Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 32

The 2023 Ig Nobel Prize winners

The 2023 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded to ten winners tonight.

The winners and their achievements are listed on the Ig Nobel Prize winners page.

Video of the ceremony, and additional detail, are on the 33rd First Annual Ig Nobel Prize web page.

Posthumous phoning / Gaming with Freud / More trivial superpowers

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:

When conversation dies — “Can the dead communicate with cell phones?” asks the headline of a press release from King’s University College, Canada…. The press release explains: “Dr. Imants Barušs, Professor of Psychology, has been awarded a $44,500 BIAL Foundation Grant for Scientific Research for his study After-Death Communication with Cell Phones.” …Gaming with Freud — Freudian psychotherapy, sometimes mocked as an entertaining but phantasmagorical relic from the old days, is alive and treating the unwell in the community of internet gamers. Georgios Floros and Ioanna Mylona in Greece gave a dose of Sigmund Freud to a gamer they call “George”. In a report titled “A psychoanalytic approach to internet gaming disorder”, they use Freudian language to analyse him: “George needed to prove himself in the eyes of his mother in order to receive affection, yet her gaze was not following him during his early childhood but her own ersatz selfobject.” …Unseen borders — The borders between trivial superpowers, trivial non-superpowers, non-trivial superpowers and non-trivial non-superpowers can be hard to discern. Trevor Howland gives an example for students to stop and savour as they stroll through Feedback’s growing catalogue of trivial superpowers: “My trivial superpower is to be able to walk in a straight line with my eyes closed. I can also look at a room, and close my eyes (or turn off the light), and be able to avoid all obstacles to get out of the room….Double-hander — Rosemary Firman, meanwhile, highlights a maybe not-so-trivial trivial superpower: “My husband Roger, who has been blind from birth, has the ability to read both sides of a page (written in Braille) at the same time, one with each hand….

Florida, Cradle of Brazilian Butt-Lift Deaths

A tragic interplay of beauty and death led two medical professionals to write this alert for their peers:

“Brazilian Butt Lift-Associated Mortality: The South Florida Experience,” Pat Pazmiño [pictured here] and Onelio Garcia, Jr., Aesthetic Surgery Journal, vol. 43, no. 2, February 2023, pp. 162–178. (Thanks to Kelsey Libner for bringing this to our attention.). The authors report:

Although BBL-related morbidity is generally associated with South Florida, it affects the entire nation. Plastic surgeons and primary care providers from around the United States routinely call about their patients who traveled to South Florida for a budget BBL, then returned home with serious complications and without reasonable means of contacting the physician who performed the surgery. These issues will only worsen as the high-volume, budget clinics of South Florida are now spreading across the United States, opening offices and bringing their practice model to new American cities.

 

24/7 x 100 (a history of some terrific tiny lectures)

The 24/7 Lectures are a long-running part of the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony – a history long enough that there have now been exactly 100 of them!

That’s 100 attempts by great thinkers to:

give a complete, technical description of a topic in just 24 seconds; and thengive a clear summary of a topic of a topic in just 7 words

Sometimes the lecturers made it look easy, sometimes they struggled (sometimes that struggle was theatrically intentional). We usually learned something – about their topic, about the skills of the 24/7 referee, or about how hard it can be to count to seven with an audience watching.

The referee and V-Chip Monitor look on while Nobel Laureate William Lipscomb gives his 2008 Lecture

Of those 100 Lectures

Delivered by Nobel Laureates: 24Delivered by women: 54Delivered by men: 46Timekeeper needed: 44Timekeeper NOT needed: 56Average number of words in the 7-word summation: 7.21

The fact that the average word count for the 7-word part of the lectures is so near to 7 is thanks to the many lecturers who used only 7 words.  On 9 occasions, lecturers offered more than 7 words. For example, Nobel Prize Winner William Lipscomb (14 words on the topic “Redundancy”) and Nobel Prize Winner Roy Glauber (15 words on the topic “The Universe”). Nobel Prize Winner Paul Krugman also needed more than 7 words (8 words on the topic of “Economics”), which he neatly explained as a “rounding error” in a New York Times Opinion piece shortly after the ceremony.

