2021 Ig Nobel Prize Grab Bag, Part 1

busy time for us. Yeah. I think we've covered the ig Nobels every year since we started covering them, and I'm not sure when that year was. Maybe it was like two thousand seven, two eight or something. I don't know, it's pretty early on. Um, we almost never cover them right away because, like you said, there's there's generally a lot going on. The awards usually come out during September or very early October, and so we're either wrapped up in Halloween stuff I then, or we're getting ready to

do Halloween stuff or something like that. Uh, So we generally come in like late November or part of sometime in November or in this case, very early December. But I guess it's better late than never. And uh, I guess one of the cool things about this is is we kind of come in after the initial coverage and chew on them a bit more. So, if you're waiting on these episodes and you and you're inclined to complain,

just don't stop. But if you're not familiar, the ig no Bells are a series of awards given out once a year by a scientific humor journal called the Annals of Improbable Research that's been edited for many years now by somebody named Mark Abraham's and the stated purpose of this of these awards is to quote honor achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think. So to give you an idea if if you haven't heard one of these episodes before and you've never read about

the ig Nobels. Among the awards we covered last or there was a prize in the material science category for research into whether you could make a knife blade out of frozen feces. What was the verdict on that? I think it was no right that no matter how hard you freeze them, they just don't really cut. I believe

so um, you know, it reminds me of Yeah. I think they think that the research ended up saying, yeah, like you, no matter how hard it gets, uh, you're still gonna have a certain amount of melting that's going to take place, right because the friction on the sharp end will will pretty quickly wear it away and then it's then it's blunt. Yeah, better to make it like a frozen poop warhammer, I think, so that could shatter.

I don't know, we'll look into that in the future. Um, but then let's see what was One of the other ones we did last year was there was a prize in the acoustics category for a study that made alligators huff helium to see if it made their voices higher pitched. I remember that. Yeah. So occasionally the papers that get selected for these prizes are I think originally themselves intended

to be satirical or funny. One example like that that comes to mind is, uh, there was a rayology study one year about whether cats should be considered a solid or a liquid. That that was a good one, but clearly there was a good bit of jokiness about the paper itself most of the time. Actually, this the research covered in in these prizes, is it's just straightforward research. They're they're straightforward experiments published in real scientific journals that

happened to have some weirdly hilarious methodology or finding. Yeah. Either you know, it varies, but you know, sometimes it's it's just a particular experiment that is hilarious or giggle inducing. Um. Other times it's just the minutia of it, you know, one of those kind of a shrimp on a treadmill situation where it may it's still important work. It's all part of the general um, you know, expansion of scientific knowledge of of the universe, but it just in an

area that we might not think about. Or sometimes it's just an important study that involves like pooper vomit or something, and therefore just by ver orteese or something, you know, just by virtue of the subject, kissing, yeah, is inherently funny. Now, in these episodes we're doing on on the Igno Bells, we're just going to pick out a few of the prizes to highlight because there was something about them that

we wanted to talk about. We're not gonna have a chance to cover all of the winners, but if you want to read about those. You can go to the Annals of Improbable Research website at Improbable dot com and you can see the full list of the awards and click on links to to read about them. I mean, and not only the most recent awards, but you can go back through the entire history of the Igno Bells and just and explore them all. It's a very simple,

easy to use website. Well, I am ready to get started if you are, Uh, let's do it, okay, Well, the first area I wanted to get into was actually this will be a pair of thematically linked prizes from this. The first is the Physics Prize, which went to Alessandro Corbetta, Jasper Mayu, Sen Chung Min Lee, Roberto Benzi, and Federico Tashi quote for conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do

not constantly collide with other pedestrians. And then the second here is the Kinetics Prize, which went to his Sashimurakami, Claudio Feliciani, Utah Nishi Yama, and katsu Hero Nishi Nari. And this is quote for conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do sometimes collide with other pedestrians. Uh, Rob, have you ever had a really memorable, just bodily head on with somebody. I was trying to remember if I had,

