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2007 Ig Nobel Awards Announced

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the best-of-the-worst dept.

prostoalex writes "The annual Ig Noble awards by Annals of Improbable Research were announced tonight. The winners included the scientists who discovered that impotence drugs help with jet lag recovery, "a Dutch researcher who conducted a census of all the creepy-crawlies that share our beds, Spanish scientists who found that rats sometimes could not distinguish between Japanese spoken backwards and Dutch spoken backwards, an Australian woman who documented the indexing problems caused by the word "the", a Japanese researcher who extracted vanilla flavoring from cow dung, and a Taiwanese man who patented a Batman-like device that drops a net over bank robbers," MSNBC says."

7 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. The indexing thing by Daimanta · · Score: 5, Insightful

    an Australian woman who documented the indexing problems caused by the word "the" Is it just me, or is that pretty handy to know. Words like "the" and "of" pretty much clutter non-smart registers.
    --
    Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
    1. Re:The indexing thing by armb · · Score: 3, Insightful

      > "Registers that ignore words like "the" and "of" are more efficient than those that doesn't"

      There speaks a man who has never tried finding music by The The on Amazon.

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      rant
    2. Re:The indexing thing by ribuck · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Heh, it's actually my sister who won this Ig Nobel prize for doing research on how to index "The". The premier geek in the family, and she doesn't even try to be one!

      As she points out in her research, how are you ever going to look up the band "The The" unless the word "the" is indexed. And if you index it sometimes, shouldn't you index it always?

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      Paid Q&A/Research
  2. it is common sense, why the research by someone1234 · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Any intelligent indexing already ignores the clutter. This was a completely redundant research.

    --
    Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
  3. Wrong superhero by carou · · Score: 3, Insightful

    a Batman-like device that drops a net over bank robbers

    Well, that's a Spiderman-like device then, surely?
  4. Viagra and jet lag by oz1cz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I must have missed something.

    Medical science is full of instances where a drug designed for one thing turns out to be useful for other things as well. Why, then, is it so amusing to consider if Viagra may have interesting and useful side effects?

  5. My fave... by fudgefactor7 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...a Japanese researcher who extracted vanilla flavoring from cow dung,...
     
    Ummm,....why would you even try? WTF?