2007 Ig Nobel Awards Announced

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."

Comments

Noble uses

[speaker of the truth]

It would actually be great for countries with overpopulation actually.

Itchy? Mites are eating your dead skin.

[Futurepower(R)]

Photo: House dust mites feed on human skin scales...

Soup Bowl experiment may help dieting

[Russell Coker]

The research that showed people eating more soup (without feeling more full) if the bowl was filled without them noticing is not interesting on it's own. But if the opposite is true then it may be commercially successful.

What if you had a soup bowl that sucked soup out without the eater noticing, if they felt full after believing that they ate a large bowl of soup then it might make dieting a lot easier!

If the appearance of food size determines how much people eat then maybe different shaped bowls could affect how much people eat. Maybe a bowl that makes a serve of food look big would encourage people to eat less.

Re:Soup Bowl experiment may help dieting

[Anonymous Coward]

Some research has indeed been done on the subject, as I recall watching a tv program detailing that sort of research work.

IIRC, people ate more when:
1. they had bigger plates.
2. they were given bigger servings.
3. they were in the company of someone they enjoyed.
4. they listened to certain kinds of music (though I don't specifically recall what kinds, whether it was selected for enjoyment or other factors)

there were other details which were factored in, but I don't recall them all.

Gay bomb - who tested this?

[Russell Coker]

I wonder who tested the "gay bomb" for the US air force?

Sounds like a good excuse for some guys who were gay already "we're not gay, we're testing some new weapons". If they didn't ban gay men from joining the military this wouldn't be a problem.

Alexander the Great seemed to be successful in his military campaigns with a significant number of homosexuals in his army. Maybe the US military would be more effective if they used the "gay bomb" on their own guys.

Re:Summary forgot the best part!

[moosesocks]

I was indeed referring to that with the heaviest of sarcasm.

Since I suppose the slashdot nerds don't appear quite as up to speed on the situation, the President of Iran made a speech at Columbia University a week or two ago, where he proudly declared that there are absolutely no homosexuals in Iran.

And, yes. Of course I understand that homosexuality is a naturally-occurring phenomenon (with strong statistical and biological evidence to support this). However, from what I understand, the bell-curve hypothesis isn't well-supported, especially with the peak centered around 50%. Whatever the estimates are regarding the distribution of human sexuality, it's safe to say that 50% of the population is NOT bisexual. In the gay community, there's also a surprising bit of contention over whether or not there are "real" bisexuals (especially among males).

A more reasonable alternate proposed was a bimodal distribution with a large peak halfway between Heterosexual and bisexual, and a smaller peak halfway between bisexual and homosexual.