and I could not bring any instances to mind. Though I have run into plenty of things in my life. I run into tree branches and sliding glass doors, but I can't really think of any head ons with humans except maybe while playing soccer. Yeah, thinking back, yes, certainly, I there have been more than a few low hanging branches that have have clipped the top of my head or tried to stab me in the eye, that sort

of thing. But in terms of of running into people, um even in crowded cities, and like I was just in um in New Orleans, and you know, those are some crowded streets at times, and those are also some drunken streets at times. You know they're folks wandering around in various states of inebriation, and yet you don't see

people just colliding with each other. I feel like I've had I can think maybe to some close calls in the past where you have that moment where you almost run into somebody and you both kind of acknowledge it and it's a little bit awkward, but still it's not like you see. I guess in a lot of like comedy films where people just plow into each other, knock their groceries down, and then they have a romantic moment

as they pick up each other's groceries, that sort of thing. Yes, why is it romantic comedies where people plow into each other? I guess there's something metaphorical about that, about you know, the oh you came into my life like a like a large, massive meat slamming me in the face. Yeah. Because Yeah, in general, you don't see like fights breaking out because people ran into each other, or at least

I don't think I've ever seen that occur. I mean it probably has occurred, but not with the regularity you might expect, given just how intense uh streets and sidewalks are at times. Yeah, and I think this is something we should keep in mind as we discussed this research. It's interesting how rare collisions are given how often huge masses of people are just criss crossing with each other all day. So to actually reference the two papers here,

the first one was Corbetta at all. This was in Physical Review E in eighteen and it was called Physics based Modeling and Data Representation of pair wise interactions among pedestrians. And then the second paper the Kinetics Prize was called Mutual anticipation can contribute to self organization and human crowds. This was by more commy at all in one in

Science Advances. Now, I was interested in this pair of findings not only because I was obviously amused by the image of people just absolutely eating each other's teeth in in high speed sidewalk collisions, but because this is one of those ignoble subjects where once you get beyond the mildly funny image it conjures, it actually raises quite i think, quite deep, mysterious, fascinating questions about the emergent mathematical properties of human behavior in groups. And it's also a subject

that goes way beyond mere curiosity. Understanding the flow of crowds is a matter of life and death. It is a vitally important subject for all kinds of reasons. So this involves questions like how do masses of people move through space on foot? What rules govern their behavior both as individuals and as as a group, How can that behavior be influenced, and especially how does the built environment shape that behavior? Uh, you know, as you were alluding

to a minute ago. I think it's actually kind of amazing how pedestrians can navigate through crowds without running into each other. It's one of those, you know, thousand little miracles of human human brain capacity that we don't usually notice or appreciate. But you can have huge crowds moving quickly and bi directionally mean running at cross directions, past each other, straight through each other, and uh and most

of the time people are able to avoid human crashes. Yeah, and it it seems to be the case no matter where you go, even though I will say, and this is just uh my my observation. I don't know to what extent this this holds up to research, but it feels like in in some parts of the world, the the energy of love, say, the movement of crowds on a sidewalk can feel different, can a little bit different, you know, but it's still maintaining, you know, the same

collision free experience. You know, like like maybe there's there's something slightly different going on there, there's some sort of there are different cultural norms in place regarding say, like what side of the sidewalk people moving this way should be on, or or so or so forth, or or even maybe you know how much space is permittable between you and the next person, but still people are managing

not to blow into each other. Yeah. So to discuss a few of the details of these two studies, regarding

the first one, Corbetta at all from from eighteen. I was reading about this uh in an article that had a few interview clips um from in l Times, and this was looking at Technical University Eindhoven researchers Federico Tashi and Alessandro Corbetta and uh so their study in particular was looking at the question of how pedestrians avoid running into each other when moving through the Eindhoven train station, and they did this by installing sensors under the plow

forms of the train station which they used to track the movements of pedestrians across the platform. So this was an area of like twenty seven square meters and they tracked pedestrian movement within it for six months. This came out to measuring the movements about five million pedestrians total, and they found a few measurable quantities. So first of all, they said that people keep an average distance of about seventy five centimeters away from other people while moving through crowds,

