Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech
Speaker 1: are you? So today we're going to talk about something
Speaker 1: goofy because I am still in Las Vegas, and working
Speaker 1: in another city is hard, y'all. For those of you
Speaker 1: who travel a lot for work, I don't know how
Speaker 1: you do it. When I travel for work, I find
Speaker 1: it incredibly disruptive. So I sought out something kind of
Speaker 1: fun and funny to talk about in order to maintain
Speaker 1: my sanity while I'm on the road. So back in
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century, a scientist, a polyglot and an arms
Speaker 1: manufacturer who also happened to have invented dynamite, decided fairly
Speaker 1: late in life that he would devote his massive fortune
Speaker 1: that he had attained through blowing stuff up toward funding
Speaker 1: the Nobel Prize awards. That man was Alfred Nobel Prize. No, sorry,
Speaker 1: my wife's just told me. It's just Alfred Nobel. He
Speaker 1: ordered that a panel would award prizes in five categories
Speaker 1: physical science, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace. The panel does
Speaker 1: not take nationality into account. It could be anyone from
Speaker 1: anywhere in the world. Awards can go to multiple individuals
Speaker 1: per category, per year. Typically they tend to be colleagues
Speaker 1: or they worked on the same problem or area of focus,
Speaker 1: but there can be multiple winners. But we're not here
Speaker 1: to talk about the Nobel Prize. Instead, we're here to
Speaker 1: talk about a prize that only dates back to nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety one, and it's for stuff that, at least on
Speaker 1: the surface level, is either very silly or infuriating. So
Speaker 1: we are talking about the ig Nobel Prize. Now. To
Speaker 1: set the stage, it's first to get to know a
Speaker 1: little bit about a couple of journals in the science
Speaker 1: world that don't really fit your normal perception of a
Speaker 1: science journal. The first is the Journal of Irreproducible Results.
Speaker 1: Think of it as kind of like a National Lampoon
Speaker 1: or Mad Magazine for science nerds. I use the term
Speaker 1: science nerds affectionately. I also realize that National Lampoon and
Speaker 1: Mad Magazine might be references that none of you get.
Speaker 1: But that's fine. Now. One could argue that the webcomic
Speaker 1: XKCD kind of embraces a bit of the spirit found
Speaker 1: in that journal. The content includes stuff like outright satirical
Speaker 1: pieces to cover of scientific research into seemingly trivial matters,
Speaker 1: you know, like the kind of stuff like if there
Speaker 1: was actually a study to determine if you drop a
Speaker 1: slice of buttered toast, are the odds greater that the
Speaker 1: toast will land on the floor butterside down or not?
Speaker 1: You know, someone has to research that. So the story
Speaker 1: goes that after launching in the nineteen fifties, the Little
Speaker 1: Humor magazine began to grow. And this was actually a
Speaker 1: problem because the two guys who had launched the magazine,
Speaker 1: which were a virologist named Alex Cohne and a physicist
Speaker 1: named Harry Lipkin, they started the whole thing. It's kind
Speaker 1: of a joke, but it gradually grew into becoming a success,
Speaker 1: which meant that it went from being a joke to
Speaker 1: serious work to put this together. They already had serious
Speaker 1: work that they had to do with, you know, like
Speaker 1: viruses and you know, I don't know, physics. In the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties, the pair passed the publication off to a
Speaker 1: different publisher, and a medical researcher named George Cher became
Speaker 1: publisher for a while, but then in the late nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: a scientific journals publisher called Blackwell Scientific Publications took over
Speaker 1: publishing this satirical magazine. Now, the journal has had several
Speaker 1: editors over its history, but one in particular stands out
Speaker 1: with regard to this episode that we're doing today. That
Speaker 1: would be Mark Abraham's. He became the editor of the
Speaker 1: journal in nineteen ninety one and he remained the editor
Speaker 1: for three years. He wrote an essay for The Guardian
Speaker 1: in which he laid out how things unfolded. So apparently
Speaker 1: he submitted a small sample of stuff he had written
Speaker 1: in the vein of funny science articles. Because he had
Speaker 1: written these things, he wanted to get them published somewhere,
Speaker 1: he wasn't having much luck, so unsolicited, he sent them
Speaker 1: off to this magazine. The publisher called him and offered
Speaker 1: him the job of editor of the magazine, which was
Speaker 1: not what he was expecting. But the trick was that
Speaker 1: he would have no real resources to put the journal together.
