|
Bizarre Theories and Science
This thread was lost because of the Hard Drive failure yesterday, so I am reloading it. Hopefully all the other threads can be restarted as well (Cosmo, you have a lot of work to do 
Ig Nobel Prize Winners 2001
IG Nobel Prizes Homepage
The 2001 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
MEDICINE
Peter Barss of McGill University, for his impactful medical report "Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts." [PUBLISHED IN: The Journal of Trauma, vol. 21, no. 11, 1984, pp. 990-1.]
PHYSICS
David Schmidt of the University of Massachusetts for his partial solution to the question of why shower curtains billow inwards.
BIOLOGY
Buck Weimer of Pueblo, Colorado for inventing Under-Ease, airtight underwear with a replaceable charcoal filter that removes bad-smelling gases before they escape.
ECONOMICS
Joel Slemrod, of the University of Michigan Business School, and Wojciech Kopczuk, of University of British Columbia, for their conclusion that people find a way to postpone their deaths if that that would qualify them for a lower rate on the inheritance tax. [REFERENCE:"Dying to Save Taxes: Evidence from Estate Tax Returns on the Death Elasticity," National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. W8158, March 2001.]
LITERATURE
John Richards of Boston, England, founder of The Apostrophe Protection Society, for his efforts to protect, promote, and defend the differences between plural and possessive.
PSYCHOLOGY
Lawrence W. Sherman of Miami University, Ohio, for his influential research report "An Ecological Study of Glee in Small Groups of Preschool Children." [PUBLISHED IN: Child Development, vol. 46, no. 1, March 1975, pp. 53-61.]
ASTROPHYSICS
Dr. Jack and Rexella Van Impe of Jack Van Impe Ministries, Rochester Hills, Michigan, for their discovery that black holes fulfill all the technical requirements to be the location of Hell. [REFERENCE: The March 31, 2001 television and Internet broadcast of the "Jack Van Impe Presents" program. (at about the 12 minute mark).]
PEACE
Viliumas Malinauskus of Grutas, Lithuania, for creating the amusement park known as "Stalin World"
TECHNOLOGY
Awarded jointly to John Keogh of Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia, for patenting the wheel in the year 2001, and to the Australian Patent Office for granting him Innovation Patent #2001100012.
PUBLIC HEALTH
Chittaranjan Andrade and B.S. Srihari of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, India, for their probing medical discovery that nose picking is a common activity among adolescents. [REFERENCE: "A Preliminary Survey of Rhinotillexomania in an Adolescent Sample," Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, vol. 62, no. 6, June 2001, pp. 426-31.]
Bizzare Theories
4th RUNNER-UP (Subject: Probability Theory): If an infinite number of
rednecks riding in an infinite number of pickup trucks fire an infinite number of shotgun rounds at an infinite number of highway signs, they will eventually produce all the world's great literary works in Braille.
3rd RUNNER-UP (Subject: Bio-Mechanics): Why Yawning Is Contagious: You yawn to equalize the pressure on your eardrums. This pressure change outside your eardrums unbalances other people's ear pressures, so they then yawn to even it out.
2nd RUNNER-UP (Subject: Symbolic Logic): Communist China is
technologically underdeveloped because they have no alphabet and therefore cannot use acronyms to communicate technical ideas at a faster rate.
1st RUNNER-UP (Subject: Newtonian Mechanics): The earth may spin faster on its axis due to deforestation. Just as a figure skater's rate of spin increases when the arms are brought in close to the body, the cutting of tall trees may cause our planet to spin dangerously fast.
HONORABLE MENTION (Subject: Linguistics): The quantity of consonants in the English language is constant. If omitted in one place, they turn up in another. When a Bostonian "pahks his cah," the lost R's migrate southwest, causing a Texan to warsh" his car and invest in "erl" wells.
GRAND PRIZE WINNER (Subject: Perpetual Motion): When a cat is dropped, it always lands on its feet, and when toast is dropped, it always landsbuttered side down. It was proposed to strap giant slabs of hot buttered toast to the back of a hundred tethered cats; the two opposing forces will cause the cats to hover, spinning inches above the ground. Using the giant buttered toast-cat array, a high-speed monorail could easily link New York with Chicago.
___________________
I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
Albert Einstein
|
