Colleccting Whale Snot With a Remote-Controlled Helicopter

We're back in Vancouver, which means we've been reading newspapers. They are, as usual, full of really strange stuff. The weirdness actually started early, though, with some wonderful reportage from CBC Radio 1 on the Twentieth First Annual Ig-Nobel awards, to which I listened while Nene purchased delicious foods late at night at the Salmon Arm Save-On-Foods.

For the uninitiated, the Ig-Nobels are presented by the folks at Improbable Research, mirror the format of the Nobels (ie prizes are presented in several categories, including Engineering, Physics, Biology, and Peace) and are, according to Nature magazine, "...arguably the highlight of the scientific calendar." According to the official website*, "The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people laugh, and then make them think," which I think is a pretty excellent thing to be honoring.

This year's winners were joined at the gala ceremony not only by past Ig-Nobel winners, but also a swag of Nobel laureates. The only dual winner, this year's Nobel laureate in Physics, Andre Geim (who won an Ig-Nobel in 2000 for using magnets to levitate a frog) was not present. Prizes this year included:

ENGINEERING PRIZE: Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin of the Zoological Society of London, UK, and Diane Gendron of Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Baja California Sur, Mexico, for perfecting a method to collect whale snot, using a remote-control helicopter.
Scarily, that makes a huge amount of sense to me. I'd never have thought of it myself though.

PHYSICS PRIZE: Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams, and Patricia Priest of the University of Otago, New Zealand, for demonstrating that, on icy footpaths in wintertime, people slip and fall less often if they wear socks on the outside of their shoes.
I was amazed that this seemed to be a new concept to the Canadian broadcaster, as parts of Canada have been known to get sub-tropical on occasion. She even jokingly suggested that Canadians might start doing putting THEIR socks on the outside of their shoes this winter. Um... yes, they might. If it works (which, apparently, it does) then surely it's a low-cost solution to a serious issue which affects millions of Canadians and other icy-clime dwellers, some of whom have little moneys. I mentioned this award to an ex-Dunedin-dweller, who was aware of the research, and of recent reportage around the research, but who highlighted some issues with exo-socks as a long-term and/or commercially-viable solution to the issue (sock-wear, primarily), but I think this at the least warrants further investigation.

PEACE PRIZE: Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston of Keele University, UK, for confirming the widely held belief that swearing relieves pain.
Canada was recently found to be the swearingest country in the world**, so this was of particular interest. And apparently they're not just talking about a reduction perception of pain, but about the actual amount of pain signal received by the brain's ouch centre. Last year's Peace Prize went to the inventor of karaoke. I have no idea what to say about that.

MANAGEMENT PRIZE: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy, for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.
I've worked for organisations who have been using this method for years.

BIOLOGY PRIZE: Libiao Zhang, Min Tan, Guangjian Zhu, Jianping Ye, Tiyu Hong, Shanyi Zhou, and Shuyi Zhang of China, and Gareth Jones of the University of Bristol, UK, for scientifically documenting fellatio in fruit bats.
This award was accepted on behalf of the team by Gareth Jones. Apparently he filled his (strictly-enforced) one-minute acceptance time-slot with a fruitbat handpuppet re-enactment of what their research uncovered. Nuff said.







* = http://improbable.com/

** = Before you jump to any conclusions, this research was conducted before we arrived in the country