Improbable Research

There is an Improbable Event coming at Erasmus University Rotterdam (the Netherlands): on Tuesday, April 1 (16.00-17.30h), Ig Nobel prize winner and European Bureau Chief of Improbable Research Kees Moeliker will give the 2008 ‘Lof der Zotheid-lecture’ titled ‘Is there life after a dead duck?’. In fluent Dutch, Moeliker will speak about ‘Onwaarschijnlijk Onderzoek en de Ig Nobel prijzen’, highlighting the achievement that won him an Ig Nobel prize and his recent quest to acquire specimens of the rapidly declining pubic louse. As a supporting act, medical ethicist Erwin Kompanje will reveal his discovery, in the 16th century medical literature, of a remarkable but forgotten ‘urological’ device.

Click here for general information.
Location: Woudestein Campus, Zaal B-3, Burg. Oudlaan 50, Rotterdam. Entrance free. Here is a map.

Two kaleidoscopic looks at last week’s Ig Nobel Tour of the UK appear in the March 18, 2008 issue of The Guardian.

Kees Moeliker’s tour diary (excerpted) begins:

With scientific accuracy Dan Meyer warms up the audience: “First I have to deal with my gag reflex, then flip my epiglottis, put my pharynx and gullet in one line and nudge my heart a little to the left.” Then he slowly lowers a 50cm steel sword down his throat. It is not the kind of thing you expect to happen in the Great Hall of the Sherfield Building of Imperial College….

Also, a podcast gives sound bites from several of the touring Ig winners, as well as an all-star science-journalist panel’s appreciation of the personalities.

EMBARRASSING TYPO ALERT: The original version of this blog item said Friday, not Thursday. It should say Thursday. Sorry about that! Thursday, Thursday, Thursday. Not Friday. Thursday.
The sixth annual Ig Nobel Tour of the UK (for National Science and Engineering Week) begins Thursday night (6 March) at Oxford. For details and/or to reserve tickets, click on the image at right.

Featured performers: Fiona Barclay, Jim Gundlach, John Hoyland, Chris McManus, Brian Witcombe and Dan Meyer, Caroline Richmond.

In this video, 2005 Ig Nobel Peace Prize winner (for photographing every meal he consumed during a 34-year period) Dr. Yoshiro Nakamats sings a version of “Do-Re-Mi” on a Tokyo Street, attempting to leverage the performance into being elected mayor of the city.

(Thanks to investigator Annalee Newitz, whose January 26, 2008 article about the many worlds of Dr. Nakamats brought this to our attention.) (NOTE: Click here to see an alternative look at Dr. Nakamats.)

Small hordes, are attacking the invention that earned its inventor the 2006 Ig Nobel Peace Prize. A February 12, 2008 BBC News report gives details:

Calls to ban anti-teen device

Campaigners are calling for a ban on a device that emits a high-pitched sound to disperse groups of teenagers, saying it is not a fair way to treat them. There are estimated to be 3,500 of the devices, known as the Mosquito, in use in England, many at shopping centres. Their sound causes discomfort to young ears - but their frequency is above the normal hearing range of people over 25…. a new campaign called “Buzz off“, led by the children’s commissioner for England and backed by groups including civil liberties group Liberty, is calling for them to be scrapped.

Howard Stapleton, the Mosquito’s inventor, received much public acclaim during his appearance, last year, on the Ig Nobel Tour of the UK. You can read about that here, and watch video of one of those tour appearances here.

(Thanks to investigator Tammy Boyce for bringing this to our attention.)

UPDATE later in the day: The British government announced it will not ban the device. (So says a news report by icWales.)

The Russian TV network NTV traveled the world to interview Ig Nobel Prize winners. Their ten-minute report, originally broadcast in December 2007, is now online. Click here to watch it. (The ten-minute-long video is slow to load over the Internet, but is enlightening.)

Among other winners, it features: the sword-swallowing half of the (Medicine Prize-winning) team that produced the medical report “Sword-Swallowing and Its Side-Effects”: the (Engineering Prize-winning) co-patent-holder for the combover; and the (Physics Prize-winning) physicist who used magnets to levitate a frog.