Only 2 lecturers in all 22 years (so far) accomplished their task in fewer than 7 words: Don Featherstone used  only 6 words to explain his topic “Art” (“Art is the appreciation of creation“). Likewise, Missy Cummings used only 6 words to sum up her topic of “Automobile Safety” (“Don’t talk. Don’t email. Just drive“).

The lectures began in 2001 with 5 topics (Computers, Biology, Art, Sex, and Science).  From its beginning, there has always been a timekeeper and a referee. For many of those years, the Referee was Mr. John Barrett who admonished the lecturers to “Keep it clean!”

A few lectures of note:

Biology (Dany Adams, 2001)The Genome (Eric Lander, 2003)Fractals (Benoit Mandelbrot, 2006)Income Inequality (Eric Maskin, 2014)Electro Muscular Incapacitation (Elena Bodnar, 2012)Vaginal pH (Kate Clancy, 2011)Dark Matter (Frank Wilczek, 2006)Genius (Stephen Wolfram, 2009)

 

NOTE, This list of 24/7 Lectures does not include the Heisenberg Certainty Lectures (1998-1999), the Micro-Lectures (1999), or The Inertia Debates (2006).

NOTE, The list of 24/7 Lectures does include Computers, Biology, Art, Sex, Science, Physics, Biochemistry, Neurobiology, Technology, Language, Animals, Astrophysics, Music, Slow Light, Memory, Chemistry, Education, The Genome, Heredity, Evolution, Diet, Oceanography, Morphology, Infinity, Purring, The Human Mind, What Is Life, Automobile Safety, Dark Matter, Fractals, Gray Parrots, Inertia, Food Science, Research Ethics, History, Chicken, Cryptography, Biology, Redundancy, Nanotechnology, Economics, Genius, Contraception, Slime Mold, Oral Bacteria, Writer Identification, Stress Responses, Single Walled Carbon Nanotubes, Chemistry, Vaginal Ph, The Universe, Mass Spectroscopy, The Possibility of Arsenic Based Life In Our Universe, Electro Muscular Incapacitation, Torque, Statistics, Force, Income Inequality, Food, Telomeres, Metabolism, Firefly Sex, Beauty, Reproduction, Life, Internet Cat Videos, Clock Genes, Duck Genital Morphology, Time, Fluid Dynamics, Bots, Uncertainty, Biomedical Research, The Forces Required to Drag Sheep Across Various Surfaces, Sponges, The Brain, Super Black in Animals, Incomplete Contracts, Cardiology, Viral Evolution, Serendipity, Theory of Mind, Habit, The Large Hadron Collider, Voting, Mathematical Truth, The Emergency Bra, Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP), Computer Bugs, Insects, The Insect Apocalypse, Bee Stings, Soft Matter, Coffee Drinking, Excretion Dynamics, Feedback Control, Baby Washing Technology, Pigeons, Medical Knowledge, Information.

24/7 Lecturers: Benoit Mandelbrot (fractals), Rebecca German (morphology), Carol Greider (telomeres), and Richard Jakowski (purring).

Special “Gulls, Crows, Pigeons, Woodpeckers” issue of the magazine

The special Gulls, Crows, Pigeons, Woodpeckers issue (volume 29, number 5) of the magazine has flown its way (through the internet, in PDF form) to subscribers. The table of contents and several free articles are online.

We heartily encourage you to buy your very own copy of the issue, or even better to subscribe to the magazine!

Brains & naps / Sloth hair / Apples & Onions / Meeting eclipse

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:

Time for a nap — Brainy people get to dream a little more than not-quite-so-brainy people, correlationally speaking, if their brains and genomes accord with the findings of researchers from the University of the Republic in Uruguay, University College London and the Broad Institute in Massachusetts. “Our findings suggest a modest causal association between habitual daytime napping and larger total brain volume,” the researchers say in a study published in the journal Sleep Health…. Feedback is eager to see the modesty of the causal association evident in future head-size-normalised, genome-augmented studies, if there are any, of habitual daytime napping in huge and tiny animals (elephants, perhaps, and fruit flies), in notoriously nap-loving dogs and cats, and in two and three-toed sloths….Beyond sloth sleep — awakened to the range of sloth unknowns, an Australian team has published a study called “Sloths: The unusual hairs from these shaggy heteroclites“. The researchers hasten to explain their interest…Apples and onions — Elizabeth Gilliard cries foul over a medical team’s inconclusive conclusion, as reported by Feedback on 12 August, that “the effects of apples and apple derivatives on disease risk reduction are both challenging and encouraging”. “The present day maxim is a corruption,” Elizabeth tells Feedback, because “the original was ‘an onion a day keeps the doctor away’, and a roast onion is still reckoned good for colds.” Researchers in the US looked at the apple/onion distinction, then presented their findings at the American Thoracic Society’s 2023 International Conference in Washington DC….Eclipse of a meeting — Two persistent activities that physicists pride themselves on: achieving higher accuracy and seeking awareness of confounding factors. The American Physical Society (APS) displayed both qualities in this recent announcement…