Speaker 1: He would have no staff, he would have no money
Speaker 1: to speak of. But he really wanted to do this
Speaker 1: kind of stuff, so he said okay, And he even
Speaker 1: called out the original co founders of the magazine who
Speaker 1: had been retired for ages. They happily came back out
Speaker 1: to help out with sort of a relaunch of this magazine. Now,
Speaker 1: the journal's transformation caught the attention of Blackwell's leadership, and
Speaker 1: it wasn't long before Abraham's was told he was going
Speaker 1: to actually get the money and the support that he
Speaker 1: had been needing but had not received. However, before that
Speaker 1: could happen, this is always the case, there was a
Speaker 1: change in leadership at the publishing company and the new
Speaker 1: president didn't see any real value in the Journal of
Speaker 1: irreproducible Results, so those offers of support withered away. So
Speaker 1: then Abrahams decided, well, what if I offered to buy
Speaker 1: the magazine from you? What would that cost? Well, suddenly
Speaker 1: this property that had no value got the price tag
Speaker 1: of a million dollars. It's amazing how something doesn't have
Speaker 1: value until a person here is that someone else wants it.
Speaker 1: I guess that's the definition of value. But to go
Speaker 1: from oh, it's not worth anything to I'll sell it
Speaker 1: to you for a million dollars is quite the turnaround.
Speaker 1: But Abrahams was not ready to put down that kind
Speaker 1: of money, so he bailed, as did most of the
Speaker 1: editorial staff. When Mark Abrahams left the journal in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety four, he founded his own science humor magazine. His
Speaker 1: version is called The Annals of Improbable Research, or air
Speaker 1: AIR for short. Now, the reason all this is important
Speaker 1: is that Abrahams actually helped launch the ig Nobel Prize
Speaker 1: back when he was editor of Irreproducible Results, but he
Speaker 1: would continue when he shifted to create the Annals of
Speaker 1: Improbable Research. I'm leaving out a lot of other stuff,
Speaker 1: a lot of drama that happened behind the scenes, like
Speaker 1: George Cher brought a lawsuit against Improbable Research and that
Speaker 1: kind of thing, you know, because George Share, the guy
Speaker 1: who had been the publisher for Irreproducible Results until nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty nine, actually became the publisher again after Blackwell essentially
Speaker 1: abandoned the journal. Yeah, so there's all this kind of
Speaker 1: crazy drama in the background. But that's not really what
Speaker 1: we're here to talk about. We're here to talk about
Speaker 1: the IG Nobel Prizes. Typically, it goes to actual scientific
Speaker 1: researchers and rewards work that on the surface seems trivial,
Speaker 1: maybe even just a total waste of time, but it
Speaker 1: falls into a category that Abraham's describes as something that
Speaker 1: first makes you laugh then makes you think. And maybe
Speaker 1: it makes you think about something in a really interesting
Speaker 1: new way. Maybe it doesn't, Maybe it just makes you
Speaker 1: think what prompted this research? But yeah, Sometimes something that's
Speaker 1: on the surface level that appears to be ridiculous may
Speaker 1: actually lead you to say things like, yeah, but why
Speaker 1: does that happen that way? Or something similar like does
Speaker 1: buttered toast fall buttersided down? More frequently the butterside up?
Speaker 1: And what would happen if you tied a piece of
Speaker 1: buttered toast to the back of a cat and then
Speaker 1: dropped it. Don't do that anyway. The Ignobel Prizes would
Speaker 1: also go to people as a way to satirically ras them.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it was not meant as a as kind of
Speaker 1: a fun, cheeky award. Sometimes it was just meant to
Speaker 1: say this is messed up. For example, a nineteen ninety one,
Speaker 1: the first year they ever had the Ignobel Prizes, they
Speaker 1: offered an award in edge education and it went to
Speaker 1: former US Vice President Dan Quail for quote demonstrating better
Speaker 1: than anyone else the need for science education end quote zing.
