Ignobel
I always enjoy the IgNobel prizes. They are just so much more fun than the Nobel ones. This year is no exception. I would love to know what was in the mind of the US military scientists who set about inventing the 'gay bomb'. Did they really think that the enemy would drop their guns and start... ahem doing stuff to each other?
Some of the research sounds off-the-wall but there is actually real science behind it. The study of bed bugs is not really that odd at all because there is actually a whole ecosystem in most of our beds.
One of my favourite winners is Glenda Browne who studied the word 'the' and its effect on sorting words into alphabetical order. I think that is no worse than the mathematician (whose name escapes me) who wrote an entire volume proving that 1 + 1 = 2 . They didn't have IgNobels in his day but I am sure he would have won one. However other mathematicians such as Mill reckoned that 1+1 can equal any number including 1596. I don't think he would been a convincing candidate for a job at the bank.
Equally delightful is the award for Kuo Cheng Hsieh who patented a device to catch bank robbers by dropping a net over them. I thought Batman already had that in his collection. Who was it that funded the team in the University of Barcelona, who showed that rats can't tell the difference between people speaking Japanese backwards or Dutch backwards? I thought research grants were difficult to get!
Some of the research sounds off-the-wall but there is actually real science behind it. The study of bed bugs is not really that odd at all because there is actually a whole ecosystem in most of our beds.
One of my favourite winners is Glenda Browne who studied the word 'the' and its effect on sorting words into alphabetical order. I think that is no worse than the mathematician (whose name escapes me) who wrote an entire volume proving that 1 + 1 = 2 . They didn't have IgNobels in his day but I am sure he would have won one. However other mathematicians such as Mill reckoned that 1+1 can equal any number including 1596. I don't think he would been a convincing candidate for a job at the bank.
Equally delightful is the award for Kuo Cheng Hsieh who patented a device to catch bank robbers by dropping a net over them. I thought Batman already had that in his collection. Who was it that funded the team in the University of Barcelona, who showed that rats can't tell the difference between people speaking Japanese backwards or Dutch backwards? I thought research grants were difficult to get!
posted by Kebz at 3:49 PM
2 Comments:
other mathematicians such as Mill reckoned that 1+1 can equal any number including 1596. I don't think he would been a convincing candidate for a job at the bank.
Didn't they have Northern Rock in his day, then?
Northern Rock is all about negative numbers. That's an entirely different concept. The ancient Chinese and Indians were the first to use negative numbers. The Chinese allegedly used red to denote positive numbers and black to denote negative numbers. That's a system the Northern Rock borrowed along with the ancient Indian numbering system which used a + sign to denote negative numbers. It's a topsy turvey world.
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