Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Be 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? As you might be able to tell, I'm
Speaker 1: under the weather. Like I thought when I was on
Speaker 1: that work trip, I was starting to get sick, and
Speaker 1: I was hopeful that it was nothing more than maybe
Speaker 1: some congestion or whatever. But no, despite all the wearing
Speaker 1: of masks and hand washing and all that stuff, I
Speaker 1: still got COVID. It's no joke, y'all. Do your best
Speaker 1: to protect yourself when you're out there. I know that
Speaker 1: it can seem lame to wear a mask this long
Speaker 1: after the pandemic, but it can make a difference. Like
Speaker 1: my case is not as bad as it could be.
Speaker 1: My guess is that wearing the mask helped at least
Speaker 1: a little bit. I didn't wear the mask the whole
Speaker 1: time because I had to participate in some events and
Speaker 1: do some recordings and stuff, So it's entirely possible it
Speaker 1: was during one of those instances where I contracted it.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I've been spending the last several days isolated
Speaker 1: in my office at home because fortunately my partner does
Speaker 1: not have it. So anyway, all that's just to say,
Speaker 1: I love y'all and I want you to be safe.
Speaker 1: So be careful out there, to your best, to just
Speaker 1: you know, take care of yourself. I know not everyone
Speaker 1: wants to wear a mask, and I get it, but
Speaker 1: I want you to be around for a while, whether
Speaker 1: you're listening to my show or not, I want you
Speaker 1: to be around, So just be careful. But enough of
Speaker 1: all that sappy stuff. Last Wednesday, although now it feels
Speaker 1: like that was an eternity ago, I published an episode
Speaker 1: about the ig Nobel Prize, So this joke set of
Speaker 1: awards is a spoof of the more prestigious Nobel Prize, that,
Speaker 1: of course was established from the wealth of a dynamite
Speaker 1: gap named Alfred Nobel, the guy who invented dynamite. Perhaps
Speaker 1: no Bell wanted his legacy to be more associated with
Speaker 1: celebrating human achievement rather than blowing stuff up, you know,
Speaker 1: like the Fast and Furious franchise, because that's all about family,
Speaker 1: or at least that's what I'm told. I haven't seen them. Anyway,
Speaker 1: The Ignobel Prizes grew out of one satirical science journal
Speaker 1: called the Journal of Irreproducible Results, and then later migrated
Speaker 1: to a second satirical science journal called the Annals of
Speaker 1: Improbable Research. Mark Abrahams, who at different times helmed each
Speaker 1: of those publications, serves as the Master of Ceremonies. He's
Speaker 1: also been called the Commander of Comedy, and Abrahams likes
Speaker 1: to reference the prizes as something that first makes you laugh,
Speaker 1: then it makes you think. Now. Some Ignobel Prize winners
Speaker 1: received the award for seemingly spending a great deal of
Speaker 1: time and effort studying something that, at least on the surface,
Speaker 1: does sound like it matters that much like why would
Speaker 1: you even bother looking into that? Others can sometimes receive
Speaker 1: the award as a kind of raz from the scientific community,
Speaker 1: kind of like almost like a for shame kind of thing.
Speaker 1: For example, the former US Vice President Dan Quayle received
Speaker 1: the nineteen ninety one ig Nobel for Education because he
Speaker 1: demonstrated quote the need for science education end quote. That
Speaker 1: was just a snarky way of saying dan Quayle's own
Speaker 1: command of science was somewhat lacking. But anyway, in that
Speaker 1: last episode, I left off at two thousand and five. However,
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk about a few more winners who
Speaker 1: received an ig Nobel Prize for stuff that relates to tech,
Speaker 1: because obviously not all the prizes do. In fact, most
Speaker 1: of them don't. They do all relate around things like
Speaker 1: science and peace and literature, kind of a reflection of
Speaker 1: the real Nobel Prizes, but in a very cheeky, tongue
Speaker 1: in cheek kind of way. Now, one of the ones
Speaker 1: I want to mention next. It requires me to go
Speaker 1: back a bit, because, like I said, I left off
Speaker 1: around two thousand and five in the last one, but
Speaker 1: there's one where I need to go back to two
Speaker 1: thousand because the person that I really didn't mention. I
Speaker 1: think I briefly gave a nod toward this person, but
Speaker 1: I don't think they even named him was Andre Geiin,
Speaker 1: who with Sir Michael Barry, earned the Ignobel Prize for
Speaker 1: Physics back in two thousand. But what garnered them such
Speaker 1: an honor, Well, it was for a scientific experiment that
Speaker 1: involved the use of magnets to levitate frogs. And while
Speaker 1: that description is technically true and accurate, it doesn't tell
Speaker 1: the whole story obviously, So Gime is a kind of
Speaker 1: an interesting person in that he likes to do exploratory
Speaker 1: experimentation to just learn new stuff, just to try new
Speaker 1: things and see what happens, Like I wonder what would
Speaker 1: happen if we this to that, and then he tries it.
