The Ig Nobel Prize

it incredibly disruptive. So I sought out something kind of fun and funny to talk about in order to maintain my sanity while I'm on the road. So back in the nineteenth century, a scientist, a polyglot and an arms manufacturer who also happened to have invented dynamite, decided fairly late in life that he would devote his massive fortune that he had attained through blowing stuff up toward funding the Nobel Prize awards. That man was Alfred Nobel Prize. No, sorry,

my wife's just told me. It's just Alfred Nobel. He ordered that a panel would award prizes in five categories physical science, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace. The panel does not take nationality into account. It could be anyone from anywhere in the world. Awards can go to multiple individuals per category, per year. Typically they tend to be colleagues or they worked on the same problem or area of focus, but there can be multiple winners. But we're not here

to talk about the Nobel Prize. Instead, we're here to talk about a prize that only dates back to nineteen ninety one, and it's for stuff that, at least on the surface level, is either very silly or infuriating. So we are talking about the ig Nobel Prize. Now. To set the stage, it's first to get to know a little bit about a couple of journals in the science world that don't really fit your normal perception of a science journal. The first is the Journal of Irreproducible Results.

Think of it as kind of like a National Lampoon or Mad Magazine for science nerds. I use the term science nerds affectionately. I also realize that National Lampoon and Mad Magazine might be references that none of you get. But that's fine. Now. One could argue that the webcomic XKCD kind of embraces a bit of the spirit found

in that journal. The content includes stuff like outright satirical pieces to cover of scientific research into seemingly trivial matters, you know, like the kind of stuff like if there was actually a study to determine if you drop a slice of buttered toast, are the odds greater that the toast will land on the floor butterside down or not? You know, someone has to research that. So the story goes that after launching in the nineteen fifties, the Little

Humor magazine began to grow. And this was actually a problem because the two guys who had launched the magazine, which were a virologist named Alex Cohne and a physicist named Harry Lipkin, they started the whole thing. It's kind of a joke, but it gradually grew into becoming a success, which meant that it went from being a joke to serious work to put this together. They already had serious work that they had to do with, you know, like

viruses and you know, I don't know, physics. In the nineteen sixties, the pair passed the publication off to a different publisher, and a medical researcher named George Cher became publisher for a while, but then in the late nineteen eighties, a scientific journals publisher called Blackwell Scientific Publications took over publishing this satirical magazine. Now, the journal has had several editors over its history, but one in particular stands out

with regard to this episode that we're doing today. That would be Mark Abraham's. He became the editor of the journal in nineteen ninety one and he remained the editor for three years. He wrote an essay for The Guardian in which he laid out how things unfolded. So apparently he submitted a small sample of stuff he had written

in the vein of funny science articles. Because he had written these things, he wanted to get them published somewhere, he wasn't having much luck, so unsolicited, he sent them off to this magazine. The publisher called him and offered him the job of editor of the magazine, which was not what he was expecting. But the trick was that he would have no real resources to put the journal together. He would have no staff, he would have no money

to speak of. But he really wanted to do this kind of stuff, so he said okay, And he even called out the original co founders of the magazine who had been retired for ages. They happily came back out to help out with sort of a relaunch of this magazine. Now, the journal's transformation caught the attention of Blackwell's leadership, and it wasn't long before Abraham's was told he was going to actually get the money and the support that he

had been needing but had not received. However, before that could happen, this is always the case, there was a change in leadership at the publishing company and the new president didn't see any real value in the Journal of irreproducible Results, so those offers of support withered away. So then Abrahams decided, well, what if I offered to buy the magazine from you? What would that cost? Well, suddenly this property that had no value got the price tag

of a million dollars. It's amazing how something doesn't have value until a person here is that someone else wants it. I guess that's the definition of value. But to go from oh, it's not worth anything to I'll sell it to you for a million dollars is quite the turnaround. But Abrahams was not ready to put down that kind of money, so he bailed, as did most of the editorial staff. When Mark Abrahams left the journal in nineteen

ninety four, he founded his own science humor magazine. His version is called The Annals of Improbable Research, or air AIR for short. Now, the reason all this is important is that Abrahams actually helped launch the ig Nobel Prize back when he was editor of Irreproducible Results, but he would continue when he shifted to create the Annals of