The image pictured here, captured from the video, shows the NTV reporter visiting the (Literature Prize-winning) Nudist Research Library in Kissimmee, Florida.

Whippings and interrogations can now, at last, we are told, be purchased for about 35 euros at the theme park popularly known as Stalin World. Viliumas Malinauskus, the park’s founder, was awarded the 2001 Ig Nobel Peace Prize.

According to a January 22, 2008 Raw Story report, which includes a Reuters video report:

Soviet theme park features belt whippings, KGB interrogations

Mickey Mouse, roller coasters, and cotton candy typify the average theme park. But in one Lithuanian town, those amenities are exchanged for belt whippings and some good old fashioned KGB interrogation.

It’s called “Gulag tourism.” And Grutas Park offers visitors a journey back to 1984 to remind citizens what life was like under Soviet rule. Organizers believe that for those old enough to remember life in the Soviet Union, visiting the park can be therapeutic, filled with old memorabilia and humor….

After an amiable introduction, visitors are quickly transported back 25 years. They are ordered to stop smiling or thinking and are chased through an elaborate labyrinth of corridors. Any misstep can result in a violent encounter with angry KGB agents. All of the activity lasts two hours, costs more than 35 Euros, and takes place inside a bunker located in the woods.

(Thanks to investigator Julia Lunetta for bringing this to our attention.)

The inventor of the bottomless bowl of soup, having assumed a position of power in Washington, DC, is now doing a regular series of podcasts.

2007 Ig Nobel Nutrition Prize winner Brian Wansink (he won the prize for his experiments using the bottomless soup bowl) was recently appointed executive director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion. Wansink began his new duties with the new year, which he marked by appearing in his first podcast.

Wansink’s book Mindless Eating describes many of his experiments with soup, candy and other gustatory treats. Our reviewer pointed out that, among other good things, it may be the best diet book ever written (even though its publisher never markets it as a diet book).

An historic meeting has just happened in Palmerston, New Zealand. Investigator Betsy Devine writes (and writes, also, about this phase of Internet-availability history):

Here you see Frank with New Zealand’s own James Watson—no, not the infamous James Watson biology Nobel but the deservedly honored (with a 2005 Ig Nobel Prize) author of a paper on Mr. Richard Buckley’s exploding trousers.

New Zealand is a lovely land full of surprises, whose only non-good surprise has been just how hard it is to get internet access even from hotels that advertise “broadband internet.”

Item: Palmerston North Coachman Hotel, where we paid for “broadband wifi” and then discovered that the signal didn’t reach as far as our room.

Item: Albany Executive Inn, just north of Auckland, which charges $4 for your first 20 Meg per day and $.15 more for every Meg on top of that level. Heck, 20 Meg hardly covers my uploads to Flickr!

The informal lectures are when you get a chance to actually hear the reasoning behind all of this research. Consider it a “Why” to the “Huh?!” Each speaker has 5 minutes to share all of their research and try to convince the audience that they aren’t off their rocker. To avoid any speakers hogging the stage it’s tradition to employ two members of the audience to help with moving the show along. When they asked for two volunteers I did the typical 6th grade “Me Me Me Me Me!” and waved my hand around from near the back of the lecture hall (actually, it was a subdued and altogether graceful raising of my hand). The MC picked me and said “Great, we have a time keeper! Do you have a watch with a second hand?”

Uh oh. I look at my watch. I stuttered for a bit. I look around at the 200 people in the room, all looking at me. I then look back down at the MC, at which point I had to confess.

“Actually, I’m wearing a binary watch.”

So writes Snively ‘11 in his MIT Admissions Office blog. Snively went to, and found himself taking part in, the 2007 Ig Informal Lectures.

(Thanks to investigator Quentin Smith for bringing this to our attention.)

What did you win your prize for?

I won my prize for an article written six years ago about how we should alphabetise index entries that start with ‘The’. Most of the rules suggest that you should look for The Beatles and The Bible at ‘B’, but The Hague and first lines of poetry such as ‘The camel’s hump is an ugly wump’ at ‘T’. If you look at the phone directory or other lists, however, you will find that these rules have been applied inconsistently. My conclusion was that we should consider indexing these terms under both the options.