Speaker 1: So the story he tells is that one day he
Speaker 1: was walking through the lab late one night when his
Speaker 1: eyes beheld an eerie sight. I mean, with his spooky season,
Speaker 1: I guess I can quote the monster mash. Now, he
Speaker 1: was walking through the lab and he had this huge
Speaker 1: like electromagnet device, and the coil of the electromagnet creates
Speaker 1: kind of a cylinder, right like you've got an empty
Speaker 1: cylinder in there, and he thought, I wonder what happens
Speaker 1: if I pour water into that cylinder. Now, this is
Speaker 1: a very expensive piece of equipment, and he actually says like,
Speaker 1: without even really thinking about and certainly without using any restraint,
Speaker 1: I decided to try it out. He turned on the electromagnet,
Speaker 1: which was extremely powerful, and he poured some water in it.
Speaker 1: Well water has a very weak magnetic property to it.
Speaker 1: It's not really noticeable most of the time. But he
Speaker 1: was using a very very strong electromagnet and perhaps that
Speaker 1: magnetic property of water is one of the things that
Speaker 1: has set up a lot of pseudoscientific discussion about water,
Speaker 1: you know, like the idea of water having some sort
Speaker 1: of molecular memory and that leads to things like homeopathy.
Speaker 1: But that's not really what he was looking at. He
Speaker 1: was just like, I wonder what happened. And what happened
Speaker 1: was that the water kind of stalled as it was
Speaker 1: pouring into the cylinder that this electromagnet had sort of created,
Speaker 1: and that he was seeing that the water would beat
Speaker 1: up into little spheres and float, and you know what,
Speaker 1: frogs have a lot of water in them, you know,
Speaker 1: So he tried putting a frog in essentially an electromagnet,
Speaker 1: where like again, the electromagnet forms a cylinder, and by
Speaker 1: putting the frog there, the frog floated right there because
Speaker 1: the electromagnet was generating enough of a magnetic field to
Speaker 1: levitate the frog to keep him or it, I guess,
Speaker 1: floating within that little cylinder. I actually saw a video
Speaker 1: of this. It looked like the frog was on one
Speaker 1: of those parabolic flights, you know, the vomit comet, the
Speaker 1: aircraft that goes up in big arcs and simulates microgravity,
Speaker 1: and Lily the frog was in one of those also
Speaker 1: didn't seem to be particularly happy about it. Can't say
Speaker 1: I blame it anyway. This odd experiment actually contributed to
Speaker 1: science beyond the fact you know that if you use
Speaker 1: a strong enough magnet you can levitate water and or
Speaker 1: a frog, because Geime started to dedicate a small amount
Speaker 1: of his time around ten percent according to his own accounting,
Speaker 1: toward conducting weird moonshot experiments. He said it was the
Speaker 1: sort of stuff that probably wouldn't be likely to result
Speaker 1: in anything important, but if it did, it could potentially
Speaker 1: be a game changer. As it turned out, he was right,
Speaker 1: because you see, Geime was also involved in the research
Speaker 1: that led to the discovery of graphene. So, graphene is
Speaker 1: a sheet of carbon atoms. It's a sheet that's just
Speaker 1: one atom thick. Right, you could have billions of atoms
Speaker 1: in width and length, but it's only one atom thick.
Speaker 1: Guayman's colleagues used an ordinary pencil which has graphite that's
Speaker 1: a form of carbon, and they use some sticky tape,
Speaker 1: and with the sticky tape and the graphite, they were
Speaker 1: able to isolate graphene from the graphite. Well, graphene is
Speaker 1: also the basis for things like carbon nanotubes. A carbon
Speaker 1: nanotube is just a sheet of carbon atoms that have
Speaker 1: been rolled up kind of burrito style. And the way
Speaker 1: you roll it up, the direction that you roll the
Speaker 1: graphene so that you know the way the atoms align
Speaker 1: with each other, that actually determines the physical properties of
Speaker 1: the carbon nanotubes. You know, you roll them one way
Speaker 1: and the carbon nanotube might act like an insulator. You
Speaker 1: roll them a different way, could act like a conductor.
Speaker 1: That kind of thing. It's really cool stuff, and it's
Speaker 1: one of those things that's like constantly referenced as going
Speaker 1: to be the basis of the next generation of technological revolutions.