Speaker 1: Other awards would go out to scientists and others who
Speaker 1: perpetuated pseudoscience, ranging from homeopathy to crop circles to perpetual motion.
Speaker 1: In those cases, the award was perhaps a bit less
Speaker 1: good natured and more of an attempt to shame someone
Speaker 1: for coming up short when it comes to scientific rigor.
Speaker 1: We're going to focus primarily on some of the prizes
Speaker 1: awarded for stuff that relates to technology, you know, tech stuff.
Speaker 1: The first ig Nobel Prize for Technology was in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety three, and it went to Jay Schiffman, who had
Speaker 1: been working on a technology that would project instrument gauges
Speaker 1: onto the cockpit windshield of an airplane. So essentially what
Speaker 1: we're talking about here is augmented reality. But that's not
Speaker 1: what the prize was for. It wasn't because he had
Speaker 1: come up with this concept or that he was testing
Speaker 1: a technology to accomplish this. Because I mean that application
Speaker 1: it totally makes sense. You would say, well, why would
Speaker 1: you get Ignobel prize for essentially creating a heads up
Speaker 1: display in an airplane cockpit? The prize was for how
Speaker 1: Shiffman was trying to convince the airplane industry and airlines
Speaker 1: and such that this technology was safe and reliable. So
Speaker 1: to do that, he rigged up a nineteen seventy Chevrolet
Speaker 1: panel truck so that he could project television images onto
Speaker 1: the windshield. Now you might imagine that turning your windshield
Speaker 1: into a transparent television screen might not be the best notion,
Speaker 1: but Shiffman claimed it actually improved driver safety because people
Speaker 1: were more likely to keep their eyes on the windshield
Speaker 1: in front of them. Now, to be clear, the image
Speaker 1: that the driver would see wouldn't take up the whole windshield,
Speaker 1: and to the driver it would look like the screen
Speaker 1: sort of in front of their car. Back in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety three, Schiffman met a lot of resistance among auto
Speaker 1: manufacturers and legislators for this invention, but these days heads
Speaker 1: up displays can be found in several vehicle lines. Heck,
Speaker 1: at the last CEES, BMW showed off a mixed reality
Speaker 1: slider technology that would display AR images across the entire
Speaker 1: width of the bottom of a windshield, so you could
Speaker 1: get readouts from the far left all the way across
Speaker 1: to the far right. And then BMW said it would
Speaker 1: be possible to even transform a windshield into a big
Speaker 1: screen TV, So you could argue that Shiffman's concept wasn't
Speaker 1: wacky or bad. It was just way ahead of its time.
Speaker 1: Or maybe it was wacky and bad and we'll find
Speaker 1: out the hard way later on. Okay, we've got some
Speaker 1: more Ignobel Prizes to talk about, but before we get
Speaker 1: into any of those, let's take a quick break to
Speaker 1: thank our sponsor. Okay, when we left off, I talked
Speaker 1: about a nineteen ninety three award. Well, that was also
Speaker 1: the year that saw on Ignobel Prize go to Ron
Speaker 1: Poe Peel, the guy who really kicked off the as
Speaker 1: seen on TV gadget craze way back in the day,
Speaker 1: for inventions like the vegiomatic and the pocket Fisherman, a
Speaker 1: device that would scramble an egg while it was still
Speaker 1: inside it shell. Those all came courtesy of a mister
Speaker 1: pop Peel, and I did an episode about him ages ago.