Improbable Research. I'm leaving out a lot of other stuff, a lot of drama that happened behind the scenes, like George Cher brought a lawsuit against Improbable Research and that kind of thing, you know, because George Share, the guy who had been the publisher for Irreproducible Results until nineteen eighty nine, actually became the publisher again after Blackwell essentially abandoned the journal. Yeah, so there's all this kind of crazy drama in the background. But that's not really what

we're here to talk about. We're here to talk about the IG Nobel Prizes. Typically, it goes to actual scientific researchers and rewards work that on the surface seems trivial, maybe even just a total waste of time, but it falls into a category that Abraham's describes as something that first makes you laugh then makes you think. And maybe it makes you think about something in a really interesting new way. Maybe it doesn't, Maybe it just makes you

think what prompted this research? But yeah, Sometimes something that's on the surface level that appears to be ridiculous may actually lead you to say things like, yeah, but why does that happen that way? Or something similar like does buttered toast fall buttersided down? More frequently the butterside up? And what would happen if you tied a piece of buttered toast to the back of a cat and then

dropped it. Don't do that anyway. The Ignobel Prizes would also go to people as a way to satirically ras them. Sometimes it was not meant as a as kind of a fun, cheeky award. Sometimes it was just meant to say this is messed up. For example, a nineteen ninety one, the first year they ever had the Ignobel Prizes, they offered an award in edge education and it went to former US Vice President Dan Quail for quote demonstrating better than anyone else the need for science education end quote zing.

Other awards would go out to scientists and others who perpetuated pseudoscience, ranging from homeopathy to crop circles to perpetual motion. In those cases, the award was perhaps a bit less good natured and more of an attempt to shame someone for coming up short when it comes to scientific rigor. We're going to focus primarily on some of the prizes awarded for stuff that relates to technology, you know, tech stuff.

The first ig Nobel Prize for Technology was in nineteen ninety three, and it went to Jay Schiffman, who had been working on a technology that would project instrument gauges onto the cockpit windshield of an airplane. So essentially what we're talking about here is augmented reality. But that's not what the prize was for. It wasn't because he had come up with this concept or that he was testing a technology to accomplish this. Because I mean that application

it totally makes sense. You would say, well, why would you get Ignobel prize for essentially creating a heads up display in an airplane cockpit? The prize was for how Shiffman was trying to convince the airplane industry and airlines and such that this technology was safe and reliable. So to do that, he rigged up a nineteen seventy Chevrolet panel truck so that he could project television images onto

the windshield. Now you might imagine that turning your windshield into a transparent television screen might not be the best notion, but Shiffman claimed it actually improved driver safety because people were more likely to keep their eyes on the windshield in front of them. Now, to be clear, the image that the driver would see wouldn't take up the whole windshield, and to the driver it would look like the screen

sort of in front of their car. Back in nineteen ninety three, Schiffman met a lot of resistance among auto manufacturers and legislators for this invention, but these days heads up displays can be found in several vehicle lines. Heck, at the last CEES, BMW showed off a mixed reality slider technology that would display AR images across the entire width of the bottom of a windshield, so you could get readouts from the far left all the way across

to the far right. And then BMW said it would be possible to even transform a windshield into a big screen TV, So you could argue that Shiffman's concept wasn't wacky or bad. It was just way ahead of its time. Or maybe it was wacky and bad and we'll find out the hard way later on. Okay, we've got some more Ignobel Prizes to talk about, but before we get into any of those, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay, when we left off, I talked