Speaker 1: We've already done a ton of stuff with like graphene
Speaker 1: and carbon nanotubes since this discovery. Anyway, it means that
Speaker 1: in twenty ten, Geime and his colleagues would win the
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize for their experimental work in isolating graphene, which
Speaker 1: means that Geime would become the first person to ever
Speaker 1: win an ig Nobel Prize and then later win a
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize. All Right, so now we've done with the
Speaker 1: stuff that I forgot to cover in the last episode,
Speaker 1: we can jump back to two thousand and five. Now,
Speaker 1: this next one isn't really tech related, but I kind
Speaker 1: of feel the need to mention it because of how
Speaker 1: wild it is. Back in the nineteen thirties, New Zealand
Speaker 1: had an exploding trousers problem. If you're a fan of
Speaker 1: the podcast Ridiculous History, you might already be aware of this,
Speaker 1: because they actually did an epist sod about it back
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty, which disappointed me. Because you may know this.
Speaker 1: I occasionally show up on Ridiculous History as a character
Speaker 1: known as the Quiztor, and when I came across this
Speaker 1: while researching the Ignobel Prize, I thought, Oh, this would
Speaker 1: be great to do in a Quiztor segment. And then
Speaker 1: I did a quick search and found out, oh, they
Speaker 1: already covered this years ago. Anyway, this all has to
Speaker 1: do in New Zealand's Department of Agriculture. The Department of
Speaker 1: Agriculture was giving recommendations to New Zealand farmers to use
Speaker 1: a chemical compound called sodium chlorate as a weed killer.
Speaker 1: The New Zealand farmers were transitioning away from herding sheep
Speaker 1: to herding cattle instead, But the sheep had been eating
Speaker 1: an invasive weed, and when they started switching to the cattle,
Speaker 1: those weeds were starting to grow out of control. So
Speaker 1: the Department of Agriculture says use the sodium chlorate to
Speaker 1: kill off those weeds. However, sodium chlorate is extremely flammable,
Speaker 1: like explosively amable, so naturally as farmers would use the stuff,
Speaker 1: some of it would end up getting soaked in on
Speaker 1: their trousers. So one such farmer, a fellow named Richard Buckley,
Speaker 1: not the famed fashion designer I should add, was drying
Speaker 1: his sodium chlorate soaked trousers in front of a fire
Speaker 1: when he observed those pants began to explode like like,
Speaker 1: there were a series of explosions within the pants. Once again,
Speaker 1: I am reminded of the Fast and Furious franchise, or
Speaker 1: at least as much as I know about it based
Speaker 1: off trailers and the podcast the worst idea of all time. Anyway,
Speaker 1: Buckley wasn't the only farmer in New Zealand with exploding pants.
Speaker 1: Some others, unfortunately, were wearing their trousers when they caught fire,
Speaker 1: and as you can imagine that had disastrous and tragic results. Actually,
Speaker 1: but a fellow named James Watson wrote a scholarly article
Speaker 1: examining this period in New Zealand history, and he called
Speaker 1: it the Significance of mister Richard Buckley's Exploding Trousers Reflections
Speaker 1: on an aspect of Technological Change in New Zealand's Dairy
Speaker 1: Farming Between the World Wars. Pretty wordy title. The journal
Speaker 1: called Agricultural History published this article. Now, as that title
Speaker 1: actually points out, this is a case of technological change,
Speaker 1: and the change didn't arrive simply for change's sake. There
Speaker 1: were multiple factors that drove this change, and I think
Speaker 1: that's a valuable lesson to pick up. Often we can
Speaker 1: reduce technological advancement as if it were almost like a
Speaker 1: natural process that if you just wait over time, tech
Speaker 1: gets better. But obviously tech isn't some sort of biological
Speaker 1: creature following an evolutionary path. Technology advances because people advance it.
Speaker 1: Sometimes the reasons for going in a certain direction with
Speaker 1: technology are complicated and diverse and external. But by understanding
Speaker 1: those driving forces, we can better understand why technology went
Speaker 1: one way rather than another, and it might even open
Speaker 1: up an opportunity to develop technology in a different way. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about some more ig Nobel Prize winners. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're back. We're still in the year two thousand and five.
Speaker 1: That was also the year that the quote unquote Internet
Speaker 1: Entrepreneurs of Nigeria received an ig Nobel Prize in Literature,
Speaker 1: specifically for the creation of the Nigerian Prince scam. And yes,
Speaker 1: this does relate to tech because this is a subset
Speaker 1: of scams that have been around for ages. Like it's
Speaker 1: not a new idea, but the Internet and the popularity
Speaker 1: of email really had them proliferate and become widespread. So
Speaker 1: if you've ever heard of the Nigerian Prince scam, or
Speaker 1: sometimes just the Nigerian scam, or I think sometimes the
Speaker 1: four nineteen scam, then this is what that refers to.
