[LINK] Ig Nobel winners

[Jan Whitaker]

Australia got a mention this year. Check out Literature!

>The 2007 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
>
>MEDICINE: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and 
>Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, USA, for their 
>penetrating medical report "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects."
>
>PHYSICS: L. Mahadevan of Harvard University, 
>USA, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of 
>Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled.
>
>BIOLOGY: Prof. Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk 
>of Eindhoven University of Technology, The 
>Netherlands, for doing a census of all the 
>mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, 
>crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi 
>with whom we share our beds each night.
>
>CHEMISTRY: Mayu Yamamoto of the International 
>Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to 
>extract vanillin -- vanilla fragrance and flavoring -- from cow dung.
>WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Mayu Yamamoto
>PRESS NOTE: Toscanini's Ice Cream, the finest 
>ice cream shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 
>created a new ice cream flavor in honor of Mayu 
>Yamamoto, and introduced it at the Ig Nobel 
>ceremony. The flavor is called "Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist."
>
>LINGUISTICS: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon 
>and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Universitat de 
>Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes 
>cannot tell the difference between a person 
>speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.
>
>LITERATURE: Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue 
>Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word 
>"the" -- and of the many ways it causes problems 
>for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order.
>
>PEACE: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, 
>Ohio, USA, for instigating research & 
>development on a chemical weapon -- the 
>so-called "gay bomb" -- that will make enemy 
>soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.
>REFERENCE: "Harassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' 
>Identifying Chemicals," Wright Laboratory, 
>WL/FIVR, Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, June 1, 1994.
>
>NUTRITION: Brian Wansink of Cornell University, 
>for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites 
>of human beings, by feeding them with a 
>self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup.
>REFERENCE: Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than 
>We Think, Brian Wansink, Bantom Books, 2006, ISBN 0553804340.
>
>ECONOMICS: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, 
>for patenting a device, in the year 2001, that 
>catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them.
>REFERENCE: U.S. patent #6,219,959, granted on 
>April 24, 2001, for a "net trapping system for capturing a robber immediately."
>NOTE: The Ig Nobel Board of Governors has 
>attempted repeatedly to find Mr. Hsieh, but he 
>seems to have vanished mysteriously. [Breaking 
>news: Mr. Hsieh reportedly has seen a news 
>account of the Ig Nobel ceremony, and contacted the news agency. Details soon.]
>
>AVIATION: Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. 
>Plano and Diego A. Golombek of Universidad 
>Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, for their 
>discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.
>-------

Jan Whitaker
JLWhitaker Associates, Melbourne Victoria
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
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Living, like writing, requires no wisdom. Only 
revising does. - Jim Sollisch, Sept, 2007
'Seed planting is often the most important step. 
Without the seed, there is no plant.' - JW, April 2005
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