Speaker 1: In fact, you can actually do a search and find
Speaker 1: an episode dedicated to Ron Popeel. It was a lot
Speaker 1: of fun to talk about. The next Ignobel Prize related
Speaker 1: to technology came in nineteen ninety seven, when the award
Speaker 1: for Communications went to Sanford Wallace. Now, in case you
Speaker 1: had not heard the name Sandford Wallace, or at least
Speaker 1: it doesn't sound familiar to you, maybe you heard one
Speaker 1: of his nicknames like Spamford Wallace or spam King. There
Speaker 1: were also less family friendly names directed at him. Wallace
Speaker 1: was a pioneer an electronic spam mail. He created a
Speaker 1: company called Cyber Promotions that became notorious for blasting out
Speaker 1: spam email to folks all around the world. And remember
Speaker 1: this is in the early days of the Internet, when
Speaker 1: some folks were just getting a handle on what email
Speaker 1: even was. Wallace had a history involving let's say, questionable
Speaker 1: marketing schemes, and his incredibly effective methods for sending out
Speaker 1: spam mail got him some unwanted attention from various sources,
Speaker 1: including the US government. So he was the subject of
Speaker 1: several cases criminal cases, and in nineteen ninety nine he
Speaker 1: found himself temporarily banned from even having an Internet connection
Speaker 1: thanks to his spam efforts. He would later go on
Speaker 1: to create a business that allegedly infected computers with spyware.
Speaker 1: Then he would offer to remove the spyware in return
Speaker 1: for a fee, kind of a smaller scale version of
Speaker 1: ransomware in that regard. By twenty sixteen, he was facing
Speaker 1: jail time and massive fines for his various escapades that
Speaker 1: broadly speaking, attempted to monetize frustration and misery. He served
Speaker 1: nearly two years in prison for all of that. Anyway,
Speaker 1: the Ignobel Prize had his number way back in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety seven. Another nineteen ninety seven award went to a
Speaker 1: guy named John Bachras. This award was for physics, and
Speaker 1: it was another satirical jab at someone failing to use
Speaker 1: scientific rigor. Bachras was a chemistry professor. He had employment
Speaker 1: at Texas A and M University. He was originally from
Speaker 1: South Africa, and he had made several claims that, if
Speaker 1: they had held up, would have been truly revolutionary. So
Speaker 1: one claim he had was that he had found a
Speaker 1: way to separate hydrogen from oxygen using sunlight, which if
Speaker 1: we're true, would have led to a hydrogen based economy
Speaker 1: right away and would have been a huge jump in
Speaker 1: our and meaning our energy needs without having to rely
Speaker 1: on fossil fuels. He even said later that he came
Speaker 1: up with an alternative method that didn't even need sunlight
Speaker 1: and still was effective at separating hydrogen from oxygen. Now
Speaker 1: you can do this by the way, you can use electrolysis,
Speaker 1: which means you're passing an electric charge through water to
Speaker 1: break those molecular bonds, but that means you have to
Speaker 1: spend energy to get hydrogen to separate from oxygen. And
Speaker 1: if the energy you're spending is greater than what you
Speaker 1: can capture through using that hydrogen as a fuel or whatever,
Speaker 1: then you're at a net loss. Right, You're spending more
Speaker 1: energy to get the fuel than the fuel actually provides
Speaker 1: you in useful work. So if Bakraus's methodology had worked,
Speaker 1: it would have been transformational. By the way, that was
Speaker 1: not the the only odd claim he had made throughout
Speaker 1: his career. Another one involved claims about cold fusion, which
Speaker 1: is carrying out the process of fusion, that is, fusing
Speaker 1: two light atoms like lighter atoms like helium or hydrogen,
Speaker 1: fusing those into a heavier atom, but doing so at
Speaker 1: low temperatures, like close to room temperature. That's something that
Speaker 1: just doesn't seem to be possible. We usually have to
Speaker 1: do these kind of experiments at very very very high temperatures.
Speaker 1: If we could do them at room temperatures, that also
Speaker 1: would be transformational. But while people over the years have
Speaker 1: claimed to have success with cold fusion, it's never actually
Speaker 1: panned out. He also pursued transmutation. That's the old concept
Speaker 1: from alchemy that involves transforming base materials into gold, So
Speaker 1: that's what got him his Ignobel prize. In nineteen ninety eight,
Speaker 1: Troy Hertubi's received an Ignobel Prize for his Ursu's Suit,
Speaker 1: a suit meant to protect the wearer from bear attacks.