Speaker 1: And in case you have never heard about this, here's
Speaker 1: how the scam works. The scammers will send out waves
Speaker 1: of emails to potential targets and the email will claim
Speaker 1: that the target, your mark, the person you're hoping to trick,
Speaker 1: has the chance to make a boatload of money if
Speaker 1: they just help the scammer out. So all they have
Speaker 1: to do is put up a relatively small amount of
Speaker 1: their money, and then the scammers say they're going to
Speaker 1: use that small amount of money to unlock a big
Speaker 1: old honkin' wad of cash, and then they will share
Speaker 1: or even give that cash to the target. And so
Speaker 1: for a little bit of money, you're going to get
Speaker 1: an enormous payout. And the particulars vary depending on the
Speaker 1: person who's sending out the scam, but the Nigerian prince
Speaker 1: version typically frames the issue as this. They say that
Speaker 1: a person of very high status, such as a prince
Speaker 1: of Nigeria, has temporarily lost access to their wealth. It
Speaker 1: may be due to political unrest something like that. Often
Speaker 1: it's that the person of high status has now been
Speaker 1: thrown in jail and they need some help in order
Speaker 1: to get out. And there's usually some other details that
Speaker 1: will go into this as well to kind of try
Speaker 1: and play upon the target's compassion. So maybe they might say, like,
Speaker 1: the prince's family is in custody and their lives are
Speaker 1: at risk, they're under threat, and so if you can help,
Speaker 1: if you can put this small amount of money forward,
Speaker 1: that will be enough for the prince to use to
Speaker 1: do things like I don't know, post bail or to
Speaker 1: bribe officials to get out of prison, and that once
Speaker 1: they do, they will regain access to their wealth, they
Speaker 1: will be able to rescue their family, and they'll be
Speaker 1: able to reward the target by giving a huge share
Speaker 1: of the wealth to the target. So obviously this is
Speaker 1: just a scam. There is no prince in danger, there's
Speaker 1: certainly no huge amount of wealth that will be shared
Speaker 1: with the person. So if the target falls for the scheme,
Speaker 1: they'll discover that the only thing that happens if they
Speaker 1: wire the money to whatever account is attached to this scam,
Speaker 1: the only thing that happens is that their bank account
Speaker 1: will go down. So the two thousand and five Ignobel
Speaker 1: Prize for Literature is cheekily applauding the ingenuity of con
Speaker 1: artists as they create stories meant to separate a fool
Speaker 1: from his money. In two thousand and six, Howard Stapleton
Speaker 1: received the Ignobel Prize in Peace for a technological innovation.
Speaker 1: It was Stapleton who created a device meant to repel teenagers.
Speaker 1: I've actually talked about this before. The typical range of
Speaker 1: human hearing spans frequencies as low as twenty that would
Speaker 1: be a very very very low pitch, to as high
Speaker 1: as twenty kill a hurtz, a very high pitch. That's
Speaker 1: typical range for human hearing. Obviously, as individuals go that
Speaker 1: range varies. However, as we age, our range of hearing
Speaker 1: usually starts to narrow. We start to lose the ability
Speaker 1: to hear certain frequencies. Usually it's off the high end,
Speaker 1: so we start losing the ability to hear those higher
Speaker 1: pitches as we get older. That means younger people can
Speaker 1: hear higher pitches that older people can't. And there's the opportunity.
Speaker 1: Stable didn't came up with the idea to use a
Speaker 1: device that generates a very loud, very high pitch, a
Speaker 1: piercing sound. But it's a sound that people of adult
Speaker 1: age are not likely to be able to hear at all.
Speaker 1: They wouldn't even know there was a sound playing, but
Speaker 1: young people would be able to hear it. So let's
Speaker 1: say you're the proprietor of a convenience store and you're
Speaker 1: sick of all these lazy teenagers hanging out in your
Speaker 1: store and loitering. They never buy anything, and they're upsetting
Speaker 1: your paying customers. So you install one of these sound
Speaker 1: generators in your shop, and when the kids are like
Speaker 1: taking up too much time and not buying anything, you
Speaker 1: turn it on. This ends up irritating the teenagers enough
Speaker 1: for them to leave because it's a very loud, high
Speaker 1: pitched sound. You can't hear it because you're an adult,
Speaker 1: but the teens can hear it, so they you know,
Speaker 1: they make tracks. Apparently Stapleton was an equal opportunity kind
Speaker 1: of guy, because according to the Ignobel Prize, they have
Speaker 1: a whole page about past winners and they actually explain
Speaker 1: that he also used this concept to design ring tones
Speaker 1: for cell phones that kids would be able to hear
Speaker 1: but adults would not be able to hear, which would
Speaker 1: mean that kids in school could hear when their phone
Speaker 1: got a notification, but their teacher would remain none the
Speaker 1: wiser because it would be a pitch too high for
Speaker 1: them to perceive. Very sneaky. Now it's time for another
Speaker 1: raz Award. This one is a doozy. It's from the
Speaker 1: two thousand and seven Peace Prize and it goes to
Speaker 1: the United States Air Force. Y'all, this one is bonkers,
Speaker 1: so okay. In two thousand and seven, as part of
Speaker 1: a Freedom of Information Act request, some researchers got some
Speaker 1: information about the US military that was actually, I'm not
Speaker 1: even sure how to put this in a way that
Speaker 1: is a valid representation of how I feel about it
Speaker 1: and is also family friendly. Let's just say it was unconventional.
