Site icon

Watching the Ig Nobel webcast, in Oz

If you are in Australia, you might plan to watch the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony live webcast on the Australian Broadcasting Corp web site.

The ABC has a preview, with video of one of Oz’s many past winners, and a descriptive listing of several others. Here’s the ABC’s partial list (these are just in science categories) of those past winners:

2006 Mathematics: Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of CSIRO for calculating the number of photographs you must take to (almost) ensure that nobody in the group will have their eyes closed.

2005 Physics: John Mainstone and the late Thomas Parnell patiently conducted the pitch drop experiment, that began in 1927, in which a glob of congealed black tar has been slowly, slowly dripping through a funnel, at a rate of approximately one drop every nine years.

2005 Biology: Benjamin Smith, Craig Williams, Michael Tyler, Brian Williams, and Yoji Hayasaka for their work painstakingly smelling and cataloguing the peculiar odours produced by 131 different species of frogs when the frogs were feeling stressed.

2003 Physics: Jack Harvey, John Culvenor, Warren Payne, Steve Cowley, Michael Lawrance, David Stuart and Robyn Williams for an Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces.

2002 Interdisciplinary research: Karl Kruszelnicki of The University of Sydney, for Bellybutton Lint — The Hole Story, who gets it, when, what colour, and how much.

2001 Technology: Awarded jointly to John Keogh of Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia, for patenting the wheel in the year 2001, and to the Australian Patent Office, and to IP Australia for granting him Innovation Patent #2001100012.

Exit mobile version