so that's about two and a half feet. And they said that about one out of every thousand people quote will turn around and go back the way they came to avoid bumping into somebody else. According to Alessandro Corbetta, quote, about eighty of the pedestrians actually collided with each other. The other pedestrians adjusted their walking route when they were at least a hundred and forty centimeters which is about four ft and seven inches apart, and thus managed to

avoid a collision. And though I was wondering about that, so he gives the number eighty eight pedestrians collided. Does that mean eighty pedestrians total, meaning roughly forty collisions or is that like, uh, there were eighty collisions, which would make you think they'd be like at least a hundred and sixty people involved. I'm not sure. Well, it raises the question how many people are necessary to create a collision?

Is it one? Or is it too it's at least two, I mean you could have more, I guess, But is it I guess it depends on like is it is it negligence on one person's part that leads to collision? Or negligence or distraction whatever on two people's parts. You know, Ah, well that will I will actually come up in the other study, I think. But what this study found is that, yeah, people are constantly monitoring for upcoming collisions and then adjusting

their walking trajectories accordingly several meters in advance. So ultimately, the question here is it's not really relevant exactly how many people slammed faces, but how on average pedestrians adjust their courses to avoid collisions. What rules do they use to make those those evasions? And this just apparently happens constantly.

We're usually not even aware of it. But you know, I can recall, like moving through an airport or something, you are just doing a delicate dance for for several minutes of a time at a time, often you know, just dodging dodging, dodging, dodging, and you don't even really think about it. It's a process that can be be oddly captivating, I find, you know, especially if I'm on my own, I don't have to worry about anyone else,

you know, traveling with me. Uh, you know, cutting a swath for them to travel through, you know, checking back on how they're doing it. It's just me cutting through, um, like a reasonable sized crowd or a reasonable flow of pedestrian traffic. Uh, it feels kind of empowering. Well, yeah it is, and I think that highlights one of the interesting features there, which is that, um, so when you're moving through a crowd, you are making individual decisions, like

and those decisions are being driven by different things. Like, on one hand, you've got your basic propulsive drive, like you have where you need to be and the course

you think you need to take to get there. And then probably the second main thing governing your movement is what these researchers would refer to as social forces, which would be things like the taboo against touching other people while you're walking, or basically the force that keeps you separate from other people and makes you want to avoid

running into them or touching them in some other way. Yeah, because there's a physical risk to actually running into somebody, and there is like a social risk to not only running into somebody, but even almost running into somebody, yeah, even getting too close exactly. But so while those forces are are guiding your decision making as an individual, you are a thinking person and you you know there are cognitive inputs, like you are moving through this crowd as

an individual. It's strange that take thousands of people and they're all making these individual decisions based on these types of forces, you know, their drive forces, and their and their restrictive social forces. And yet when you look at them as a group, they seem to behave in ways

that are predictable. Even though they're making in these individual decisions, they behave in ways that can quite well be modeled and predicted and understood by things that are that are like physics models the way the same way that you would model, say, the movements of a fluid, you know, a gas or a liquid through a container than and so the authors of this first study you're saying, well, by studying the natural movement patterns of pedestrians and trying

to model them in in terms of the language of physics on a large scale, Uh, this can be useful in terms of things like architecture and design. You know, you can design better spaces for people to walk, both in terms of efficiency the throughput how many people can move through them quickly, but also in terms of safety because as we know, and as I'll talk about in a bit, UH, crowds can become quite dangerous when when

density gets too high. Now, I was also reading an article that that had a few uh quotes from these researchers, And this was an article for Physics, the magazine of the American Physical Society by Michael scherber Uh. And this one also discussed the second winner, the winner of the Kinetics Prize, the paper that was by Murakami at all. And this study was interesting too. So it instead of measuring, you know, putting sensors under a floor and measuring natural movement,

it's staged experiments. So this study asked volunteers to walk by directionally, so imagine people crossing each other, walking in opposite directions the way they would say, like a crowded crosswalk in the street. And then it tried to see what happens when when people walk by directionally under normal circumstances, and then what happens when some of those people are distracted, specifically, what happens when they're trying to do calculations on their phones.