Speaker 1: So the actual story goes back much further because this
Speaker 1: was classified information and otherwise without the Freedom of Information
Speaker 1: Act you would never be able to get access to it.
Speaker 1: But the story goes back to the nineteen nineties. So
Speaker 1: apparently back then people at the US Air Force explored
Speaker 1: the possibilities of using chemical warfare, but not chemical warfare
Speaker 1: in the sense of using like deadly chemicals in an
Speaker 1: attempt to poison or to burn or to otherwise cause
Speaker 1: physical harm to enemy combatants. Instead, they were looking for
Speaker 1: chemicals that would alter behavior in combatants in different ways,
Speaker 1: you know, as a way to reduce them as a
Speaker 1: threat in war. So imagine like you find a chemical
Speaker 1: that reduces aggression, for example. Well, one of these proposals
Speaker 1: explored the use of quote strong afrodisiacs, especially if the
Speaker 1: chemical also caused homosexual behavior end quote. Now, the media
Speaker 1: ran with this and began to reference the whole idea
Speaker 1: as a quote unquote gay bomb. Now there's no real
Speaker 1: need to dive into how awful all of this is,
Speaker 1: but I used to say that even considering some theoretical
Speaker 1: weapon that would compromise a person's agency to that regard
Speaker 1: raises some really serious questions. It's like saying, what if
Speaker 1: we just roofeed everybody and also somehow turned them gay?
Speaker 1: And it boggles the mind, like the scientific basis for
Speaker 1: such a weapon as flimsy at best. So it ends
Speaker 1: up being just a theoretical discussion because it's not like
Speaker 1: it's not like humans act on you know, pheromones or
Speaker 1: aphrodisiacs like this. We're more complicated than that. But it's
Speaker 1: still wild to me that anyone would even consider it
Speaker 1: as a viable weapon. I think it reveals, at the
Speaker 1: very least a pretty strong homophobic tendency. Anyway, congrats on
Speaker 1: winning an Ignobel prize. I guess another two thousand and
Speaker 1: seven honoree was Ching Hussey, whose name I am sure
Speaker 1: I have completely butchered. Anyway, he received a patent back
Speaker 1: in two thousand and one for a quote net trapping
Speaker 1: system for capturing a robber immediately. End quote. This is
Speaker 1: a reminder also that these awards, these Ignobel Prizes, they
Speaker 1: don't always come out the same year that something happened.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's years later, because you know, people just didn't
Speaker 1: notice the inciting event, or maybe they had not had
Speaker 1: a full appreciation of the impact of that event. But yeah,
Speaker 1: this was for a net trapping system for capturing a
Speaker 1: robber immediately, which is kind of like have you ever
Speaker 1: seen a film where someone's walking along a forest or
Speaker 1: jungle path and then suddenly they get swept up in
Speaker 1: a big net that then holds them up over the ground.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like that, except this net would actually
Speaker 1: be installed above a point of entry, as the patent explains.
Speaker 1: This is a direct quote from the patent quote. The
Speaker 1: device looks like a storing box and is installed above
Speaker 1: the entrance of the business. When a robbery takes place
Speaker 1: and the system is activated, an infrared detecting device determines
Speaker 1: if a robber is in a zone beneath the storing box.
Speaker 1: A net, a curtain, and a plurality of barriers will
Speaker 1: drop down immediately and simultaneously after a lifting motor is activated.
Speaker 1: The system traps the robber and suspends him above the floor.
