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All Hail The Consumers of Time and Occupiers of Space
(Hi! This is a bigger-than-usual edition of Everything Is Amazing, and it probably won’t fit in your Inbox, so you’ll have to click through to see the whole thing. Just click on the title and it’ll open the Web version for you.)
Well, it’s official - the Ig Nobels are leaving the United States, at least for now.
I’ve written before about my love of these satirical science awards - particularly how they invite winners in to share the joke, like lab colleagues good-naturedly ribbing each other while respecting the important work they’re doing:
In 2000, Sir Andrew Geim was joint-awarded the Ig Nobel for Physics, along with Michael Berry, for their work in levitating a frog using diamagnetism. Ten years later, Geim would joint-win the actual Nobel Prize for Physics for his work with the carbon allotrope Graphene, a material that’s currently making headlines for how it’s unlocking all sorts of new scientific breakthrough.
But the Ig Nobels are also intentionally daft. They make a priority of aiming for a LOL - like how, in the very first ceremony in 1991, then-US-Vice-President Dan Quayle won in the Education category “for demonstrating, better than anyone else, the need for science education.”
(I also love their description of him: “consumer of time and occupier of space.”)
That’s the other side of the awards, the utterly merciless roasting - and it’s just as fun.
The 1991 Ig Nobel Prize for PEACE: awarded to Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and first champion of the Star Wars weapons system, for his lifelong efforts to change the meaning of peace as we know it.
The 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for MEDICINE: awarded to James Johnston of R.J. Reynolds, Joseph Taddeo of U.S. Tobacco, Andrew Tisch of Lorillard, William Campbell of Philip Morris, Edward A. Horrigan of Liggett Group, Donald S. Johnston of American Tobacco Company, and the late Thomas E. Sandefur, Jr., chairman of Brown and Williamson Tobacco Co. for their unshakable discovery, as testified to the U.S. Congress, that nicotine is not addictive.
The 2009 Ig Nobel Prize for MATHEMATICS: awarded to Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank, for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers — from very small to very big — by having his bank print bank notes with denominations ranging from one cent ($.01) to one hundred trillion dollars ($100,000,000,000,000).
The 2020 Ig Nobel Prize for MEDICAL EDUCATION: awarded to [BRAZIL, UK, INDIA, MEXICO, BELARUS, USA, TURKEY, RUSSIA, TURKMENISTAN] Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom, Narendra Modi of India, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, Donald Trump of the USA, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow of Turkmenistan, for using the Covid-19 viral pandemic to teach the world that politicians can have a more immediate effect on life and death than scientists and doctors can.
(Wince.)
Now the Ig Nobels will be held in Zurich, beginning with this year’s ceremony on the 3rd September - and although the official (and perfectly believable) reason for this is the increasing difficulty in getting nominees to attend, I wonder if this isn’t going to feature in the awards? If so, I can understand the organisers not wanting to be in the U.S. when that’s announced….
So - for whatever reason, it’s all change after 35 years. And as a fan of the Ig Nobels and of utterly shameless listicles, I can’t resist the call here.
Here’s the first part of a roundup of thirty-five Ig Nobel Awards that tickle me no end.
1. THE 2012 IG NOBEL PRIZE FOR ACOUSTICS
You know when you’re on a Zoom call and the other person isn’t using headphones and hasn’t muted their audio, so you’re met with a slightly delayed version of your own voice every time you speak?
More than a decade ago, Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada first discovered what we’ve all now learned from bitter experience - that it’s incredibly annoying when this happens, and can instantly derail your train of thought.
The device they used to demonstrate this is called the SpeechJammer, and it was built with a noble purpose in mind:
“This technology ... could also be useful to ensure speakers in a meeting take turns appropriately, when a particular participant continues to speak, depriving others of the opportunity to make their fair contribution.”
This also made me realise we can do this manually!
Is someone in your already tedious work Zoom meeting just droning on and on, and you’re ready to ask them to finish their contribution before somebody dies? Simple! Just slyly unplug your headphones, nudge your speakers up to full volume and SpeechJammer the wretch until they splutter to a halt.
Oh dear, sorry about the technical difficulties, you say with hand-wringing contrition. But I think it’s fixed now. So, where were we?
(NOTE: you probably only get to try this once, or twice if your acting skills are up to the challenge. Choose your moment wisely!)
2. THE 2005 IG NOBEL PRIZE FOR ECONOMICS
How much do you rely on the snooze button on your alarm clock or phone to get you up in the morning?
I’m not here to judge you either way - although it seems that repeat snoozers suffer no ill effects and may even have slightly sharper minds than instant-arisers.
However, if you’re in the latter category as I am, and you want your alarm clock to absolutely, unambiguously get you out of damn bed the very first time it goes off, maybe you need the clock invented by Gauri Nanda of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology two decades ago.
It’s called Clocky, and it has one job - to infuriate you awake in the shortest time possible. Yes, it has a snooze button, but it also has wheels, and when that alarm rings, off it scarpers across your room in as fast and as random a path as possible…
Alas, there’s only one way to shut it up.
Thus its mission is accomplished, maybe adding hours of productivity to your workday - or even helping you meet the love of your life!
3. THE 2014 IG NOBEL PRIZE FOR NEUROSCIENCE
If you’ve been reading me for a while, you’ll know my soft spot for the human visual bias called pareidolia - which is how you can see Marlene Dietrich, Gillian Anderson or the Virgin Mary in the grilled cheese sandwich that Diana Duyser sold to GoldenPalace.com for $28,000 in 2004.
It’s also how you can see this aggressively drunk octopus:
But in 2014, the international team of Jiangang Liu, Jun Li, Lu Feng, Ling Li, Jie Tian, and Kang Lee, went deeper - asking what is actually happening in the brains of people who can see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast.
As I said in my original write-up:
“There’s a region of your brain called the right fusiform face area that’s strongly associated with processing the patterns of human facial features, letting us spot the faces of our loved ones in a sea of strangers. And when it gets activated, it so easily drowns out other conflicting messages. It’s like a megaphone at a town hall meeting.
Only problem is: like every other process, it’s working with the same “corner-cutting” visual guesswork inputs. And it’s easily tricked into making mistakes, as with Upside-Down Adele.”
More recently, researchers from the University of Queensland in Australia found that pregnant women and new mothers seem to have hightened sensitivity to face pareidolia - perhaps to help with social bonding between mothers and infants, perhaps facilitated by increased levels of the hormone & neurotransmitter oxytocin.
There’s clearly much more work to be done here. But any mechanism in the brain for heightening emotional connections to parts of the world around us - for making us care about it, in a way that motivates us into acquiring a sense of stewardship around it - is well worth learning more about.
Coming up after the paywall:
Dodgy car manufacturing…
madly excessive co-authorship…
an inventive (if highly inadvisible) way of tackling a snakebite…
the remarkable minds of taxis drivers…
the best way to beat procrastination…
…and other lovable madness.