And the purpose of this experiment was to interfere with people's ability to see collisions coming and avoid them. Now, it probably won't come as a big surprise that pedestrians who were distracted by phones made more navigation mistakes, leading to a number of near collisions. But even when not distracted, people sometimes had difficulty and uh. One of the implications of this experiment is that avoiding collisions is a collaborative effort.

It requires awareness and coordination of multiple parties, both looking at each other and trying to assess what paths they're about to take, and then adjusting their own paths in accordingly. And this becomes difficult when even just one of these parties is distracted, especially if multiple parties are distracted. I was also reading an interview with one of the researchers

from the second study, the coninectics ees UM. This was on a Swiss news site swiss Info dot c H and it was an interview by Zeno Soccatelli with a researcher named Claudio Feliciani who works at the University of Tokyo but who originally hails from Switzerland. And so Feliciani

mentioned a few interesting things in this interview. One is that, okay, so when you when you have people not distracted, UM, how do they tend to move in groups when they're moving by directionally, like you imagine people crossing each two crowds at at a busy crosswalk trying to go past each other. How do they normally move? And Feliciani says that what tends to happen is people automatically self organize

into lines. People tend to naturally follow the person directly in front of them, and simply by obeying this rule, the moving crowd naturally forms into lanes or lines of people. And so they were trying to understand the mechanisms that make these lines form and how they work. Of course, you know one way understand how something works is to

see if you can break it. Um So, Feliciani says, quote specifically, we caused some of the pedestrians to be distracted, asking them to walk while solving simple calculations on their phones. With just three out of fifty four people focused on something else, rows formed much less quickly, especially if the distracted people were at the front of the group, and the increased attention of the non distractors is not enough to make up for the lack of attention of the

three who are distracted. And then on this website there is actually video I could watch maybe you want to take a look, rob But there's video that shows how people move in these lines under normal conditions, and then what it looks like when just a few of them are distracted. So not everybody is trying to do math on their phone. Just a few people, just a few people out of the fifty four completely screw things up and everybody gets jammed up. The lanes stone form naturally.

Uh So it seems like its navigating through crowds by directionally. It has this tendency to for you know, self organizing emergent structures to form, but that requires everybody to be paying attention and monitoring each other and sort of communicating nonverbally about where they're headed. This is interesting. I mean, of course, this has huge ramifications on a are already you know, near ubiquitous use of smartphones and the fact that people will have them out while they're walking around.

But it also makes me wonder about, you know, the more we push into this idea of augmented reality, of of having some sort of you know, a metaverse that is digitally imposed on the world around us. Uh, you know, what's what's that going to do? Or does it make it easier? I don't know like I can. Maybe you imagine the case being made that like, well, you're not looking at your screen, You're looking at the world around you for this information, which you were probably already doing

and potentially distracted by, just as a normal pedestrian pre smartphone. Well, I mean it is yet another one of those things are we have surprisingly powerful capacities, you know, like we can do things that are kind of amazing if you sit and think about them, like walking through crowds without collisions or driving a car, but we also fail to have the metacognitive recognition of how much attention it takes

to do that correctly. So you have people not realizing how impaired they are when they're texting while driving, or uh, not quite appreciating how quickly this entire crosswalk will get jammed up if just a couple of people are distracted while they're walking. But anyway, I just got really interested in the subject of the the modeling of the flow

of human crowds. Um uh. Like one idea that that I found very sticky is I was looking at a paper from two thousand three in the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics by Roger L. Hughes, who is who worked in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Melbourne, and the paper is called the Flow of Human Crowds, and he was discussing the idea that human movements could be modeled like like the flow of of non human substances, you know, just like molasses flowing