about a nineteen ninety three award. Well, that was also the year that saw on Ignobel Prize go to Ron Poe Peel, the guy who really kicked off the as seen on TV gadget craze way back in the day, for inventions like the vegiomatic and the pocket Fisherman, a device that would scramble an egg while it was still inside it shell. Those all came courtesy of a mister pop Peel, and I did an episode about him ages ago. In fact, you can actually do a search and find

an episode dedicated to Ron Popeel. It was a lot of fun to talk about. The next Ignobel Prize related to technology came in nineteen ninety seven, when the award for Communications went to Sanford Wallace. Now, in case you had not heard the name Sandford Wallace, or at least it doesn't sound familiar to you, maybe you heard one of his nicknames like Spamford Wallace or spam King. There were also less family friendly names directed at him. Wallace

was a pioneer an electronic spam mail. He created a company called Cyber Promotions that became notorious for blasting out spam email to folks all around the world. And remember this is in the early days of the Internet, when some folks were just getting a handle on what email even was. Wallace had a history involving let's say, questionable marketing schemes, and his incredibly effective methods for sending out spam mail got him some unwanted attention from various sources,

including the US government. So he was the subject of several cases criminal cases, and in nineteen ninety nine he found himself temporarily banned from even having an Internet connection thanks to his spam efforts. He would later go on to create a business that allegedly infected computers with spyware. Then he would offer to remove the spyware in return for a fee, kind of a smaller scale version of

ransomware in that regard. By twenty sixteen, he was facing jail time and massive fines for his various escapades that broadly speaking, attempted to monetize frustration and misery. He served nearly two years in prison for all of that. Anyway, the Ignobel Prize had his number way back in nineteen ninety seven. Another nineteen ninety seven award went to a guy named John Bachras. This award was for physics, and it was another satirical jab at someone failing to use

scientific rigor. Bachras was a chemistry professor. He had employment at Texas A and M University. He was originally from South Africa, and he had made several claims that, if they had held up, would have been truly revolutionary. So one claim he had was that he had found a way to separate hydrogen from oxygen using sunlight, which if we're true, would have led to a hydrogen based economy right away and would have been a huge jump in our and meaning our energy needs without having to rely

on fossil fuels. He even said later that he came up with an alternative method that didn't even need sunlight and still was effective at separating hydrogen from oxygen. Now you can do this by the way, you can use electrolysis, which means you're passing an electric charge through water to break those molecular bonds, but that means you have to

spend energy to get hydrogen to separate from oxygen. And if the energy you're spending is greater than what you can capture through using that hydrogen as a fuel or whatever, then you're at a net loss. Right, You're spending more energy to get the fuel than the fuel actually provides you in useful work. So if Bakraus's methodology had worked, it would have been transformational. By the way, that was not the the only odd claim he had made throughout

his career. Another one involved claims about cold fusion, which is carrying out the process of fusion, that is, fusing two light atoms like lighter atoms like helium or hydrogen, fusing those into a heavier atom, but doing so at low temperatures, like close to room temperature. That's something that just doesn't seem to be possible. We usually have to do these kind of experiments at very very very high temperatures. If we could do them at room temperatures, that also

would be transformational. But while people over the years have claimed to have success with cold fusion, it's never actually panned out. He also pursued transmutation. That's the old concept from alchemy that involves transforming base materials into gold, So that's what got him his Ignobel prize. In nineteen ninety eight, Troy Hertubi's received an Ignobel Prize for his Ursu's Suit, a suit meant to protect the wearer from bear attacks. So essentially this was a suit of armor. It's made

out of titanium and chain mail and hard plastic. Her two Bees billed himself as a conservationist who wanted to help save animals like grizzly bears, But the tricky thing is those animals are super dangerous. Her two b said he had been injured in a previous encounter with a grizzly bear, so the suit was meant to keep him safe in future encounters. He appeared in a National Geographic special in which he tested out the suit himself, thus

