Fuddland
About eighteen months ago I went to a promotional night for the Ig Nobel awards, and I didn’t think much of them — I thought them a bit too silly. This year’s awards have just been announced, and these seem much more along the lines I was hoping for: research that sounds like it was fun or a bit weird to carry out, but still with a valid point.
In the psychology category, the award went to collaborative work between Harvard and the University of Illinois in which a number of subjects were asked to watch a video of people throwing a couple of basketballs around, counting the number of times the balls were thrown, and then asked if they noticed the man in a gorilla suit who walked straight through the picture, pausing to beat his chest. A significant proportion did not.
The prize for medicine went to the researches who showed an apparent correllation between suicide rates and the amount of country music played on local radio. I particularly liked their acceptance speech:
[If] you play country records backwards, your dog and estranged spouse come home and you get your job back.
Special mention was made of US patent 4,022,227, filed in 1975, patenting the combover: a “method of concealing partial baldness”, which includes [if you jump through a few hoops and get the right plugin to allow you to view them] instructional images, demonstrating the technique.
A method of styling hair to cover partial baldness using only the hair on a person’s head. The hair styling requires dividing a person’s hair into three sections and carefully folding one section over another.
I wonder if our old friend in the States knows that he owes Messers Smith and Smith some royalties?
Comments
Brown | 2004 / 10 / 01 – 22:32
Well to be fair the people throwing the basketball didn’t notice either.
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