out of a jar, or like the way particles of gas move around in a container. But of course it's complicated by the fact that there are social inputs on the movement, even if the movement can be modeled like the movement of a physical substance at the large scale. Uh. And he ended up characterizing crowds as the field of

quote thinking fluids, which is just wonderful. Uh. And so this isn't related to either of the prize winners I was just talking about, but I was also I ended up reading another really interesting article on the subject of physical and mathematical modeling of crowdflow. And this was an

article in Smithsonian Magazine from January by Evelyn Lamb. It was called how fluid dynamics can help You Navigate crowds And so the premise of this article is that because the of human crowds can be modeled like the flow of physical substances. Physics modeling can also offer suggestions to individual members of crowds for how to move through them in the safest and best way, at least potentially. I mean,

there's a lot of uncertainty. Uh this, I guess it's kind of a young scientific field right now, but um that it could potentially offer individual advice in addition to the stuff we already talked about, like informing how to better design spaces for people to walk through and uh so, of course, this article mentioned some of the same research we already talked about, such as the the idea that moving crowds tend to form the self organizing natural lanes or lines, often just by a rule as simple as

you directly follow the person ahead of you. But then this article goes on to side a few researchers offering some other observations. So one thing is that it cites a researcher named Dirk Helping, who is at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Zurich and who studies computation

all social science. Um, I just noticed, I wonder if there's like a big center of crowdflow study in Switzerland, because several of these uh of these papers have had Swiss connections of one kind or another, so springing off of some stuff that that helping says here, Lamb actually highlights a couple of the main governing forces that appear to drive the individual behaviors of people within crowds, and I think they actually they sort of line up with

what we're talking about a minute ago. So on one hand, you've got a force that propels the person towards their goal. They're they're trying to get somewhere, and then second you've got the social forces that prevent them from doing something, mostly prevent them from colliding with with other people in the crowd. And regarding that second force, the social force,

I thought this was really interesting. The article makes the case that it is similar to the repulsive force that keeps particles from colliding, like physical particles, and in the case of physic goal like atoms and molecules, this would be the electromagnetic force. Electrons of course repel one another. They've got like charges, they push back against each other, and in the case of particles, you can actually calculate the strength of the repulsive force via what's known as

the inverse square law. So the inverse square law is a very important mathematical principle that applies throughout physics. Basically, it applies to any quantity of energy or force propagating out from a central source in three dimensions, and it says that the that quantity will decrease, not just in a linear way as you move away from the source, but it will decrease according to the square of the

distance between you and the source. So a simpler way to conceptualize this is that when you're thinking about light intensity, or gravity or electromagnetic repulsive forces between particles, proximity really matters, and a force that is almost undetectable at a distance can become very strong as you can close. So this is true of particles avoiding collisions in flowing masses of liquid or gas. But it's also true of humans moving in a crowd, uh, though in a slightly different way.

And then the article calls attention to a paper that made a really interesting discovery back in so this paper was by Johannis Karamutzas, Brian Skinner, and Stephen Jay Guy and Physical Review letters called universal power law governing pedestrian interactions, and the author summarize their findings like this, They say, quote, here we introduce a novel statistical mechanical approach to directly

measure the interaction energy between pedestrians. This analysis, when applied to a large collection of human motion data, reveals a simple power law interaction that is based not on the physical separation between pedestrians, but on their projected time to a future collision, and it's therefore fundamentally anticipatory in nature.

So this really got me. So so there is a rule in operation just automatically in moving human crowds that works somewhat like the inverse square law for the repulsion between particles in a fluid, but it's a repulsion based not just on physical proximity. It's based on the anticipation of movement pathways. So you can think about it this way. If you're in a big crowd of people and you're moving along on the sidewalk, you can actually be very

close to another person. So you can be walking beside somebody parallel, side by side, or you can even be pretty close to the person ahead of you or behind you walking in the same direction, where you have to adjust your path to avoid a collision is when you notice that your path is about to cross somebody else's. And we calculate these adjustments not purely in terms of distance,

but in terms of time. That like, the variable is time to collision based on the current speed of your movement, and people are typically anticipating about one to three seconds into the future, depending on the characteristics of the crowd. Thank so, people use these rules pretty reliably to move in crowds, and as we've said already, they can usually avoid collisions. But there are some situations where the rules stop working, particularly as the density of the crowd increases.

