Website of the Week - Roll over Alfred

[PointyHairedJedi]

[color=#000000:post_uid0]This is one that falls under the 'improbable but true' category - the Ig Nobels (http://www.improb.com/ig/ig-top.html) are an alternative award for some of the wierder and less probable science that's going on out there. And trust me, it is all actually true, unbelieveable as that might seem.[/color:post_uid0]

[Sa'ar Chasm]

[color=#000000:post_uid0][quote:post_uid0]"Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants."[/quote:post_uid0]

Every discipline has its lunatic fringe, although in physics that fringe occurs a lot closer to the core. Who else but physicists could come up with terms like WIMPs and MACHOs?

[quote:post_uid0]computer-based automatic dog-to-human language translation device.
[/quote:post_uid0]

"Hey! Hey! Heyheyheyheyheyheyhey! Heeeeeeeyyyyyy! Hey!"[/color:post_uid0]

[Things Are Good]

[color=#000000:post_uid0]Sa'ar-that last thing was from The Far Side, right?[/color:post_uid0]

[Sa'ar Chasm]

[color=#000000:post_uid0][quote:post_uid0]Sa'ar-that last thing was from The Far Side, right?[/quote:post_uid0]

Of course. You think I come up with all this stuff myself?[/color:post_uid0]

[Nan]

[color=#000000:post_uid0]*rolls on floor laughing*

Ah, Sa'ar. That was good. Well, ah, Gary Larson, that was good. ;)


~Nan[/color:post_uid0]

[Sa'ar Chasm]

[color=#000000:post_uid0][quote:post_uid0]John Richards of Boston, England, founder of The Apostrophe Protection Society, for his efforts to protect, promote, and defend the differences between plural and possessive. [/quote:post_uid0]

Rumour has it Bob the Angry Flower was the second member.

[quote:post_uid0]Dr. Jack and Rexalla Van Impe of Jack Van Impe Ministries, Rochester Hills, Michigan, for their discovery that black holes fulfill all the technical requirements to be the location of Hell. [/quote:post_uid0]

Prior to 'Dr.' Van Impe's research, Hell was thought to be located in Secaucus, New Jersey.


[quote:post_uid0]"Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments."

Chris Niswander of Tucson, Arizona, for inventing PawSense, software that detects when a cat is walking across your computer keyboard.

The British Royal Navy, for ordering its sailors to stop using live cannon shells, and to instead just shout "Bang!"
[/quote:post_uid0]

There is absolutely nothing I can say to make these any funnier. You can't make this stuff up.[/color:post_uid0]

[Captain Galactic]

[color=#000000:post_uid0][quote:post_uid0]Karl Kruszelnicki of The University of Sydney, for performing a comprehensive survey of human belly button lint -- who gets it, when, what color, and how much.[/quote:post_uid0]

Somebody had a [i:post_uid0][b:post_uid0]lot[/b:post_uid0][/i:post_uid0] of free time on their hands. And few (or no) friends. And few (or no) interests.

But it achives the Ig Nobel goal, I guess...

[quote:post_uid0]Every Ig Nobel Prize winner has done something that first makes people LAUGH, then makes them THINK. Technically speaking, the Igs honor people whose achievements "cannot or should not be reproduced." [/quote:post_uid0][/color:post_uid0]

[Kira]

[color=#000000:post_uid0]One of my profs told us an anecdote a couple weeks ago about some research that could qualify for an Ig Nobel.

Several years ago (this is probably going back to at least the 70's if not farther), one of the professors in the Microbiology department decided to investigate whether you could get vitamin K from intestinal bacteria. To do this, he found some grad students to experiment on. (Grad students apparently have no rights in the scientific community; you wouldn't be able to get away with this on any animal -- they're too well protected. :D) Anyways, he put these grad students on a diet extremely low in vitamin K. This may not sound so bad until you realize how many things have vitamin K in them; these students weren't allowed to eat milk products or leafy greens to name a few and were basically living off diet coke and Jell-o. Naturally, this made the poor grad students pretty weak and exhausted. As if this weren't enough, just to make absolutely sure that their vitamin K levels were lowered (because this experiment was so important to science, you know), the professor gave the students low doses of warfarin.

For those of you who may not be aware, warfarin is used as rat poison.[/color:post_uid0]

[Celeste]

[color=#000000:post_uid0]OMG, you know, I think i've heard of this case. Those poor students. Of course it's just like me having to be practiced on by my peers. If someone has a sharp pointy instrument they've never even looked at before cept 3 minutes ago, and now they're gonna play around with it in your mouth...... uh huh that's what I thought ;)

And my tongue still hurts from where Cynthia cut me while placing XRay films last tuesday! Mrs Wood was wiping off the blood![/color:post_uid0]