On The Funway

The Guardian does a fine job of reporting on the Ig Nobel Prize that has me pumping my fist while exclaiming yes each and every time I see reference to it. I've had favorites before, but never has there been a prize that I claim as mine.

"And what prize might that be, Geri?"

The PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE [AUSTRALIA, UK, USA]: Peter K. Jonason, Amy Jones, and Minna Lyons, for amassing evidence that people who habitually stay up late are, on average, more self-admiring, more manipulative, and more psychopathic than people who habitually arise early in the morning.

REFERENCE: Creatures of the Night: Chronotypes and the Dark Triad Traits, Peter K. Jonason, Amy Jones, and Minna Lyons, Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 55, no. 5, 2013, pp. 538-541.

Heck, even the comments made so far on the Guardian site are good, especially this series at the beginning:

wiganwill 19 September 2014 12:40am

First time I have ever been around at the right time to make the opening comment and it turns out this suggests I am a psychopath. Great.

richardmuu wiganwill 19 September 2014 1:20am

Go to bed. Now.

chutzzpah wiganwill 19 September 2014 1:32am

It's not late.

Proper Psychopaths stay up till at least 3am.
Maybe you're just a Narcissist with Insomnia ;)

*************

Okay. Gotta work now. And collapse. Excellent times in Sanders Theatre have me rather on the wiped side.

All of this year's winners are online at Improbable Research, and in worldwide media coverage.

Ira Flatow hosts his annual specially edited recording of the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony today on NPR's Science Friday.

It starts at 2pm Eastern time. Gavi and I will be listening via the web. The Science Friday How to Listen page links to the public radio stations across the country as well as the free radio podcast via iTunes or RSS and the Science Friday app for iOS and Android.

Enjoy!

"...you’d need a trailer to transport it and the lungs of a horse to play it."

It's a pretty monster, even if at the lowest of its lows, it really just goes "blat."

Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony! Tonight!

Ten brand-spanking new Ig Nobel Prizes as we recognize, honor, and celebrate research that makes people laugh and then think.

Last night's rehearsal was a hoot. Tonight's show promises to be even more so. If you're coming to Sanders Theatre, remember to bring paper for both deluges of paper airplanes, the first at the very start of the show. And if you're watching the broadcast live on the web, be sure to tune in promptly at 7:15 pm Eastern Time for the American debut of "Keromin," the Amazing Frogs, in a pre-ceremony mini-concert.

Print a few pages of the IgBILL and make your own genuine Ig paper airplanes to fly at the designated times. Or, if you like to burn through ink/toner and want to go giant-sized, there's always the 2012 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony poster.

I'm in the back-up position on the slides this year. Improbable Research intern Lauren Maurer created the slides for this year's show and is running lead on their projection. Given the sheer pandemonium marking my year, this was a super-wise move on Chief Airhead Marc Abrahams' part, and one I'm extraordinarily grateful for. I'll be clicking forward along with Lauren, ready to switch to my computer at a moment's notice should that be needed and also on hand to help resolve any other real-time problems that might crop up. So it's not exactly stress-free, but it's mostly just plain fun. It's my 5th year running slides at the Igs. We're doing a lot of things differently this year. Most of the changes are making the slide jockey jobs easier as a side-effect of improving the show for everyone watching it. Win!

Chief AIRhead Marc Abrahams reminded me, and I'm reminding you:

Today is the annual day-after-Thanksgiving Ig Nobel broadcast on NPR's Science Friday.

They have edited this year's ceremony down to a radio hour. As always, it will be fun to see how they managed to do that.

Details.

In Boston, it will be on WBUR (90.9 FM) at 2:00 pm. It will also be live-streamed online by a number of stations.

This past Sunday, AIRheads marked the end of the 2011 Ig Nobel Tour of the UK with this historic group reading of William Topaz McGonagall’s most famous bad poem, "The Tay Bridge Disaster." As you'll see in the video, they're obvious on a train. And yes, the train they're on is of course crossing the (rebuilt) Tay Bridge:



Two other McGonagall poems that had not been read in public in over 100 years (if ever) were read at the Ig Nobel UK Tour show in Dundee on Saturday night: Sterling Castle and Hawthornden.