The higher the density, the more your collision avoidance skills are overwhelmed and different principles take over. And sometimes, unfortunately, these situations can turn very dangerous. Uh. You know, people are killed in crowds all the time, at everything from

music festivals to religious events. And I think a lot of times when people read reporting about about deaths through through crowd crush and crowd dynamics, I think a lot of times people fail to understand exactly what's happening in these situations, Like they sometimes seem to imagine that this must result from the crowds being somehow evil like violent or malicious or chaotic, or at least the news reporting on these events sometimes has that kind of tone, and

this is not necessarily the case at all. People in large crowds can easily be injured or killed simply by the uncontrollable flow of human bodies through space. Like you don't have to imagine people in the crowd wanting to trample each other. There there are irresistible physical forces at work, like you could you could essentially have a large mass of people attending a rally about the importance of crowd safety and if we're not managed properly, it could result

in injury. Right. Yeah, So say maybe you're trying to quickly move a huge, massive people and they're moving through a corridor that's originally a hundred meters wide and then suddenly it narrows to five ms wide. Uh, this could

this could spell disaster. And you can also imagine scenarios where, you know, especially at events that are attracting big crowds, non crowdflow dynamics can can have exactly the wrong incentives for how to shape those spaces, right, Like maybe at a big music festival or something, you want to have choke points that control access to spaces, maybe so that you can check for tickets or who knows what UM.

But but it's exactly at areas where there are there are things like bottlenecks where suddenly the density of the crowd increases dramatically and unexpectedly, that things can really get dangerous. And researchers in this field studying crowdflow have actually uh looked at a lot of video documentation to come up with models to try to understand what happens when crowdflow becomes deadly. And the article here discusses a few observations

in this area. Though it's quick to caveat and I guess we should too, that we we we we can't give you, you know, the hard and fast rules to follow that will always keep you safe, because there's still a lot that's not known about exactly how this happens. But there are a few things that seem probably true. One of them, again, obviously, is that density seems to be a major contributor to when when crowds get dangerous.

That you know, if a pathway suddenly narrows at a tunnel or a bridge or something um and the article describes how increasing density and these types of areas can lead to something called stop and go waves, where people can no longer keep moving continuously forward. They're moving, they're used to walking, and then they eventually reach a point where the crowd is so dense that even at low speeds,

they can't keep moving forward, so they stop. And then once they're stopped, they move forward, but of course people are still trying to move in behind them. Uh, so they're stopped, people are advancing behind them, and they tend to move forward into any gaps as soon as they appear. Uh. Stop and go waves are not always necessarily dangerous, but they can be an indication that crowd density is getting

too high. And then, to read from Lamb's description of what happens after this here quote, things get really dangerous if the crowd continues to get denser or people make unexpected movements. At that point, the crowd can become turbulent and chaotic, with people being pushed randomly in different directions.

Disasters can break out when say, one person stumbles, causing someone else to be pushed into their place and either trampling them or stumbling themselves, and this whole can have a kind of gravitational effect pulling in more and more people, which in terms of the physical dynamics, this is similar to how the flow of physical substances like water behave

when they're funneled into narrower and narrower places. Like I think about how some of the world's most dangerous whirlpools seem to occur in bottlenecks for the flow of water, where for example, the tide is pushing a huge amount of water through a narrow, straight or your This can lead to rushing and turbulence. It's chaotic flow and unpredictable directions which can sometimes create these whirlpools. Anyway, back to the article, it mentions a couple of other UH seeming

risk factors for for when this happens UH. In addition to the high density another one is bidirectional or multidirectional flow. So things can get more dangerous if you have high density and people trying to move in different directions UM. And then finally, lambsites The researcher Juannas Kara Mutzis, who was one of the authors on that paper from feen I mentioned a minute ago saying that in large enclosed spaces.