Speaker 1: End quote. First of all, robbers could be women. Let's
Speaker 1: not put gender to this, but no. I imagine the
Speaker 1: fact that this invention would replicate a scene found in
Speaker 1: various adventure movies is what prompted the Ignobel designation. And
Speaker 1: you can actually read this patent yourself if you want to, like,
Speaker 1: if you want to look at what this design actually
Speaker 1: looks like and to debate whether or not it would work,
Speaker 1: you can just go to a patent search site like
Speaker 1: Google has a patent search site, and the US patent
Speaker 1: number for this one is sick million, two hundred nineteen,
Speaker 1: nine hundred and fifty nine. Okay, skipping ahead to two
Speaker 1: thousand and nine, we have a prize in public health
Speaker 1: that went to a trio of inventors Elena Bodner, Rafael Lee,
Speaker 1: and Sandra Margin. They perhaps anticipated the pandemic of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty because their invention was a garment piece of clothing
Speaker 1: that you could quickly separate to create a pair of
Speaker 1: face masks to be worn in situations where a face
Speaker 1: mask might be needed. That garment was a bra. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they invented a brazier that, when removed, could then be
Speaker 1: converted into a couple of face masks, allowing a pair
Speaker 1: of bosom buddies to stay abreast of the situation while
Speaker 1: remaining safe. And they got a patent for it. If
Speaker 1: you want to read up on that patent, including to
Speaker 1: see the various sketches of the proposed invention, you can
Speaker 1: search for u US Patent seven million, two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty five thousand, six hundred and twenty seven. Personally, I
Speaker 1: wish to thank them for supporting public health while simultaneously
Speaker 1: removing personal support. Okay, I think that's as many juvenile
Speaker 1: jokes as I can get away with without completely alienating
Speaker 1: all of you. I'm sure I've alienated most of you,
Speaker 1: but some of you are still there. I hope we're
Speaker 1: gonna take another quick break, and then I've got a
Speaker 1: few more Ignobel Prize winners I want to mention before
Speaker 1: we sign off. Okay, we're back now. I only have
Speaker 1: one prize in twenty ten to mention in this episode,
Speaker 1: and it's sort of indirectly about technology. The Ignobel Prize
Speaker 1: for Medicine went to a pair of researchers from the
Speaker 1: Netherlands for quote, discovering that symptoms of asthma can be
Speaker 1: treated with a roller coaster ride end quote. Now, the
Speaker 1: actual paper that prompted this award has the title roller
Speaker 1: Coaster Asthma when positive emotional stress interferes with disnea perception.
Speaker 1: Nea is new to me, dyspnea. I mean, I know
Speaker 1: apnea and things like that, but dispna is hard for
Speaker 1: me to say, and I may I may be pronouncing
Speaker 1: it totally wrong, so that's fair play. But anyway, this
Speaker 1: is this is more about the euphoric thrill that you
Speaker 1: get with certain activities can apparently interfere at least with
Speaker 1: our perception of asthma symptoms. If not the actual symptoms,
Speaker 1: are perception of them, which ultimately in our brains kind
Speaker 1: of means the same thing. So it's less about the
Speaker 1: technology itself. It's more about how roller coasters are the
Speaker 1: way to create this euphoric response. But I just love
Speaker 1: the idea of a doctor advising a patient to take
Speaker 1: a trip out to six Flags and ride some roll
Speaker 1: leaue coasters in order to treat their asthma. In twenty eleven,
Speaker 1: some researchers in Japan received the Ignobel Prize in chemistry
Speaker 1: for figuring out quote the ideal density of airborne with
Speaker 1: sabi to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire
Speaker 1: or other emergency end quote. So it's kind of like
Speaker 1: using with sabi, which you know, you could also think
Speaker 1: of as horse radish. It's a little more complicated than that,
Speaker 1: but similar. You can think of it as sort of
Speaker 1: like smelling salts. But Jonathan, you may say, while this
Speaker 1: is no doubt amusing, what does it have to do
Speaker 1: with technology. Well, my friend, while they took the knowledge
Speaker 1: of this, like they learned what concentration of this smell
Speaker 1: does it take to wake someone up? They then applied
Speaker 1: that in a technology. They created a special type of
Speaker 1: smoke alarm and it emits a synthesized with sabi smell
Speaker 1: upon detecting smoke. Now, some of y'all might think, well,
Speaker 1: that seems excessive, why would you do that? But if
Speaker 1: you are hard of hearing, like if you are deaf,
Speaker 1: an audible smoke alarm may not wake you out of
Speaker 1: a sound sleep, and in the event of a fire,
Speaker 1: obviously that creates an urgent situation. So this study, which
Speaker 1: at first sounds absolutely silly, led to the development of
Speaker 1: a technology that potentially could save lives. So they actually
Speaker 1: did some research here. They found out that all but
Speaker 1: one of their test subjects would wake up within two
Speaker 1: minutes of the scent reaching them. The one outlier who
Speaker 1: did not wake up within those two minutes happened to
Speaker 1: be really congested at the time, so it was a
Speaker 1: nasal blockage, so the wasabi had no means of reaching them.
