2021 Ig Nobels
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
There are roughly 300 Ig Nobel laureates, putting the Nobel prize winner percentage at 0.3% which is ahead of most universities I suspect.
Edit: actually I guess there were roughly 300 prizes awarded but many went to multiple people, making the percentage lower. But still probably better than most universities.
Based on his wikipedia page [0], you would think that Keeper of the Broom is a more prestigous title than Nobel laureate.
Ironically, it is not immediately obvious which piece of research led to which prize. Scotch tape is hardly on the cutting edge of science is it?
I guess I agree that the levitating frog business could one day lead to very impactful scientific advances, but suppressing graphene at this point is a high bar.
> Citation: Alessandro Corbetta, Jasper Meeusen, Chung-min Lee, Roberto Benzi, and Federico Toschi, "for conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do not constantly collide with other pedestrians."
> Kinetics Prize
> Citation: Hisashi Murakami, Claudio Feliciani, Yuta Nishiyama, and Katsuhiro Nishinari, "for conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do sometimes collide with other pedestrians."
"Everything got all dizzy and i was lifted up and flew upside down here to this new place."
They probably have religions based on it. Or are there opiate addict rhinos chasing helicopters around there, hoping for another hit?
(Disclaimer: yes, you will have to do a ton of boring research. But you still can fit a rhino in between that!)
There are modern methods to teaching that embrace top-down approaches. I think a lot of kids struggle with topics like math because they're never given the applicability or told why it matters. They're just force to memorize formulas they don't care about. If you could preface these classes with "look at all this cool stuff we've achieved using math" then I think you'd find some of those kids a lot more engaged.
I will tend myself as a counter example to your "everyone expects ..." comment. I don't expect a seat car belt to be funny nor a scientist to be a sitcom comedian. I do like to see a sense of humour flourish sometimes.
In the real life the zoologists that study rhinos in the wild live in permanent warfare against poachers and the organized crime nets connected to them. People that export rhino horns or lion teeth for big money and will not hesitate to shoot a witness. Many directors of African national parks need to be escorted by the army 24 hours a day against people that want they dead. All while cleaning baby rhino s*t and doing thousands of boring things as important (if not more) as finding a Hollywoodesque "Jurassic Park like" way to move a rhino by air.
There is not a lot of humor into seeing a species wanish in front of your very eyes. Maybe we need to improve our focus in the problem. This is a drama, not a Disney comedy.
If the ig-Nobel price people want a really big laugh, I would suggest to give the prize to the African scientists that work in this circumstances without even having the benefit of returning to a first world country several months a year. I can't think in a superior level of craziness.
>The wild black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis) faces a serious threat from poachers in southern Africa, along with agriculture development encroaching on its turf. This is leading to too much inbreeding. So African governments have taken to occasionally relocating the rhinos to different geographical regions to mix things up a bit. The problem is that transport by truck is difficult if not impossible, given the rugged terrain, so the Namibian Ministry of Environment and Tourism (MET) has resorted to transporting the rhinos aerially. This involves sedating the ungulates (from a safe distance) with a potent opioid and then suspending the drugged rhinos by their feet under the helicopter for as long as 30 minutes. Robin Radcliffe (Cornell University) and his co-authors noted that nobody had studied the physiological effects of this practice on the rhinos.
If you look at the list, all the research that was awarded has practical applications. All of this can be used to further our knowledge of the world, to give insight into how things work. And this is what a curious mind should strive for. To look into things like no one else has done before.
I think the scientists are people like you and me. In fact, knowing a few, I know this for a fact. They have a sense of humour, a drive to explore the world with knowledge and a healthy ability to mix the two.
> Corbetta et al. set up a six-month pedestrian-tracking experiment at three train station in Eindhoven, Netherlands, and collected data from October 2014 to March 2015 with the help of four overhead Microsoft Kinect sensors.
"for testing the hypothesis that humans evolved beards to protect themselves from punches to the face"
Impact Protection Potential of Mammalian Hair: Testing the Pugilism Hypothesis for the Evolution of Human Facial Hair https://doi.org/10.1093/iob/obaa005
Dan Quayle, "consumer of time and occupier of space" (as well as the then-U.S. Vice President), for demonstrating, better than anyone else, the need for science education.
I thought that Ig Nobel is given for useless work but I don't find this completely useless:
- Work about the sounds cats can make
- Work about gum bacteria
- Work about how to transport wild rhinceroses
Therefore I conclude Ig Nobel is not about useless work but about weird work and about work that is not immediately evident to be sensible in creating niche knowledge.
In other words, I find these works useful.
I agree, the winning research used to be much wilder, but they went a less iflamatory way in the recent years. When I now read about them from the 90s, there are some harsh burns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ig_Nobel_Prize_winners
"Yeah, like it is totally proven that it helps with punches to the face. It's like an armor like that."
ACOUSTICS PRIZE: Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada [JAPAN] for creating the SpeechJammer — a machine that disrupts a person’s speech, by making them hear their own spoken words at a very slight delay.
https://www.iflscience.com/technology/us-navy-develops-weapo...
* Well, reproduction _except_ if that earned someone the Ig Nobel prize because… yeah.