For some reason, the sides of the space seemed possibly to be more dangerous than the middle, though there isn't enough research to be sure of that or to explain why it happens. So obviously, understanding the flow of crowds goes way beyond just just being a kind of interesting

little curiosity and like looking at how people move. It is something that is of critical importance in managing, you know, large masses of people, and in designing spaces for them to move through, and in planning events and all kinds of things like that. I mean, this is like one of those things that starts off being really funny but

is in fact a critically important subject. Yeah, I mean absolutely, they're they're just going to be more and more office and these uh, these large events of of you know, varying genres are going to continue to be a part of our lives. This actually got me wondering about something, which is um why doesn't anything like like uncontrollable crowdflow with with actual like pressing against one another happen with cars.

You can see some of the characteristics happen with cars because you can get traffic back up when there's a bottleneck in the highway, maybe seven lanes suddenly go down to one, and this will cause a huge traffic jam. But you don't usually have the problem with like cars pushing each other and and pressing against one another and leading to this bill up of uncontrollable forces. I was wondering why that is. Maybe it's because I'm just guessing.

I wonder if it's because it's never considered acceptable for cars to touch each other at all. Uh. And people, of course mostly avoid try to avoid touching one another in crowds, but in some situations, maybe it just seems like there's no avoiding it, so you just sort of resign yourself to touching and then that and then that can build up. Maybe I'm not sure, you know, that's

a good point. Yeah, because even though some drivers do like to come as close as possible to touching your car, uh, which is something I've never been able to understand, just given how dangerous it actually is to you know, to to you know, to pull up right behind somebody will at high speeds on the interstate. Uh. Yeah, yeah, to your point, they you're not actually supposed to ram into them even a little bit. And and while you know,

certainly pile ups do occur. You do have acts density, do have cars crashing into one another and then multiple car pile ups occurring. Um, yeah, I wonder if this stricter no touch policy with cars has some sort of influence on us. Well yeah, maybe another thing is I'm not conceptualizing it right, And maybe the crowd dynamics I was talking about are more analogous to just actual like pile up crashes, I guess, which I wasn't thinking about in a similar way because those happen at higher speeds.

I wonder what would we would see in something that's halfway between if what would be between a car and a person if we were to say, look at a bicycle traffic in very congested bicycle situations, say a city where there's a high number of bicycle riders or something,

or bicycle races. Because I feel like one of the things with people is that yeah, it's like, yeah, maybe segways, but I feel like one of the things with people, like you've already mentioned, is when you're pushed forward, you may be pushed into that hole that you could not otherwise occupy or wouldn't occupy socially. But now you know, if you're being pushed. I guess that's where I'm going. Um, so there's just more nooks and crannies for for human beings.

Um and then with with cars less so. But perhaps if you're looking at bicycles, like maybe maybe we see something that's more like the human scenario. It'd be interested to hear from some of our bicyclists out there, like what are the social laws of crowded bicycle scenarios? How close can you get to another bicyclist while moving while

stationary while sort of you know, uh, tiptoeing along. I'd be interested a year, Yeah, totally, I mean especially yeah, like it seems a key difference is is the the the balancing act that's necessary on a bicycle? Yeah? Well, anyway, I want to say about these two subjects, the physics and kinetics price this year. This definitely did, uh did

achieve the desired intent. It made me laugh a little bit and then did make me think it was not I will I will grant it did not make me laugh hilariously, so it was a mild chuckle, but then it got really interesting to me. Yes, all right, we're gonna go and close this episode out, but we will be back. Um, I'm going to talk about the Biology Prize. We're gonna get into some other prizes from the Igno Bells this year, so just tune into that in the next Core episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. To

remind everybody, Stuff to Blow Your Mind. The podcast feed can be found wherever you get your podcasts. Core episodes come out on Tuesdays and Thursday's Monday is listener Mail, Wednesday is a short form artifact episode, and on Friday's we do Weird House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just focus on a weird film. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth

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