Speaker 1: But a pretty ingenious use of technology, like the idea
Speaker 1: of spraying with sabi to synthesize with sabi in this case,
Speaker 1: but to spray with sabi and wake people up so
Speaker 1: that they can respond to an emergent situation. Just one
Speaker 1: of those kind of weird inventions you wouldn't have necessarily
Speaker 1: thought about. All right, now we're up to twenty twelve.
Speaker 1: Next up is the Ignobel Prize for an invention. I've
Speaker 1: referenced many times on this show. In fact, I talk
Speaker 1: about this actually more often I talk about it off
Speaker 1: the show than on the show. Just a couple of
Speaker 1: weeks ago, while I was trying to record an interview
Speaker 1: over the Internet, I talked about this. So the prize
Speaker 1: was in the field of acoustics, and it went to
Speaker 1: Katsutaka Kurihara and Kojitsukata for their invention. They called the
Speaker 1: speech jammer. So this is the device that plays back
Speaker 1: a person's own spoken words at a very small delay.
Speaker 1: So essentially, this device has a microphone which picks up
Speaker 1: a target's speech. Then it has a slight delay device,
Speaker 1: so it just it inserts a digital delay, and then
Speaker 1: it plays back the spe each by a very short
Speaker 1: delay through a speaker system, and it plays it back
Speaker 1: at the person who's making the speech. Now, if you've
Speaker 1: ever had the experience of being in say like you know,
Speaker 1: a video call or something like that, and you hear
Speaker 1: yourself on a delay, you know that before long it
Speaker 1: starts to get difficult to continue to speak to make sense.
Speaker 1: The longer you go, the harder it gets, and you
Speaker 1: might find yourself stumbling over your own words or even
Speaker 1: saying stuff that isn't words at all. Well, the speech
Speaker 1: jammer was meant to do this on purpose. The inventors
Speaker 1: intended it to be used by agencies like law enforcement.
Speaker 1: So imagine you've got a big crowd that's getting all
Speaker 1: riled up. Maybe there's a charismatic speaker standing on a
Speaker 1: little platform and delivering a rousing speech, and you're worried
Speaker 1: that the crowd is going to become unruly and maybe
Speaker 1: it'll turn to a riot. Well, then you would use
Speaker 1: the speech jammer, and you would pointed at the person
Speaker 1: giving the speech, and they would soon find it difficult
Speaker 1: or maybe even impossible to continue to rally the troops.
Speaker 1: Now you can argue this isn't exactly a noble cause.
Speaker 1: Maybe it is more of an ignoble one. I guess
Speaker 1: if you've never experienced this feeling, it really is a
Speaker 1: bit disconcerting. I think a lot of people could actually
Speaker 1: work through it. Like, I don't think it's as effective
Speaker 1: as it's always made out to be, at least not
Speaker 1: for everyone. I've done it myself, and I've seen other
Speaker 1: people really push through when this is happening. It's just
Speaker 1: not an ideal situation where you're getting that little bit
Speaker 1: of a delay and you're in playback and it's causing
Speaker 1: you some issues. In my experience, you can get through.
Speaker 1: It just takes a lot of effort and it's not pleasant.
Speaker 1: There's also a great twenty twelve prize in neuroscience for
Speaker 1: the ignobels. I would argue this one was actually extremely important.
Speaker 1: This went to a group of VA searchers who use
Speaker 1: some very sophisticated brain brain activity detection equipment like including
Speaker 1: an fMRI machine, and they detected brain activity in a
Speaker 1: dead salmon and as in the fish. And yes, if
Speaker 1: this were a research project that somehow proved that dead
Speaker 1: fish can have meaningful brain activity throughout the entirety of
Speaker 1: their bodies, that would be weird. But no, this was
Speaker 1: actually a demonstration to show that without using very careful
Speaker 1: controls and rigorous scientific discipline, the possibility for false positives.
