Ig Nobel Prize-winning inventor Ron Popeil was profiled in the year 2000 by the inventive writer Malcolm Gladwell. (Thanks to Pagan Kennedy for bringing this to our attention.) Popeil was awarded the 1993 Ig Nobel Prize in the field of consumer engineering, for redefining the industrial revolution with such devices as the Veg-O-Matic, the Pocket Fisherman, […]
Category: Ig Nobel
News about the Ig Nobel Prizes — honoring achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK.
Ig Nobel Prize winner Harold Camping achieves his doom
Ig Nobel Prize winner Harold Camping is dead. Camping shared the 2011 Ig Nobel Prize for mathematics. That prize was awarded to Dorothy Martin of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1954), Pat Robertson of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1982), Elizabeth Clare Prophet of the USA (who […]
Research on kids’ indifference to, or fear of, Santa Claus
Professor John Trinkaus did several studies documenting the prevalence of indifference or fear among kids visiting Santa Claus in a shopping mall, we remind you. Professor Trinkaus was awarded the 2003 Ig Nobel Prize in literature for for meticulously collecting data and publishing more than 80 detailed academic reports about things that annoyed him (such as: What […]
Tightropes and slacklines – the math(s)
A good number of people would probably find walking across a tightrope or slackline a decidedly non-trivial task. If it helps, assistance is at hand in the form of a comprehensive mathematical analysis which looks not only at the effect of the human on the rope, but also the rope on the human – in […]