10 ms·

2021 Ig Nobels

201 points by NKosmatos 5y ago

NKosmatos 5y ago
https://www.improbable.com/2021-ceremony/winners/#ig2021 https://www.improbable.com/2021-ceremony/winners/#ig2021
h2odragon 5y ago
The stoned, upside down rhinoceroses dangling from helicopters certainly deserved a prize. I can't help but imagine the stories these critters tell. "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?
- zabzonk 5y ago
  Makes me want to be a rhinoceros.
  - lostlogin 5y ago
    It must be a conflicting issue for the Sacklers. One one hand there aren’t many rhinos, but on the other hand, they need a lot of opiates.
theologic 5y ago
This was the highlight of my day because the article was written by the head editor-in-chief of my college newspaper. (I was the opinion section editor.) I haven't seen her in 25 years, but thanks to you guys, I get to read a great article and think about old friendships.
sriram_sun 5y ago
I was curious about the DIY colonoscopy. The picture in the article, but no other mention of it other than the pic.
- duiker101 5y ago
  Check the 2018 winners. https://www.improbable.com/2021-ceremony/winners/#ig2018 https://www.improbable.com/2021-ceremony/winners/#ig2018
  - lostlogin 5y ago
    There is some gold in this. The below prize is amazing. My phone does this occasionally and it’s very difficult to speak. 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.
    - rolandog 5y ago
      Definitely have had this happen to me as well during phone calls where the other party is on speakerphone and in a place with poor room acoustics.
    - UncleSlacky 5y ago
      Unsurprisingly, it's been weaponized: https://www.iflscience.com/technology/us-navy-develops-weapon-that-could-make-it-impossible-to-speak/ https://www.iflscience.com/technology/us-navy-develops-weapo...
    - tgv 5y ago
      I thought that was long known (https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1963-07967-001 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1963-07967-001). What's so new about this?
modeless 5y ago
I learned recently that one winner of an Ig Nobel prize went on to win a Nobel prize in physics. The former for levitating a frog, and the latter for discovering that you can make graphene using Scotch tape. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andre_Geim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andre_Geim 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.
- H8crilA 5y ago
  Willing to put a confidence interval on that binomial parameter estimate? :)
- gizmo686 5y ago
  The guy who used to sweep away the paper airplanes (Roy Glauber) went on to win the Nobel prize in physics for his work in quantom optics. Based on his wikipedia page [0], you would think that Keeper of the Broom is a more prestigous title than Nobel laureate. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_J._Glauber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_J._Glauber
- drcongo 5y ago
  I may have this wrong, but I seem to remember Andre Geim being one of the very few people to turn up to accept his Ig Nobel. He's an extremely likeable character.
  - burning_hamster 5y ago
    Pretty sure the vast majority of people turn up to collect their price (outside of pandemics).
- FridayoLeary 5y ago
  >I learned recently that one winner of an Ig Nobel prize went on to win a Nobel prize in physics. The former for levitating a frog, and the latter for discovering that you can make graphene using Scotch tape. 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?
JimTheMan 5y ago
Yet another excuse I can provide for letting myself go and growing out a beard like a professor or a 'person of no fixed address'. "Yeah, like it is totally proven that it helps with punches to the face. It's like an armor like that."
lucb1e 5y ago
That moment when you realize you were a subject in a study that went on to win an Ig Nobel prize: > 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.
kibwen 5y ago
> Physics Prize > 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."
- surajs 5y ago
  Not looking forward thanks
jpmattia 5y ago
My all time favorite award in 1991 for Education: 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.
- wiredfool 5y ago
  I really liked the Dead Salmon in an FMRI one.
mngnt 5y ago
What I absolutely love about the Ig Nobels (beside the occasional chuckle and general mood improvement they bring me) is how they highlight that science can be fun. Many kids and young adults don´t want to get into science for fear of having to do research into some boring subject they don´t care about. And these show you that your research can get a completely different direction, studying upside down rhinos hanging from a helicopter or that theatre smell that weirds you out or why you breathe better after sex or if your cat is trying to tell you something. Whatever fascinates you, go ahead and study it. There´s an Ig Nobel waiting for you. (Disclaimer: yes, you will have to do a ton of boring research. But you still can fit a rhino in between that!)
- pvaldes 5y ago
  The problem is that science shouldn't be taken as entertainment for children. In the end we are slowly assimilating that boring science is disappointing and that bombastic science is the good science. This is a catastrophic move as society. Nobody expects a seat car belt to be funny and have a nice pattern of flowers. Everybody expects scientists to be able to act as sitcom comedians or fit in a cartoonist character. Why?
  - gerdesj 5y ago
    mngmt never mentioned children's entertainers. They simply said that they like to find humour in science and implied that they may have dallied with an inverted rhino. 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.
    - pvaldes 5y ago
      Personally I think that telling children that zoology equals to playing with rhinos in airplanes and making scientists appear as a happy Capitan America in the jungle is lying profoundly to them. Even worse; IgNobel prizes and their cherry-picked examples are perpetuating the infamous myth of "scientists are crazy people (so we should do the opposite that they say?)". 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.
bertil 5y ago
I love of the Ig Nobel are an asterisks on the scientific method where you talk a big game about hypothesis, documentation, falsifiability, reproduction*, peer-review, etc. * Well, reproduction _except_ if that earned someone the Ig Nobel prize because… yeah.
type0 5y ago
Their Peace Prize seems more legit than the real one. "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 https://doi.org/10.1093/iob/obaa005
LightG 5y ago
Some of these are genuinely laugh-out-loud. Thanks.
RickJWagner 5y ago
Only through the magic of taxation and government can such strides be made.
_nalply 5y ago
I was surprised about the entries. 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.
- mngnt 5y ago
  From https://www.improbable.com/ https://www.improbable.com/ : Research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ig_Nobel_Prize_winners