Speaker 1: Using these types of instruments and the typical types of
Speaker 1: statistical analysis, false possibility is extremely high. Obviously, this means
Speaker 1: any conclusions that you would draw from such work would
Speaker 1: have to be couched in the fact that the process
Speaker 1: isn't always reliable, that it does require that extreme effort
Speaker 1: to try and eliminate false positives as much as possible,
Speaker 1: And if you don't have those strict controls in place,
Speaker 1: you actually can't be confident in any conclusions you've drawn
Speaker 1: from using that equipment. So it's obvious that deadfish cannot
Speaker 1: have meaningful brain activity. So obviously, if the research suggests otherwise,
Speaker 1: something has gone wrong, right, Like, you can definitively say
Speaker 1: this deadfish does not have any brain activity, So that
Speaker 1: means something has gone wrong in the process, and you
Speaker 1: can start to take a look at that. It also
Speaker 1: means that if it's possible to get that kind of
Speaker 1: reaction while you are measuring a dead fish, it brings
Speaker 1: into question the validity of data from procedures that have
Speaker 1: actual people involved. What if that was also wrong because
Speaker 1: the equipment wasn't calibrated correctly or trolled for properly, that
Speaker 1: brings into question. They're really pointing out you've got to
Speaker 1: be super careful because otherwise you're drawing conclusions on data
Speaker 1: that might not be reliable. And researchers have been using
Speaker 1: fMRI machines, which create images through magnetic resonance, to track
Speaker 1: brain activity as people do everything from like simple tasks
Speaker 1: like you know, lifting a cup of liquid, to watching
Speaker 1: for emotional responses, to various stimuli like watching to see
Speaker 1: how a brain reacts as a person looks at a
Speaker 1: different set of photographs. That kind of thing. Now, this
Speaker 1: information could potentially teach us a lot about how the
Speaker 1: brain works, and clearly could be really useful for practical
Speaker 1: stuff in the future, like designing brain computer interfaces. Like
Speaker 1: having that understanding of the brain's workings can mean that
Speaker 1: we could create better brain computer interfaces, which could end
Speaker 1: up opening up all sorts of opportunities, particularly for people
Speaker 1: who may not have any way of moving around on
Speaker 1: their own or communicating outwardly. But these researchers were showing
Speaker 1: that any kind of work that is based around this
Speaker 1: field has to be accompanied by carefully applied strict procedures
Speaker 1: to mitigate the risk of false positives, because otherwise we
Speaker 1: might end up pursuing a path that actually doesn't lead anywhere.
Speaker 1: And it's because the way we used, or maybe I
Speaker 1: should say misused the scientific instruments gave us the wrong
Speaker 1: idea about what was going on in the first place,
Speaker 1: and we were pursuing something that just didn't exist. It's
Speaker 1: like we were snipe hunting. The research serves as a warning,
Speaker 1: and I honestly think that's incredibly valuable. It's also good
Speaker 1: for me to remember when I see press releases about
Speaker 1: technology meant to interact with the brain. We should all
Speaker 1: be critical thinkers about this kind of stuff, and to
Speaker 1: remind ourselves that without scientific rigor, we can't really count
Speaker 1: on result, especially if it's something that just kind of
Speaker 1: popped up out of nowhere. I'm reminded of all those
Speaker 1: various toys that proclaimed they used brainwave activity to allow
Speaker 1: you to control something, and a lot of that is
Speaker 1: questionable at the very least, right, So, yeah, I think
Speaker 1: this particular Ignobel prize is for something that is genuinely important,
Speaker 1: and I can see it's a perfect example of something
Speaker 1: that first makes you laugh and then makes you think,
Speaker 1: because the whole thing was precipitated upon the scientists detecting
Speaker 1: brain activity in a dead salmon as a way of
Speaker 1: showing how you have to be careful with your scientific process.
Speaker 1: So fantastic prize there, all Right. That wraps up this
Speaker 1: episode of tech stuff about the Ignobel Prizes up to
Speaker 1: twenty twelve. Clearly we've got a little bit more than
Speaker 1: a decade left to catch up, so we'll do another
Speaker 1: episode about this not too long from now and really
Speaker 1: focus on the technology angles. Obviously, there are lots of
Speaker 1: other prizes that were awarded over the years for other categories.
Speaker 1: I highly recommend you check them out because some of
Speaker 1: them are really interesting. Some of them are just they'll
Speaker 1: make you scratch your head, and some of them are
Speaker 1: again those sort of raz awards to say, shame on
Speaker 1: you for doing this, because you made the world worse.
Speaker 1: There's a few of those in the Ignobel Prizes as well.
Speaker 1: It also is really amusing to me that a lot
Speaker 1: of the recipients of the Ignobel Prize will take the
Speaker 1: effort to attend the ceremony, and often there are Nobel
Speaker 1: Laureates there as well. So it all like seems to
Speaker 1: be done in pretty good humor, and I like that
Speaker 1: a lot too. I think that's really encouraging. Actually, Okay,
Speaker 1: I hope you're all well. I hope you're all staying safe.
Speaker 1: I'm slowly getting better myself. Hopefully in tomorrow's episode i'll
Speaker 1: sound a bit better than I do today, and we'll
Speaker 1: just be on an upward swing and I'll talk to
Speaker 1: you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.