Sept 29: Improbable Dramatic Readings at the Cambridge Science Festival

On Friday, September 29, we will be doing TWO (2) shows of Improbable Dramatic Readings as part of the Cambridge Science Festival, organized by the MIT Museum.

What

Luminaries (of various wattage) will each do brief dramatic readings from seemingly absurd, genuine research studies and patents. Some of those studies and patents have won Ig Nobel Prizes. All of them make people laugh, then think.

The image you see here (with text that begins “The person reading a paper to you…”) explains how this works.

Two Shows, with Different Performers and Material

There will be TWO (2) shows. Both will happen at the MIT Welcome Center, 292 Main Street, Building E38 (next to the MBTA station and the new MIT Museum), Cambridge MA, USA. Robin Abrahams will emcee both shows.

TICKETS (separate admission for each show) are free, available from the Cambridge Science Festival:

TICKETS for the 5 pm showTICKETS for the 7 pm show

5 PM SHOW  — PERFORMERS: Karen Hopkin / Chris Hopkin / Jenn Bulger James / Gary Dryfoos / Louise Sacco / Dany Adams / Joe Madsen / Celina Moore Barton / Eric Jung / Bryan Man / Abhi Natarajan / and maybe others

7 PM SHOW — PERFORMERS: Debbie Douglas / Martha Eddison / Fatima Husain / Christina Symons / Elly Berke / Cadence Payne / Deborah Blum / Sara Dion / and maybe others

Meanwhile, in Italy…

That day, September 29, if you happen to be in Italy rather than Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, come to one of the Ig Nobel events in Perugia, Cagliari, Catania, L’Aquila, Macerata, and Pavia. They all are part of Sharper — European Researchers’ Night)!

Coming: Improbable Dramatic Readings at the Cambridge Science Festival

On Friday, September 29, we will be doing TWO (2) shows of Improbable Dramatic Readings as part of the Cambridge Science Festival, organized by the MIT Museum.

What?

This is what will happen at each show: Luminaries (of various wattage) will each do brief dramatic readings from seemingly absurd, genuine research studies and patents. Some of those studies and patents have won Ig Nobel Prizes. All of them make people laugh, then think.

Two Shows, with Different Casts and Material

There will be TWO(2) shows. Both will happen at the MIT Welcome Center, 292 Main Street
Building E38, Cambridge MA, USA.

The first show is at 4 pm.

The second show, with different dramatic readers reading different dramatic readings, will be at 7 pm.

Meanwhile, in Italy

BUT…. that day, September 9, if you happen to be in Perugia, Italy rather than Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, come to the Ig Nobel event we will be doing in Perugia (as part of Sharper — European Researchers’ Night)!

And related events are happening in Cagliari, Catania, L’Aquila, Macerata, and Pavia.

Lots About Knots

The Ig Nobel Prize-winning study about why strings get tangled got an appreciative nod in the Veritasium video about knots and knot theory. The mention moment comes at about 31:50 in the video:

Of course the video is not not worth watching in its entirety:

The 2008 Ig Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Dorian Raymer and Douglas Smith, for proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots.

Their prize-winning study is: “Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String,” Dorian M. Raymer and Douglas E. Smith, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 104, no. 42, October 16, 2007, pp. 16432-7.

(Thanks to Dean Grodzins for bringing the new mention to our attention.)

The 2023 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony: Countdown, and where to watch!

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The 33rd First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony will happen entirely online on Thursday, September 14, 2023.

The webcast begins at 6 pm (U.S. eastern time) and will be available for viewing on the ceremony page.

Ten new Ig Nobel Prize winners will be introduced. Each has done something that makes people LAUGH, then THINK.