earning him the Ignobel Prize for Safety Engineering. You may even have seen video of him from one of these demonstrations where a pair of people are holding up a log that's attached to a pair of ropes. So it's essentially a swing right, it's a big log and they let it swing loose, and it's swings down and hits this armored dude square in the chest, knocking him flat in his back. That was her two bees wearing his Ursus suit. Tragically, he would much later pass away in

a car accident. And it's interesting that he had several different inventions that he claimed throughout his life, some of which, to put it lightly, I would say, are unsubstantiated claims of success, like essentially of creating an invisible ray kind of thing, like a ray that would turn you or anything else translucent. At the very least, there never seemed to be any actual proof of that. But he actually

did build the Ursu suit. In nineteen ninety nine, an inventor named Hyuk Ho Kwan created the self perfuming business suit. So yeah, a business suit that smells real good. According to the Harvard Crimson the suit quote emits a pleasant fragrance when rubb end quote, so a scratch and sniff suit. Quan actually attended the Ignobel ceremony in person. That has happened quite a bit. A lot of people have in good humor attended the Ignobel Prizes to claim their prize

in person. So he went to the ceremony and he brought with him four custom made self perfuming suits for the four Nobel Laureates who were actually in attendance at the prizes. That is class. Also, Quan's category was called Environmental Protection, which I just think is brilliant. Also in nineteen ninety nine, the Ignobel Prize awarded Charles Furie and Michelle Wong in the category of Peace. So what had

they done to merit an Ignobel Prize for Peace. Well, they had patented a car Securities that included not just a burglar alarm, but a flamethrower as well, I guess to torch the person who's attempting to steal a car, which sounds a lot like they had watched RoboCop two, which came out in nineteen ninety that included a satirical commercial about anti theft device for cars that delivers a fatal amount of voltage to the would be thief. And maybe they saw that and thought, hey, what if we

made that but for real and with fire. Unlike Quan, they did not attend the ceremony in person. They had invented this in South Africa. I actually remember when this happened because I remember watching a news segment where they covered this particular invention and I thought, that is crazy that setting someone on fire could be seen as an acceptable option. Yeah, that was a bonker's one. Now we get our first prize awarded for software back in two thousand.

This went to Chris Niewander, who created a program called paw Sense. So what did paw Sense do well. Paw Sense would detect if a cat happened to be walking across your keyboard. It would detect if there were these little patches of nonsense texts that were coming in, and then it would block in puts from your keyboard in order to try and you know, preserve your important report for your boss or your teacher. So it didn't include absolute gibberish in the middle of it, you know, apart

from the stuff you put in there yourself. And then it would also make a quote sound that annoys the cat in the quote, so I guess it was meant to scare the cat from standing on top of your keyboard. I personally think that was a truly brilliant invention that deserves a real Nobel Prize, not an ig Nobel Prize. There was also an award for research into a really crappy situation, which was namely the quote collapse of toilets

in Glasgow end quote. This went to researchers who reported that due to aging commodes, essentially there were a few cases of toilets breaking from underneath the sitter upon the throne, which also meant these poor folks suffered some pretty nasty cuts and abrasions in the process. It wasn't just you know, a plumbing issue and potentially humiliating, but also legitimately dangerous. So they did a study and then an issue a

report alerting people to this epidemic of breaking toilets. To learn more about toilets, you should search the tech stuff archives. I've got an episode I recorded with Josh Clark of Stuff you Should Know. We talk all about the toilets in that one, including some of the world's oldest toilets. Flush toilets if you sort of flush toilets, if you think of the tides as being your flushing mechanism, which I actually visited several years ago. They were in Scotland, Okay,

we're going to take another quick break. When we come back, I'm going to wrap up about these early Ignobel prizes awarded in the fields of technology and related subjects. But first we need to thank our sponsors. All Right, we're back. So we're up to two thousand and one. We get another satirical barb. The award for technology went to two different recipients, John Keo and the Australian Patent Office. So why well, just let me quote you the abstract on

