We are planning final details for Saturday’s big (free) event at the Cambridge Science Festival — public readings from studies that have won Ig Nobel Prizes, plus Ig Nobel opera songs performed by Neara Russell and Julia Lunetta. Spread the word, please! We’ll select the readings from all 19 years of Ig winners. There will […]
Month: April 2010
The giant slide rule went missing
David Brooks of the Nashua Telegraph reports: Information hard to find about world-record 320-foot slide rule built at Alvirne High School [This] truly gigantic creation – as long as a football field – was built in 1979, just as slide rules were being made obsolete by electronic calculators…. [It] was 320 feet long. Considering that […]
Mouthful comparison
This medical study’s title is almost panoramic: “Pancreaticogastrostomy Compared with Pancreaticojejunostomy after Pancreaticoduodenectomy,” J.P. Arnaud, J.J. Tuech, C. Cervi, and R. Bergamaschi, European Journal of Surgery, vol. 165, no. 4, April 1999, pp. 357–62. (Thanks to Gary B. Rollman for bringing this to our attention.) The authors are at the University Hospital of Angers, France. [AIR […]
Ukraine parliament mimics Ig winner
News reports, including this video, show Ukraine’s parliament members punching, beating, and otherwise assaulting each other. This mimics the behavior pioneered by Taiwan’s Parliament, which earned the 1995 Ig Nobel Peace Prize (“for demonstrating that politicians gain more by punching, kicking and gouging each other than by waging war against other nations”). The Ukrainian effort […]