Five Ig Nobel winners travelled to Goa, India to explain how and why they have won their prize, at the Quark 2014 Techno Management Fest ‘Beyond Dimensions’ at the BITS Pilani K.K. Birla Goa Campus. On Sunday, February 9th 2014, their show starts at about 7pm local time in the auditorium. Try to be there […]
Tag: India
God-awful pollution of India’s waters
Do the gods pollute? Scientists in India, worried about the public health consequences of immersing idols in lakes and rivers, have been looking anew at water pollution. They hope, and perhaps in some cases pray, to harmonise their medical concerns with some people’s religious priorities. Most of their research has focused on idols of the elephant-headed god Ganesh, created for […]
Ig Nobel winners gathering in India
The APOGEE science festival, at BITS in Pilani, India has invited a collection of Ig Nobel Prize winners to come star in the festival on March 17 and 18. They have produced this nifty graphic, featuring the six Ig Nobellians who plan to take part: The Ig Nobel winners themselves are excited to go—and are […]
Tipu’s Tiger
Maggie Koerth-Baker, Boing-Boing’s ace science observer, is doing a series of essays about “My Favorite Museum Exhibit”. The Bishop of Durham’s rectum, on which we have spent an inordinate amount of time and space, because it has a curious back story, is there. (Well, actually, the Bishop’s bottom, what’s left of it, is in the […]
Gov’t Falling Coconut Advice Underscored
Knowingly or not, Indian government officials acted in accord with published medical advice when they ordered recently that coconuts be removed from the trees at Mumbai’s Gandhi museum for fear that a nut would descend on to the head of President Obama. Should those officials wish to more fully educate the public, they could distribute […]
The helpful roar of the cinema crowd
Noisy, chatty Indian cinema audiences extract more from their movies than audiences elsewhere. You might conclude that, if you go to an Indian cinema then read a study called The Active Audience: Spectatorship, Social Relations and the Experience of Cinema in India by Lakshmi Srinivas, published in 2002 in a journal called Media Culture and […]
India’s living dead will rally on June 30
The New Delhi Pioneer reports about a new initiative by Ig Nobel Prize winner Lal Bihari: Upper Pradesh’s ‘dead’ await justice, resurrection on June 30 In their quest to tell the world that they are still alive, hundreds of ‘dead’ drawn from all over the State would assemble in Azamgarh to observe their ‘Punarjanam Diwas’ […]
Cause and Effect: Avenging Elephants
Fr. Sunil de Silva, of the organization America Needs Fatima, reports what is (to him) almost certainly a case of cause and effect: In July 2008 a severe persecution of Christians broke out in the Indian state of Orissa….The end result saw more than 500 Christians murdered, and thousands of others injured… Recently a strange […]
The aim of the tiles
Meena Kadri looks at the psychology of tile placement: Disrupting Urination Norms In Mumbai someone kindly explained to me the custom of putting wall tiles of gods from different religions along street facades. They’re positioned at pissing height – and act as a perfect deterrent in a reverent nation.