the patent application that KO had sent in. Quote in a court with a first aspect of the present invention, there is provided a transportation facilitation device including a circular rim, a bearing in which a hollow cylindrical member is rotatable around a rod situated within the hollow cylindrical member, and in a series of connecting members connecting the circular rim with the hollow cylindrical member to maintain the circular rim

and the hollow cylindrical member in substantially fixed relation, wherein the rod is positioned on an axis perpendicular to the plane of the circular rim and substantially central of the circular rim end. Quote. Now, in case he didn't pick up on that he's essentially describing a wheel like a bicycle wheel. I mean, that's what the description of the invention amounts to. So he applied for a patent for the invention of the wheel in two thousand and one.

Here's the kicker, the Australian Patent Office awarded him that patent. Now, in case you're thinking he was trying to pull a fast one, well sort of. He wanted to put Australia's innovation patents to the test. He suspected that the Patent Office was giving very little attention to these patents, which have a much lower threshold than other types of patents.

And I'd say his demonstration proved his point. He was also a patent lawyer, so he was showing how backward the system was, how broken it was, and that this could cause real headaches and the court systems. Further on and later on, the Australian Patent Office would quietly revoke the patent for the wheel. I think this really kind of ties into the recent episodes I did about the

history of the US Patent Office. If you remember, in those early early years, there was this issue where the Patent Office was told it wasn't their job to review patents. It was just their job to approve them, and that the courts sorted out further down, which means that you could have two or three or countless people patent the

exact same thing. The patent office would have to award a patent as long as they got the patent fee, the application fee, and then the courts would have to decide which patent was the legitimate one, which kind of seems like it's a really backwards way and wasteful way to do things. That's kind of what Kio was pointing out here. So I think the Ignobel Prize was really kind of calling out like, yes, this was an absurd situation and it did need to be called out like this,

and they were. I would say, this is more of a sincere award. Now, there's something else interesting that happened in two thousand and one as I understand it, which is that someone who won an Ignobel Prize would later go on to win an actual Nobel Prize, which it's not the only time that's happened, but it is the first time. But we'll talk about that in the future

episode instead. For our final entry for this episode. I'm actually going to talk about something that happened in two thousand and five, and that's when the Ignobel Prize for Peace went to Claire Rind and Peter Simmons, who had published a paper that was titled orthoptren DCMD neuron A reevaluation of responses to moving objects one selective responses to approaching objects. So Orthoptera is an order of insects that includes critters like locusts and grasshoppers. The DCMD neuron stands

for the descending contralateral movement detector. So essentially, they were studying how insects like locusts perceive potential threats, like how do they perceive movement and then choose to respond, Like how does that actually work? Now? So far, nothing about that necessarily sounds like it's worthy of an Ignobel Prize, right. I mean, it's studying in and figuring out, well, what is the actual process by which they're able to respond to threats. Well, the way they determined it is what

awarded them the prize. So one of the stimuli they tested on these insects was that they showed them Star Wars. As in the movie Star Wars. They used that stimuli to determine that the insects were actually more likely to respond to oncoming objects regardless of their size. And previously the hypothesis was that the size of the object was the main criterion that the insects responded to, that if it was big, they were going to go into flight

mode rather than if it was smaller. But no, it turns out if it was something coming toward them, that's what would prompt the response. Now, what I could not tell is whether or not the locusts had to sit through one of the prequels or if you know, it was one of the good Star Wars movies. No word on that. All right, that's enough for today's episode. I will have to come back and do another episode and follow up and do some more of these Ignobel prizes

before too long. They're fun to talk about and once in a while, like I said, the stuff we learn actually ends up being useful, maybe in ways we didn't anticipate. You can sometimes learn valuable things from something that's foolish. I'd argue, I'm living proof of that. Okay, that wraps up this episode of tech stuff. I hope you are all well. I will be back in Atlanta next week, so things should return to what passes for normal then, and I will talk to you again really soon. Tech

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