The latest Ig Nobel prize winners are out. This year’s highlights include:
- An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces.
- Politicians’ Uniquely Simple Personalities.
- The First Case of Homosexual Necrophilia in the Mallard Anas platyrhynchos
A friend of mine also forwarded me this report on happiness, although I’m not too sure what the nonpecuniary domain is. The same friend also provided me with this amusing paper on the Detection of large woody debris accumulations in old-growth forests using sonic wave collection.
Another friend of mine had such fun with a Biocad machine she decided to write about it. This made me laugh.
All this of course means that a link to the classic “Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass” is all but inevitable.
Hooray for science!
i went to a presentation at my student union by the guy who organises the ig nobels — a previous winner gave a talk about his work too. although it’s a lot of fun, i was slightly disappointed that so much time and energy gets put into attempting to win one of these things.
[<a href=’http://fuddland.org.uk/archives/2003/03/13/nob_and_nobelity.php’>full story</a>]
oops, html not allowed eh? sorry about that mess at the end there.
Nope – I wrote the software myself and it was easier to replace angle brackets than parse for HTML and allow/disallow specific stuff 🙂
Talking of science, I enjoyed the story earlier this week about the PhD student who has been researching why biscuits crumble and break while still in their packets. His supervisor was quoted as saying it was very important research!