There's more information about the lost poems in The Scotsman and Marc Abraham's column written for The Guardian. As the end of Marc's column explains, "Yes, this is the McGonagall whose name J.K. Rowling beststowed upon a curious character in the Harry Potter novels, and who inspired Terry Pratchett to create the Nac Mac Feegles, and provoked wonder in many other people and places."

Ten years ago, Andre Geim and his fellow researcher Sir Michael Berry won an Ig Nobel Prize in Physics for using magnets to levitate a frog.

Today, Andre Geim became the first individual to win both an Ig Nobel Prize and a Nobel Prize when he and his fellow researcher Konstantin Novoselov were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene."

As if that weren't enough improbable delight for a day, the Nobel Foundation website has a tradition of doing short telephone interviews with new Nobel Laureates. Nobelprize.org Editor-in-Chief Adam Smith finished his interview with Andre Geim by talking about his unique Ig Nobel/Nobel status and asking if he plans to display the two prizes together in his office.

And so the interview ended with the new Nobel Laureate talk about his pride in having won the Ig Nobel Prize, and the head of the Nobel Prize website following that by saying, "It certainly doesn’t seem to have done you any harm. On the contrary, I suspect."

Ah, yes. Not only do I love living in the future, I love living in such an improbable world.

Step 1: Go to bmj.com

If you see knitted gangrene, read accompanying copy. Then read Note 1 below.

If you don't see knitted gangrene (perhaps because it is no longer 23 September), please proceed to the next step.

Step 2: Go to the BMJ News tab

Repeat "If...." instructions above.

Step 3: Go to this Improbable Research blog post

You should see knitted gangrene there. Read accompanying copy.

Note 1: Once you see knitted gangrene and read the accompanying copy, you don't need to complete any of the latter steps. All links lead to the same information, more or less.

Note 2: For those wary of unknown websites, yes, that's the British Medical Journal BMJ. Really.

Note 3: The picture and article will also be in the print edition of this week's BMJ.

Note 4: Even in today's competitive college application market, I bet not many admission's officers see citations like this from American high school seniors.

Note 5: No, really, I had no idea. I mean, we knew the picture was going to accompany a short article in advance of next Thursday's Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. We were darned excited about that. I had no idea that the article was going to be about the knitted gangrene and the young woman who designed and created it, or that it was going to make the main page of the BMJ website. Yowser.

Note 6: Screen shot behind the cut tag; click on that image for a sampling of other screen shots and article citation info. It's all hanging out in the gallery of Bacteria for the 20th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony.

Note 73: The ceremony has been sold out for weeks, but everyone's welcome at the LIVE WEBCAST on YouTube. Thursday, September 30th schedule:
Test pattern: 7:05 pm (Boston time)
Webcast begins: 7:15 pm
Ceremony begins: 7:30 pm

Here's where to watch the webcast.

Also, the Ig Informal Lectures at MIT on Saturday, October 2nd, are great fun. Free admission -- but seating is limited. More info awaits those who scroll down the Ig page.

( Knitted Gangrene at the BMJ )

Signed: Aunt, Unca, Mother, Friend

(Ref: Robert Lichtman’s Trap Door #13.)

Streptobacilli. E. coli X 3. Black death (well, purple death in this case). Salmonella. Bacillis. Corynebacteriaceae. Susan, Gavi, and I are busy knitting bacteria for use in the 20th First Annual Ig® Nobel Prize Ceremony. Why bacteria? In honor of this year's theme, which is (wait for it)...Bacteria.

Tickets for the September 30th ceremony go on sale at noon Sunday at the Harvard Ticket Office. Info and links at the Improbable Ig page linked above. That's Sunday as in today, August 1st. This will be my third Ig ceremony. It turns out that Ig fun is clearly cumulative. It may even be exponential; that's certainly been my experience since I signed on with Improbable Research a couple of weeks after the 2007 Ig Nobel prizes were awarded.

"I'm really excited about starting in on gangrene." -- Gavi Levy Haskell, 31July2010

Photos to follow, here and/or on the Improbable Research blog.

So, buy your tickets a come to Harvard University's gorgeous Sanders Theatre, host a viewing party for the webcast wherever you'll be come the day, and/or knit up some bacteria for this year's crop of Ig Nobel prize winners, Nobel Laureates, Ignitaries, and other Improbable suspects. If you send them to me, I'll add them to the petri dish that is my dining table and make sure they get to the ceremony.

Yesterday, the 19th First Annual Ig Nobel Prizes were a category on Jeopardy!.