Speaker 1: So essentially this was a suit of armor. It's made
Speaker 1: out of titanium and chain mail and hard plastic. Her
Speaker 1: two Bees billed himself as a conservationist who wanted to
Speaker 1: help save animals like grizzly bears, But the tricky thing
Speaker 1: is those animals are super dangerous. Her two b said
Speaker 1: he had been injured in a previous encounter with a
Speaker 1: grizzly bear, so the suit was meant to keep him
Speaker 1: safe in future encounters. He appeared in a National Geographic
Speaker 1: special in which he tested out the suit himself, thus
Speaker 1: earning him the Ignobel Prize for Safety Engineering. You may
Speaker 1: even have seen video of him from one of these
Speaker 1: demonstrations where a pair of people are holding up a
Speaker 1: log that's attached to a pair of ropes. So it's
Speaker 1: essentially a swing right, it's a big log and they
Speaker 1: let it swing loose, and it's swings down and hits
Speaker 1: this armored dude square in the chest, knocking him flat
Speaker 1: in his back. That was her two bees wearing his
Speaker 1: Ursus suit. Tragically, he would much later pass away in
Speaker 1: a car accident. And it's interesting that he had several
Speaker 1: different inventions that he claimed throughout his life, some of which,
Speaker 1: to put it lightly, I would say, are unsubstantiated claims
Speaker 1: of success, like essentially of creating an invisible ray kind
Speaker 1: of thing, like a ray that would turn you or
Speaker 1: anything else translucent. At the very least, there never seemed
Speaker 1: to be any actual proof of that. But he actually
Speaker 1: did build the Ursu suit. In nineteen ninety nine, an
Speaker 1: inventor named Hyuk Ho Kwan created the self perfuming business suit.
Speaker 1: So yeah, a business suit that smells real good. According
Speaker 1: to the Harvard Crimson the suit quote emits a pleasant
Speaker 1: fragrance when rubb end quote, so a scratch and sniff suit.
Speaker 1: Quan actually attended the Ignobel ceremony in person. That has
Speaker 1: happened quite a bit. A lot of people have in
Speaker 1: good humor attended the Ignobel Prizes to claim their prize
Speaker 1: in person. So he went to the ceremony and he
Speaker 1: brought with him four custom made self perfuming suits for
Speaker 1: the four Nobel Laureates who were actually in attendance at
Speaker 1: the prizes. That is class. Also, Quan's category was called
Speaker 1: Environmental Protection, which I just think is brilliant. Also in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety nine, the Ignobel Prize awarded Charles Furie and
Speaker 1: Michelle Wong in the category of Peace. So what had
Speaker 1: they done to merit an Ignobel Prize for Peace. Well,
Speaker 1: they had patented a car Securities that included not just
Speaker 1: a burglar alarm, but a flamethrower as well, I guess
Speaker 1: to torch the person who's attempting to steal a car,
Speaker 1: which sounds a lot like they had watched RoboCop two,
Speaker 1: which came out in nineteen ninety that included a satirical
Speaker 1: commercial about anti theft device for cars that delivers a
Speaker 1: fatal amount of voltage to the would be thief. And
Speaker 1: maybe they saw that and thought, hey, what if we
Speaker 1: made that but for real and with fire. Unlike Quan,
Speaker 1: they did not attend the ceremony in person. They had
Speaker 1: invented this in South Africa. I actually remember when this
Speaker 1: happened because I remember watching a news segment where they
Speaker 1: covered this particular invention and I thought, that is crazy
Speaker 1: that setting someone on fire could be seen as an
Speaker 1: acceptable option. Yeah, that was a bonker's one. Now we
Speaker 1: get our first prize awarded for software back in two thousand.