Describe the award.

The award is a wooden block topped with a rubber chicken swallowing a plastic egg. The chicken is deliciously squishy, and the egg is appallingly yellow. I am fonder of my certificate, which has a picture of Rodin’s Thinker with the Thinker fallen to the ground. It has been signed by five real Nobel Laureates, one of whom presented me with my award….

2007 Ig Nobel Literature Prize winner Glenda Browne, interviewed by her son, Bill Browne, age 11, in the November 2007 issue of the Penrith High School Newsletter.

Click here to read the complete interview.

Two strangely charming old men arrive each Christmas. One, Santa Claus, is fictional. The other, Professor John Trinkaus, of the Zicklin school of business in New York City, merely seems fictional.
This year is Trinkaus’s fourth on the international Christmas scene. His gift to us - all of us - this time is a study called Visiting Santa: An Additional Look.

It is a follow-up to last year’s Visiting Santa: A Further Look. That was a sequel to the previous year’s Visiting Santa: Another Look, which expanded on the work he described in the very first of his Santa-related studies, the 2004 classic Santa Claus: An Informal Look.

Each of these reports gives a cheerfully dreary look at the behaviour of children and their parents in a shopping mall….

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

[NOTE: Trinkaus won the 2003 Ig Nobel Literature Prize for his numerous studies of things that annoy him. It is believed that, directly or indirectly, Trinkaus's Santa research inspired the South Florida Sun-Sentinel's "Scared of Santa" photo gallery, the source of the photo shown here. ]

Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, a physics professor, has long had a cult following at M.I.T. And he has now emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute created to spread knowledge through cyberspace.

So says a December 19, 2007 New York Times profile. The Times does not mention one of Professor Lewin’s most unusual accomplishments. At the 2001 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, Professor Lewin accepted custody of the Ig Nobel Astrophysics Prize on behalf of the winners, televangelists Jack and Rexella Van Impe. The Van Impes (who said they could not attend the ceremony because they had “a previously scheduled fund-raiser”) won the prize for their discovery that black holes fulfill all the technical requirements to be the location of Hell. Paying tribute to the Van Impes, Professor Lewin said:

I accept this prestigious prize on behalf of Jack and Rexella Van Impe for their breakthrough contributions to astrophysics by making the intriguing connection between black holes and Hell.

Now, I do real research in black holes. A black hole is one of the most bizarre, exciting, fascinating, enigmatic and mind-boggling objects in our entire universe. Black holes are unimaginable. They go beyond our wildest expectations, fantasies and dreams. As a scientist, you can’t wish for more. Black holes are heaven for us.

However, we were recently straightened out by Jack and Rexella, who have shown that black holes fulfill all the requirements of Hell. As a result of their incredible insights, we now have to rethink our ideas about black holes — and I, for one, will be much more careful than ever about getting too close to the inner workings of black holes; and maybe my soul will be spared after all.

I can put this in seven words: Black holes are wonderful, but stay away.

NOTE: Click on the photo to see an unrelated incident — Professor Lewin beating a student named Simon, with cat fur.

1997 Ig Nobel Astronomy Prize winner Richard Hoagland has a new book out. He won his Ig for identifying artificial features on the moon and on Mars, including a human face on Mars and ten-mile high buildings on the far side of the moon. Those discoveries appear in his book “The Monuments of Mars : A City on the Edge of Forever.

The new book, called Dark Mission, is said to contain equally impressive discoveries. The publisher explains:

Why is the Bush administration intent on returning to the Moon as quickly as possible? What are the reasons for the current “space race” with China, Russia, even India? Remarkable images reproduced within this book provided to the authors by disaffected NASA employees give clues why, including spectacular information about lunar and Martian discoveries.

(Thanks to Mark Frauenfelder for bringing this to our attention)

The Russian network NTV has just made a documentary about the Ig Nobel Prizes. NTV visited and interviewed many people—including Ig Nobel Prize winners whose achievements include (among others) the Nudist Research Library, sword-swallowing, patenting the combover, and using magnets to levitate a frog.

Broadcast is scheduled for Sunday, December 9, 2007, at 21.00 (Moscow time), on the “Glavny geroy” program.