Improbable Research

As mentioned here recently, Troy Hurtubise — the 1998 Ig Nobel Prize winner in Safety Engineering — was auctioning off the Ursus Mark VI suit made famous in the 1996 documentary “Project Grizzly”. Unlike previous sell-a-suit-of-anti-grizzly-bear-armor attempts, this one worked.

The suit sold for US$2,226.00 (or about $2,239.36 in Troy’s native Canadian dollars). Unfortunately, this fell somewhat short of the C$40,000 mark Troy was hoping for to repay debts incurred in the development of his various grizzly-resistant suits.

Troy, ever a man of action, presses on.

This report was submitted to us by an MIT professor who requests anonymity.

I wish to report a discovery made by my female colleague (identified here as “F”) working with me (”M”). I am male.

M snored. His great thundering stentorian waves of sound even woke people in other bedrooms. The snoring was a side-effect of sleep apnea, an ailment characterized by pauses in breathing.

M stopped breathing for such periods of time that F was ready to call an ambulance. Between the snoring and the fear of waking up beside a corpse, F got very little sleep.

She tried shaking M, which served only to wake and anger him. She tried tickling his ribs and underarms but to no avail. The snoring and apnea continued and sleep was impossible.

Then in a moment of inspiration, she went to M’s nexus. She tickled his testicles. Success! Sweet, blissful silence ensued. The snoring stopped or the sleep apnea disappeared, time after time and without fail. F had discovered a reliable, hands-on treatment for male sleep disorders.

The first time I brought my graphs and spreadsheet to a doctor’s appointment, the doctor was stunned. He called all the other doctors and nurses over to look at it. He asked my permission to make copies and fax them to other doctors. He asked me to start sending him my graphs between appointments. He stopped talking to me like I was a slow child and started discussing with me what the data might mean. He gave me suggestions for ways to get more useful data. All of this helped get me through a difficult time.

So writes Female Science Professor.

Now that I am unemployed and living in a burnt out cornfield in the Midwest, I can focus a lot more time on finding amazing things like this site, courtesy of the Kentucky Geological Survey. Now I thought geological surveys had to do with, well, rocks and oil and fossils and the like. But no! They deal with hot dogs! I haven’t seen anything this amazing since the octodog!

The site is an instructional how-to on making cephalopods in a blanket, I’m guessing to feed future geologists? The page is under the “earth education” section. Apparently it was either, feed the kids rocks, or feed them cephalopods in a blanket. A great, albeit misinformed, quote on the site about making cephalopods in a blanket (or for short, CIBs): “This recipe uses a variation of the old pigs-’n-
a-blanket theme in order to make edible cephalopods. Cephalopods were squid-like animals that lived in shells. They were very common in Paleozoic-era seas. They would probably have tasted like calamari (a fancy name for squid to trick people into eating it), but what are your chances of getting a child to eat squid?”

There is also an amazing diagram of how to cut the ends of the hot dogs into tentacles, obviously done on some fancy computer program intended to map oil fields (although not fancy enough to give the cephs enough tentacles)

So writes investigator Jessica Girard.

Troy Hurtubise is valiantly trying to auction another of his anti-grizzly suits of armor. This time, he is offering up the most famous of the bunch.

Back in early 2007, Troy  — the 1998 Ig Nobel Prize winner in Safety Engineering — attempted to auction off his “Trojan” combat suit. Unfortunately, the $35,000 minimum price was not met. This is not the first time Troy has had trouble finding eBay purchasers for his grizzly-resistant suits.

Troy is again attempting to recoup some of the money he’s put into his various projects (flame paste, the “Angel Light”, and of course, his various grizzly suits), this time by auctioning off the Ursus Mk VI suit featured in the documentary “Project Grizzly”. The suit is currently priced at a bit over US$2,000, and Troy hopes the ending price will exceed $40,000 by the auction’s end on July 14th.