Speaker 1: This went to Chris Niewander, who created a program called
Speaker 1: paw Sense. So what did paw Sense do well. Paw
Speaker 1: Sense would detect if a cat happened to be walking
Speaker 1: across your keyboard. It would detect if there were these
Speaker 1: little patches of nonsense texts that were coming in, and
Speaker 1: then it would block in puts from your keyboard in
Speaker 1: order to try and you know, preserve your important report
Speaker 1: for your boss or your teacher. So it didn't include
Speaker 1: absolute gibberish in the middle of it, you know, apart
Speaker 1: from the stuff you put in there yourself. And then
Speaker 1: it would also make a quote sound that annoys the
Speaker 1: cat in the quote, so I guess it was meant
Speaker 1: to scare the cat from standing on top of your keyboard.
Speaker 1: I personally think that was a truly brilliant invention that
Speaker 1: deserves a real Nobel Prize, not an ig Nobel Prize.
Speaker 1: There was also an award for research into a really
Speaker 1: crappy situation, which was namely the quote collapse of toilets
Speaker 1: in Glasgow end quote. This went to researchers who reported
Speaker 1: that due to aging commodes, essentially there were a few
Speaker 1: cases of toilets breaking from underneath the sitter upon the throne,
Speaker 1: which also meant these poor folks suffered some pretty nasty
Speaker 1: cuts and abrasions in the process. It wasn't just you know,
Speaker 1: a plumbing issue and potentially humiliating, but also legitimately dangerous.
Speaker 1: So they did a study and then an issue a
Speaker 1: report alerting people to this epidemic of breaking toilets. To
Speaker 1: learn more about toilets, you should search the tech stuff archives.
Speaker 1: I've got an episode I recorded with Josh Clark of
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know. We talk all about the toilets
Speaker 1: in that one, including some of the world's oldest toilets.
Speaker 1: Flush toilets if you sort of flush toilets, if you
Speaker 1: think of the tides as being your flushing mechanism, which
Speaker 1: I actually visited several years ago. They were in Scotland, Okay,
Speaker 1: we're going to take another quick break. When we come back,
Speaker 1: I'm going to wrap up about these early Ignobel prizes
Speaker 1: awarded in the fields of technology and related subjects. But
Speaker 1: first we need to thank our sponsors. All Right, we're back.
Speaker 1: So we're up to two thousand and one. We get
Speaker 1: another satirical barb. The award for technology went to two
Speaker 1: different recipients, John Keo and the Australian Patent Office. So
Speaker 1: why well, just let me quote you the abstract on
Speaker 1: the patent application that KO had sent in. Quote in
Speaker 1: a court with a first aspect of the present invention,
Speaker 1: there is provided a transportation facilitation device including a circular rim,
Speaker 1: a bearing in which a hollow cylindrical member is rotatable
Speaker 1: around a rod situated within the hollow cylindrical member, and
Speaker 1: in a series of connecting members connecting the circular rim
Speaker 1: with the hollow cylindrical member to maintain the circular rim
Speaker 1: and the hollow cylindrical member in substantially fixed relation, wherein
Speaker 1: the rod is positioned on an axis perpendicular to the
Speaker 1: plane of the circular rim and substantially central of the
Speaker 1: circular rim end. Quote. Now, in case he didn't pick
Speaker 1: up on that he's essentially describing a wheel like a
Speaker 1: bicycle wheel. I mean, that's what the description of the
Speaker 1: invention amounts to. So he applied for a patent for
Speaker 1: the invention of the wheel in two thousand and one.
Speaker 1: Here's the kicker, the Australian Patent Office awarded him that patent. Now,
Speaker 1: in case you're thinking he was trying to pull a
Speaker 1: fast one, well sort of. He wanted to put Australia's
Speaker 1: innovation patents to the test. He suspected that the Patent
Speaker 1: Office was giving very little attention to these patents, which
Speaker 1: have a much lower threshold than other types of patents.
