IgNobels 2011, wacky research inside

[The Larch]

http://www.improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2011

PHYSIOLOGY PRIZE: Anna Wilkinson (of the UK), Natalie Sebanz (of NETHERLANDS, HUNGARY, and AUSTRIA), Isabella Mandl (of AUSTRIA) and Ludwig Huber (of AUSTRIA) for their study 'No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise."

CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami of JAPAN, for determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi (pungent horseradish) to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency, and for applying this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm.

MEDICINE PRIZE: Mirjam Tuk (of THE NETHERLANDS and the UK), Debra Trampe (of THE NETHERLANDS) and Luk Warlop (of BELGIUM). and jointly to Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder and Robert Feldman (of the USA), Robert Pietrzak, David Darby, and Paul Maruff (of AUSTRALIA) for demonstrating that people make better decisions about some kinds of things — but worse decisions about other kinds of things, when they have a strong urge to urinate.

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE: Karl Halvor Teigen of the University of Oslo, NORWAY, for trying to understand why, in everyday life, people sigh.

LITERATURE PRIZE: John Perry of Stanford University, USA, for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which says: To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that's even more important.

BIOLOGY PRIZE: Darryl Gwynne (of CANADA and AUSTRALIA and the USA) and David Rentz (of AUSTRALIA and the USA) for discovering that a certain kind of beetle mates with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle

PHYSICS PRIZE: Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, Dominique Deviterne and Bruno Ragaru (of FRANCE), and Herman Kingma (of THE NETHERLANDS), for determining why discus throwers become dizzy, and why hammer throwers don't.

MATHEMATICS PRIZE: 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 predicted the world would end in 1990), Lee Jang Rim of KOREA (who predicted the world would end in 1992), Credonia Mwerinde of UGANDA (who predicted the world would end in 1999), and Harold Camping of the USA (who predicted the world would end on September 6, 1994 and later predicted that the world will end on October 21, 2011), for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.

PEACE PRIZE: Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, LITHUANIA, for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armored tank.

PUBLIC SAFETY PRIZE: John Senders of the University of Toronto, CANADA, for conducting a series of safety experiments in which a person drives an automobile on a major highway while a visor repeatedly flaps down over his face, blinding him.

I think that the wasabi alarm and the drunken beetle sex are my favourites tihs year. 

[jimmy olsen]

Airborne wasabi! 

[Ideologue]

PEACE PRIZE: Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, LITHUANIA, for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armored tank.

[Razgovory]

PEACE PRIZE: Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, LITHUANIA, for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armored tank.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-fWN0FmcIU  It's not really a tank.  A BTR of some kind.  Looks like a BTR-80.

[DGuller]

It would've been funny if that BTR flipped over while riding over the Merc, while the mayor was sitting on the hatch.  That would've been a truly awesome publicity stunt.

[Drakken]

How is worthy of a Peace price? It's basically unreasonable use of force against those luxury car owners, and thus arbitrary breach of private property.

Not that it's relevant anyway. IgNobels are just useless time wasters anyway to reward cooky scientists with too much time on their hands. It's not something one would proudly put on his research resume.

[HisMajestyBOB]

How is worthy of a Peace price? It's basically unreasonable use of force against those luxury car owners, and thus arbitrary breach of private property.

It was a stunt.

[Syt]

About the Structured Procrastination:

http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

[Razgovory]

How is worthy of a Peace price? It's basically unreasonable use of force against those luxury car owners, and thus arbitrary breach of private property.

Not that it's relevant anyway. IgNobels are just useless time wasters anyway to reward cooky scientists with too much time on their hands. It's not something one would proudly put on his research resume.

Some are useful research, but are portrayed in a way to make it seem silly.

[The Larch]

How is worthy of a Peace price? It's basically unreasonable use of force against those luxury car owners, and thus arbitrary breach of private property.

Not that it's relevant anyway. IgNobels are just useless time wasters anyway to reward cooky scientists with too much time on their hands. It's not something one would proudly put on his research resume.

Some are useful research, but are portrayed in a way to make it seem silly.

And other scientists can do both apparently silly and then serious research, like Andre Geim (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andre_Geim) who has earned both an IgNobel (for getting a frog to levitate with electromagnetism) and a real deal Nobel in Physics (for discovering graphene).