2021 Ig Nobels

201 points by NKosmatos 5y ago

https://www.improbable.com/2021-ceremony/winners/#ig2021 https://www.improbable.com/2021-ceremony/winners/#ig2021

The stoned, upside down rhinoceroses dangling from helicopters certainly deserved a prize. I can't help but imagine the stories these critters tell. "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?

zabzonk 5y ago
Makes me want to be a rhinoceros.
- lostlogin 5y ago
  It must be a conflicting issue for the Sacklers. One one hand there aren’t many rhinos, but on the other hand, they need a lot of opiates.

theologic 5y ago

This was the highlight of my day because the article was written by the head editor-in-chief of my college newspaper. (I was the opinion section editor.) I haven't seen her in 25 years, but thanks to you guys, I get to read a great article and think about old friendships.

sriram_sun 5y ago

I was curious about the DIY colonoscopy. The picture in the article, but no other mention of it other than the pic.

duiker101 5y ago
Check the 2018 winners. https://www.improbable.com/2021-ceremony/winners/#ig2018 https://www.improbable.com/2021-ceremony/winners/#ig2018
- lostlogin 5y ago
  There is some gold in this. The below prize is amazing. My phone does this occasionally and it’s very difficult to speak. 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.
  - rolandog 5y ago
    Definitely have had this happen to me as well during phone calls where the other party is on speakerphone and in a place with poor room acoustics.
  - UncleSlacky 5y ago
    Unsurprisingly, it's been weaponized: https://www.iflscience.com/technology/us-navy-develops-weapon-that-could-make-it-impossible-to-speak/ https://www.iflscience.com/technology/us-navy-develops-weapo...
  - tgv 5y ago
    I thought that was long known (https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1963-07967-001 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1963-07967-001). What's so new about this?

modeless 5y ago

I learned recently that one winner of an Ig Nobel prize went on to win a Nobel prize in physics. The former for levitating a frog, and the latter for discovering that you can make graphene using Scotch tape. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andre_Geim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andre_Geim 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.

H8crilA 5y ago
Willing to put a confidence interval on that binomial parameter estimate? :)
gizmo686 5y ago
The guy who used to sweep away the paper airplanes (Roy Glauber) went on to win the Nobel prize in physics for his work in quantom optics. Based on his wikipedia page [0], you would think that Keeper of the Broom is a more prestigous title than Nobel laureate. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_J._Glauber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_J._Glauber
drcongo 5y ago
I may have this wrong, but I seem to remember Andre Geim being one of the very few people to turn up to accept his Ig Nobel. He's an extremely likeable character.
- burning_hamster 5y ago
  Pretty sure the vast majority of people turn up to collect their price (outside of pandemics).
FridayoLeary 5y ago
>I learned recently that one winner of an Ig Nobel prize went on to win a Nobel prize in physics. The former for levitating a frog, and the latter for discovering that you can make graphene using Scotch tape. 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?

JimTheMan 5y ago

Yet another excuse I can provide for letting myself go and growing out a beard like a professor or a 'person of no fixed address'. "Yeah, like it is totally proven that it helps with punches to the face. It's like an armor like that."

lucb1e 5y ago

That moment when you realize you were a subject in a study that went on to win an Ig Nobel prize: > 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.

kibwen 5y ago

> Physics Prize > 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."

surajs 5y ago
Not looking forward thanks

jpmattia 5y ago

My all time favorite award in 1991 for Education: 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.

wiredfool 5y ago
I really liked the Dead Salmon in an FMRI one.

mngnt 5y ago

What I absolutely love about the Ig Nobels (beside the occasional chuckle and general mood improvement they bring me) is how they highlight that science can be fun. Many kids and young adults don´t want to get into science for fear of having to do research into some boring subject they don´t care about. And these show you that your research can get a completely different direction, studying upside down rhinos hanging from a helicopter or that theatre smell that weirds you out or why you breathe better after sex or if your cat is trying to tell you something. Whatever fascinates you, go ahead and study it. There´s an Ig Nobel waiting for you. (Disclaimer: yes, you will have to do a ton of boring research. But you still can fit a rhino in between that!)

pvaldes 5y ago
The problem is that science shouldn't be taken as entertainment for children. In the end we are slowly assimilating that boring science is disappointing and that bombastic science is the good science. This is a catastrophic move as society. Nobody expects a seat car belt to be funny and have a nice pattern of flowers. Everybody expects scientists to be able to act as sitcom comedians or fit in a cartoonist character. Why?
- gerdesj 5y ago
  mngmt never mentioned children's entertainers. They simply said that they like to find humour in science and implied that they may have dallied with an inverted rhino. 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.
  - pvaldes 5y ago
    Personally I think that telling children that zoology equals to playing with rhinos in airplanes and making scientists appear as a happy Capitan America in the jungle is lying profoundly to them. Even worse; IgNobel prizes and their cherry-picked examples are perpetuating the infamous myth of "scientists are crazy people (so we should do the opposite that they say?)". 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.

bertil 5y ago

I love of the Ig Nobel are an asterisks on the scientific method where you talk a big game about hypothesis, documentation, falsifiability, reproduction*, peer-review, etc. * Well, reproduction _except_ if that earned someone the Ig Nobel prize because… yeah.

type0 5y ago

Their Peace Prize seems more legit than the real one. "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 https://doi.org/10.1093/iob/obaa005

LightG 5y ago

Some of these are genuinely laugh-out-loud. Thanks.

RickJWagner 5y ago

Only through the magic of taxation and government can such strides be made.

_nalply 5y ago

I was surprised about the entries. 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.

mngnt 5y ago
From https://www.improbable.com/ https://www.improbable.com/ : Research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ig_Nobel_Prize_winners