Pressures Produced When Penguins Poo, And Other Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know
My brain works in strange ways sometimes.
All these lovely con photos got me to thinking about how to make sure nobody is blinking in a group photo. Then, I remembered I'd heard that someone had calculated the number of photos it takes to almost ensure no one in the group is blinking in at least one shot (the rule of thumb for groups of less than twenty people, by the way, is in good lighting, divide the number of people in the photo by three; in bad lighting, divide by two). Then, I remembered where I'd heard it: the Ig Nobel Awards.
The Ig Nobel Awards are a hilarious parody of the Nobel Awards, hosted by Harvard University and The Annals of Improbable Research. They select ten honorees, each in different categories of intellectual achievement, for their truly bizarre and usually very funny research endeavors, and the awards are presented by actual Nobel Prize winners. This year's awards ceremony will be on October 1, and NPR always airs it, so if you're in need of a good laugh, I highly recommend it.
Anyway, I needed something fun and silly and mindless to do, so I picked some of my favorite awards from years past (and yes, these are all real):
1999 Literature: Presented to the British Standards Institution for its six-page specification of the proper way to make a cup of tea. (Arthur Dent would be proud.)
2000 Peace: Presented to The Royal Navy, for ordering its sailors to stop using live cannon shells, and to instead just shout "Bang!" (Do you suppose this is up on YouTube somewhere?)
2001 Literature: Presented to John Richards of Boston, England, founder of The Apostrophe Protection Society, for his efforts to protect, promote, and defend the differences between the plural and the possessive. (THANK YOU!! Where do I sign up?)
2003 Economics: Presented to Karl Schwärzler and the nation of Liechtenstein, for making it possible to rent the entire country for corporate conventions, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and other gatherings. (Maybe someone should rent out Liechtenstein for a con?)
2003 Physics: Presented to Jack Harvey, John Culvenor, Warren Payne, Steve Cowle, Michael Lawrance, David Stuart, and Robyn Williams of Australia, for their irresistible report "An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces". (WTF?)
2005 Economics: Presented to Gauri Nanda of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for inventing Clocky, an alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday. (I need one of these. And, they're sooo cute!)
2005 Fluid Dynamics: Presented jointly to Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow of International University Bremen, Germany and the University of Oulu, Finland; and József Gál of Loránd Eötvös University, Hungary, for using basic principles of physics to calculate the pressure that builds up inside a penguin, as detailed in their report "Pressures Produced When Penguins Poo - Calculations on Avian Defecation". (That is such a phonetically beautiful title that I don't even care it's about bird droppings.)
2006 Mathematics: Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, for calculating the number of photographs that must be taken to (almost) ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed. (Also of note: if your group is upwards of thirty, you pretty much have to take as many pictures as there are people in your group. More than fifty? Good luck.)
2006 Medicine: Francis M. Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, for his medical case report "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage";[14] and Majed Odeh, Harry Bassan, and Arie Oliven of Bnai Zion Medical Center, Haifa, Israel, for their subsequent medical case report also titled "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage". (My Felix muse was being very evil. He wanted me to entitle this post: "Felix said, 'That wasn't foreplay--Louis had hiccups.'")
2006 Ornithology: Ivan R. Schwab, of the University of California Davis, and Philip R.A. May of the University of California Los Angeles, for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don't get headaches. (I am actually really curious about this one now.)
2007 Peace: The United States Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, for suggesting the research and development of a "gay bomb," which would cause enemy troops to become sexually attracted to each other. (Point of interest: they were also looking into giant stink bombs, so American troops could smell enemy troops no matter where they were hiding.)
2008 Biology: Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert, and Michel Franc, for discovering that fleas that live on dogs jump higher than fleas that live on cats. (???)
All these lovely con photos got me to thinking about how to make sure nobody is blinking in a group photo. Then, I remembered I'd heard that someone had calculated the number of photos it takes to almost ensure no one in the group is blinking in at least one shot (the rule of thumb for groups of less than twenty people, by the way, is in good lighting, divide the number of people in the photo by three; in bad lighting, divide by two). Then, I remembered where I'd heard it: the Ig Nobel Awards.
The Ig Nobel Awards are a hilarious parody of the Nobel Awards, hosted by Harvard University and The Annals of Improbable Research. They select ten honorees, each in different categories of intellectual achievement, for their truly bizarre and usually very funny research endeavors, and the awards are presented by actual Nobel Prize winners. This year's awards ceremony will be on October 1, and NPR always airs it, so if you're in need of a good laugh, I highly recommend it.
Anyway, I needed something fun and silly and mindless to do, so I picked some of my favorite awards from years past (and yes, these are all real):
1999 Literature: Presented to the British Standards Institution for its six-page specification of the proper way to make a cup of tea. (Arthur Dent would be proud.)
2000 Peace: Presented to The Royal Navy, for ordering its sailors to stop using live cannon shells, and to instead just shout "Bang!" (Do you suppose this is up on YouTube somewhere?)
2001 Literature: Presented to John Richards of Boston, England, founder of The Apostrophe Protection Society, for his efforts to protect, promote, and defend the differences between the plural and the possessive. (THANK YOU!! Where do I sign up?)
2003 Economics: Presented to Karl Schwärzler and the nation of Liechtenstein, for making it possible to rent the entire country for corporate conventions, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and other gatherings. (Maybe someone should rent out Liechtenstein for a con?)
2003 Physics: Presented to Jack Harvey, John Culvenor, Warren Payne, Steve Cowle, Michael Lawrance, David Stuart, and Robyn Williams of Australia, for their irresistible report "An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces". (WTF?)
2005 Economics: Presented to Gauri Nanda of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for inventing Clocky, an alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday. (I need one of these. And, they're sooo cute!)
2005 Fluid Dynamics: Presented jointly to Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow of International University Bremen, Germany and the University of Oulu, Finland; and József Gál of Loránd Eötvös University, Hungary, for using basic principles of physics to calculate the pressure that builds up inside a penguin, as detailed in their report "Pressures Produced When Penguins Poo - Calculations on Avian Defecation". (That is such a phonetically beautiful title that I don't even care it's about bird droppings.)
2006 Mathematics: Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, for calculating the number of photographs that must be taken to (almost) ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed. (Also of note: if your group is upwards of thirty, you pretty much have to take as many pictures as there are people in your group. More than fifty? Good luck.)
2006 Medicine: Francis M. Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, for his medical case report "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage";[14] and Majed Odeh, Harry Bassan, and Arie Oliven of Bnai Zion Medical Center, Haifa, Israel, for their subsequent medical case report also titled "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage". (My Felix muse was being very evil. He wanted me to entitle this post: "Felix said, 'That wasn't foreplay--Louis had hiccups.'")
2006 Ornithology: Ivan R. Schwab, of the University of California Davis, and Philip R.A. May of the University of California Los Angeles, for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don't get headaches. (I am actually really curious about this one now.)
2007 Peace: The United States Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, for suggesting the research and development of a "gay bomb," which would cause enemy troops to become sexually attracted to each other. (Point of interest: they were also looking into giant stink bombs, so American troops could smell enemy troops no matter where they were hiding.)
2008 Biology: Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert, and Michel Franc, for discovering that fleas that live on dogs jump higher than fleas that live on cats. (???)