along without one.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
The winner of the medicine prize got it for ground breaking research into curing intractible hiccups by sticking his finger up a patient's anus.
He also suggests that sex is the most potent cure for hiccups, but that won't really affect anyone on slashdot.
why dry spaghetti breaks into more than one piece when it is bent: -1, Lame
Apparently someone doesn't know how interesting this problem is. Feynman spent a lot of time on it. It's much, much harder than, say, showing that a tall, skinny brick structure will break 1/3 of the way up from the ground if it's slowly tipped to one side (or if a demolition charge makes it crumble). Though that research certainly isn't Nobel-winning stuff, it's a remarkably difficult problem with a lot of applications (including, methinks, applications to space-station engineering and probably nanostructures).
At Bathurst subway/streetcar/bus station in Toronto, they play classical (well, baroque actually) music on the PA to keep teenagers away. It seems to work quite well, actually. It's only at that station, and since classical music is only annoying to teens (at least to the point of forcing them from the building) it doesn't trouble other patrons. One caveat: if you (like me) are one of those Classical Punks- who follow their own rules, and wear all the lead-based makeup and penny loafers they want- it doesn't work.
No, it really works! I've seen no electronic teenagers round here...
Sorry.
What's next, Peace Prize for the nuclear bomb? They certainly bring peace...
There was this guy named Bertrand Russell.
At the end of World War 2 when the 'allies' had the nuke and the Soviets didn't, he advocated a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union.
As soon as the Soviets developed their own nukes, he became an anti-nuclear peace activist.
For him, it was all down to game theory.
So yeah in a sense nukes may brought peace -- if the Soviets hadn't developed them, Eastern Europe and Russia would quite possibly have been nuked into submission. I think that would have been less 'peaceful' than the cold war.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
You seem to miss the significance of that research. Note that the article mentioned the physics Nobel price for big bang research. This spaghetti research is of course very related to the question of how the universe was created. After all, we know it was created by the FSM, and surely bending and breaking spaghetti was an integral part of the act of creation.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.