Speaker 1: And I'd say his demonstration proved his point. He was
Speaker 1: also a patent lawyer, so he was showing how backward
Speaker 1: the system was, how broken it was, and that this
Speaker 1: could cause real headaches and the court systems. Further on
Speaker 1: and later on, the Australian Patent Office would quietly revoke
Speaker 1: the patent for the wheel. I think this really kind
Speaker 1: of ties into the recent episodes I did about the
Speaker 1: history of the US Patent Office. If you remember, in
Speaker 1: those early early years, there was this issue where the
Speaker 1: Patent Office was told it wasn't their job to review patents.
Speaker 1: It was just their job to approve them, and that
Speaker 1: the courts sorted out further down, which means that you
Speaker 1: could have two or three or countless people patent the
Speaker 1: exact same thing. The patent office would have to award
Speaker 1: a patent as long as they got the patent fee,
Speaker 1: the application fee, and then the courts would have to
Speaker 1: decide which patent was the legitimate one, which kind of
Speaker 1: seems like it's a really backwards way and wasteful way
Speaker 1: to do things. That's kind of what Kio was pointing
Speaker 1: out here. So I think the Ignobel Prize was really
Speaker 1: kind of calling out like, yes, this was an absurd
Speaker 1: situation and it did need to be called out like this,
Speaker 1: and they were. I would say, this is more of
Speaker 1: a sincere award. Now, there's something else interesting that happened
Speaker 1: in two thousand and one as I understand it, which
Speaker 1: is that someone who won an Ignobel Prize would later
Speaker 1: go on to win an actual Nobel Prize, which it's
Speaker 1: not the only time that's happened, but it is the
Speaker 1: first time. But we'll talk about that in the future
Speaker 1: episode instead. For our final entry for this episode. I'm
Speaker 1: actually going to talk about something that happened in two
Speaker 1: thousand and five, and that's when the Ignobel Prize for
Speaker 1: Peace went to Claire Rind and Peter Simmons, who had
Speaker 1: published a paper that was titled orthoptren DCMD neuron A
Speaker 1: reevaluation of responses to moving objects one selective responses to
Speaker 1: approaching objects. So Orthoptera is an order of insects that
Speaker 1: includes critters like locusts and grasshoppers. The DCMD neuron stands
Speaker 1: for the descending contralateral movement detector. So essentially, they were
Speaker 1: studying how insects like locusts perceive potential threats, like how
Speaker 1: do they perceive movement and then choose to respond, Like
Speaker 1: how does that actually work? Now? So far, nothing about
Speaker 1: that necessarily sounds like it's worthy of an Ignobel Prize, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's studying in and figuring out, well, what
Speaker 1: is the actual process by which they're able to respond
Speaker 1: to threats. Well, the way they determined it is what
Speaker 1: awarded them the prize. So one of the stimuli they
Speaker 1: tested on these insects was that they showed them Star Wars.
Speaker 1: As in the movie Star Wars. They used that stimuli
Speaker 1: to determine that the insects were actually more likely to
Speaker 1: respond to oncoming objects regardless of their size. And previously
Speaker 1: the hypothesis was that the size of the object was
Speaker 1: the main criterion that the insects responded to, that if
Speaker 1: it was big, they were going to go into flight
Speaker 1: mode rather than if it was smaller. But no, it
Speaker 1: turns out if it was something coming toward them, that's
Speaker 1: what would prompt the response. Now, what I could not
Speaker 1: tell is whether or not the locusts had to sit
Speaker 1: through one of the prequels or if you know, it
Speaker 1: was one of the good Star Wars movies. No word
Speaker 1: on that. All right, that's enough for today's episode. I
Speaker 1: will have to come back and do another episode and
Speaker 1: follow up and do some more of these Ignobel prizes
Speaker 1: before too long. They're fun to talk about and once
Speaker 1: in a while, like I said, the stuff we learn
Speaker 1: actually ends up being useful, maybe in ways we didn't anticipate.
Speaker 1: You can sometimes learn valuable things from something that's foolish.
Speaker 1: I'd argue, I'm living proof of that. Okay, that wraps
Speaker 1: up this episode of tech stuff. I hope you are
Speaker 1: all well. I will be back in Atlanta next week,
Speaker 1: so things should return to what passes for normal then,
Speaker 1: and I will talk to you again really soon. Tech
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