Colleagues,
Harold Camping of the USA, who won this year’s Ig Nobel award for mathematics, has predicted that the world will end on October 21, 2011. The citation notes that he has taught the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations, especially after the failure of his earlier similar forecast that the world would end on September 6, 1994. In the expectation that he has learned from previous mistakes, as we all do, and that he’ll right this time around, I’m inviting you to an End of the World Celebration at morning tea (10.30 am) this coming Friday (21st October). As it’s possibly the last time we have to meet, you might care to show up and consume fayre provided: cakes, biscuits and dips. Given that Camping lives in the US, where the time will still be 20 October when we meet, the event should be safe.
You can visit Camping’s web-site at: http://www.familyradio.com/english/connect/bio/haroldcamping_bio.html .
To quote Nature, "The Ig Nobel awards are arguably the highlight of the scientific calendar." They are an American parody of the Nobel Prizes and are given each year in early October for ten unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research. The stated aim of the prizes is to "first make people laugh, and then make them think". Organized by the scientific humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), they are presented by a group that includes Nobel Laureates at a ceremony at Harvard University's Sanders Theater, and they are followed by a set of public lectures by the winners at MIT. This year’s winners were announced and awarded on Thursday night, September 29. The ceremony was webcast live.
To make you feel better about the quality of your own research, here are this year’s other winners. Note that Australian’s shared the prizes for Medicine and Biology in conjunction with other nationalities.
PHYSIOLOGY PRIZE: Anna Wilkinson (of the UK), Natalie Sebanz (of THE NETHERLANDS, HUNGARY, and AUSTRIA), Isabella Mandl (of AUSTRIA) and Ludwig Huber(of AUSTRIA) for their study "No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise."
CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami of JAPAN, for determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi (pungent horseradish) to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency, and for applying this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm. [The importance of this research lies in helping deaf people to escape fires.]
MEDICINE PRIZE: Mirjam Tuk (of THE NETHERLANDS and the UK), Debra Trampe (of THE NETHERLANDS) and Luk Warlop (of BELGIUM). and jointly to Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder and Robert Feldman (of the USA), Robert Pietrzak, David Darby, and Paul Maruff (of AUSTRALIA) for demonstrating that people make better decisions about some kinds of things — but worse decisions about other kinds of things‚ when they have a strong urge to urinate.
PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE: Karl Halvor Teigen of the University of Oslo, NORWAY, for trying to understand why, in everyday life, people sigh.
LITERATURE PRIZE: John Perry of Stanford University, USA, for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which says: To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that's even more important.
BIOLOGY PRIZE: Darryl Gwynne (of CANADA and AUSTRALIA and the UK and the USA) and David Rentz (of AUSTRALIA and the USA) for discovering that a certain kind of beetle mates with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle.
PHYSICS PRIZE: Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, Dominique Deviterne and Bruno Ragaru (of FRANCE), and Herman Kingma (of THE NETHERLANDS), for determining why discus throwers become dizzy, and why hammer throwers don't.
PEACE PRIZE: Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, LITHUANIA, for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armoured tank.
PUBLIC SAFETY PRIZE: John Senders of the University of Toronto, CANADA, for conducting a series of safety experiments in which a person drives an automobile on a major highway while a visor repeatedly flaps down over his face, blinding him.
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