Improbable Research

Andy Jordan of the Wall Street Journal attended the 2008 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, and brought his videocamera. He produced a lovely four-minute report. Click the image here to watch it.

A man named Steven Milloy is misusing the the good name of the Ig Nobel Prizes. Mr. Milloy does his dirty business in an October 30, 2008 article, one of his regular so-called “Junk Science” columns that are published by Fox News.*

The Ig Nobel Prizes, which we have awarded every year since 1991, honor achievements that “first make people laugh, then make them think.” Mr. Milloy has no connection — and never has had any connection — with the Ig Nobel Prizes.

Mr. Milloy’s October 30 column discards the basic Ig Nobel notion of laughter and thought. The column is a personal attack on 76 Nobel Prize winners (several of whom happen to be on the editorial board of the Annals of Improbable Research). The column begins:

FOXNEWS.COM HOME > OPINION
IgNobels for Obama

Thursday, October 30, 2008

By Steven Milloy

Seventy-six American Nobel laureates in science endorsed Barack Obama this week. Despite their scientific successes, their political analysis just doesn’t make the grade.

Featuring signatories such as James Watson — the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA who shocked the world in 2007 with his assertion that blacks were not as intelligent as whites — the Nobelists praised Obama in an Oct. 28 letter as a “visionary leader who can ensure the future of our traditional strengths in science and technology and who can harness those strengths to address many of our greatest problems: energy, disease, climate change, security, and economic competitiveness.”

We awarded the real 2008 Ig Nobel Prizes on October 2, in a ceremony at Harvard University. Click here to see the list of winners, and here to watch video of the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. Click here to see Fox News’s report about the real Ig Nobel Prizes.

*The column also appears in the October 30 issue of The National Post, with the headline “Ig-Nobels for Obama.” Click here to see a National Post report about the real Ig Nobel Prizes, and here to see another.

(Thanks to Mark Perew for bringing Mr. Milloy and his several junky, non-scientific quests to our attention.)

Contrary to what you might think, sitting is not a static activity, unless you are dead. In the study Chair Load Analysis During Daily Sitting Activities, Carla Paoliello and Edgar Vladimiro Mantilla Carrasco adopt the perspective of a chair. They quantify the shifting risks your furniture faces when someone sits on it.

Now - right now - is a great moment in the history of furniture, because “the investigation of furniture behaviour itself and its components under a given load is just beginning”.

Paoliello and Mantilla are based at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, in Brazil. They published their report in the Forest Products Journal. Sitting, they emphasise, is indeed a “rather dynamic” activity. Here, in their words, is the situation:

“Sitting is a posture in which the weight of the body is transferred to an area supported mainly by the ischial tuberosities and their surrounding soft tissues. In 1979, Panero and Zelnik determined that when sitting, about 75% of the total body weight is supported by only four square inches. This constitutes an exceptionally heavy load, distributed on quite a small area,…

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

The June 6, 2008 issue of The Daily Telegraph contains a rare newspaper report about a fine point of taxonomy:

According to a report in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, vets were asked to treat an adult, female giraffe at Israel’s largest zoo, the Safari Park in Ramat Gan.

The team, led by Professor Zohar Amar, took a routine sample of milk and found that it clotted in the way required by Jewish law for kosher certification.

They submitted more milk for verification by the rabbinical authorities and the paper reported that a ruling was made that giraffe meat and milk are acceptable for observant Jews.

(Thanks to Scott Langill for bringing this to our attention.)

Food Fight is an abridged history of war, from World War II to present day, told through the foods of the countries in conflict. Watch as traditional comestibles slug it out for world domination in this chronologically re-enacted smorgasbord of aggression.

That is the claim — and yes, it’s an accurate claim — by the filmmaker.

(Thanks to Shakespeare’s Sister for bringing this to our attention.)