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Archive for the ‘Trivia’ Category
The Cheetah revealed
October 8, 201222nd IgNobel awards – 2012
September 21, 2012
“The Stinker”, the official mascot of the Ig Nobel Prizes.
Researchers who worked on statistics which show brain activity in dead salmon, changed height perceptions when leaning to the left, a “speech-jammer” and a report that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports are some of the winners of this years IgNobel awards.
The 22nd Ig Nobel awards, organised by the humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research and awarded on Thursday at Harvard University, are a spoof of the Nobel prizes, to be announced next month. They honour achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think”. …….
….. This year’s Ig Nobels were handed out by five Nobel laureates including the 2009 physics laureate Roy Glauber, 2009 physiology or medicine winner Jack Szostak, and 2007 economics winner Eric Maskin.
Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, and founder of the Ig Nobels, ended the ceremony with the traditional goodbye: “If you didn’t win an Ig Nobel prize tonight – and especially if you did – better luck next year.”
Psychology prize:Anita Eerland, Rolf Zwaan and Tulio Guadalupe, for their study entitiled Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller.
Peace prize: The SKN company, for using technology to convert old Russian ammunition into new diamonds.
Acoustics prize:Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada for creating the SpeechJammer, a machine that disrupts a person’s speech by making them hear their own spoken words at a very slight delay.
Neuroscience prize:Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, andGeorge Wolford, for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere – even in a dead salmon.
Chemistry prize: Johan Pettersson for solving the puzzle of why, in certain houses in the town of Anderslöv, Sweden, people’s hair turned green.
Literature prize: The US government general accountability office, forissuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.
Physics prize:Joseph Keller, Raymond Goldstein, Patrick Warren andRobin Ball, for calculating the balance of forces that shape and move the hair in a human ponytail.
Fluid dynamics prize:Rouslan Krechetnikov and Hans Mayer, for studying the dynamics of liquid sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee.
Anatomy prize:Frans de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny, for discovering that chimpanzees can identify specific other chimpanzees from seeing photographs of their rear ends.
Medicine prize: Emmanuel Ben-Soussan, for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimise the chance of their patients exploding.
India tops the list of Olympics underachievers
August 14, 2012London 2012 has been a fantastic Olympics – the Bolt Games – notwithstanding a fairly pathetic closing ceremony.
The BBC with the help of Meghan Busse from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in the US has produced a table of the underachieving and overachieving nations (based on population and GDP).
The top-10 list of countries that won most Olympic medals barely changed between 2008 and 2012. The top four – US, China, Russia, UK – were identical. Just one country dropped out – Ukraine – which was replaced by Japan. But which countries did better or worse than we should have expected?
Before the Games started, BBC Radio’s More or Less programme decided to level the statistical playing field by working out how many medals nations could expect to win based on population and GDP alone.
“If you use those predictions as a kind of benchmark, then you can ask the question, who’s done well and not so well relative to that prediction – who won more medals than they should have, and who won fewer,” says Meghan Busse from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in the US, who helped with the sums.
THE ALTERNATIVE MEDAL TABLE
By the grace of Allah – a water-powered car!
August 8, 2012Of course it’s August and it’s silly season but the bottom is reached when a Pakistani Minister of Religious Affairs and cabinet ministers endorse a water-powered car!!
….. “By the grace of Allah, I have managed to make a formula that converts less voltage into more energy,” the professed inventor, Agha Waqar Ahmad, said in a telephone interview. “This invention will solve our country’s energy crisis and provide jobs to hundreds of thousands of people.” ……
Federal ministers lauded Mr. Ahmad and his vehicle, sometimes at cabinet meetings. The stand-in minister for religious affairs, Khursheed Shah, appeared on television with him and took a ride in his small Suzuki rental, which was hooked up to a contraption that Mr. Ahmad described as a “water kit.” Respected talk show hosts suggested he should get state financing and protection. …..
The country’s most famous scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan — revered inside Pakistan as the father of the country’s nuclear weapons program and reviled elsewhere as a notorious figure in the international nuclear black market — gave it his imprimatur, too. “I have investigated the matter, and there is no fraud involved,” he told Hamid Mir, a popular television journalist, during a recent broadcast that sealed Mr. Ahmad’s celebrity.
The quest to harness chemical energy from water is a holy grail of science, offering the tantalizing promise of a world free from dependence on oil. Groups in other countries, including Japan, the United States and Sri Lanka, have previously made similar claims. They have been largely ignored. Not so with Mr. Ahmad, even if he is an unlikely scientific prodigy. Forty years old and a father of five, he graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1990 from a small technical college in Khairpur, in southern Sindh Province, he said in the interview. For most of his career he worked in a local police department. He is currently unemployed.
Most of the Pakistani media went ape. But Dawn at least kept its cool and represented the voice of sanity:
TALK-SHOW hosts feted it. Politicians rode in it. Cabinet ministers discussed it. Well-known scientists backed it. Those of a particularly conspiratorial bent called for him to be provided security against a threatened oil industry. While a lone voice calling foul was barely given a chance to be heard, Agha Waqar Ahmad and his ‘water car’ were being hailed as the invention that would free the world from the tyranny of fossil-fuel dependence and transform Pakistan’s image around the globe. As was bound to happen eventually, his scientifically impossible claim, which defies the basic laws of physics, is now being exposed as gobsmacked scientists begin to write and speak about it. A technical examination of the water kit, planned at the highest levels of government, has been delayed indefinitely. Perhaps the best proof has come from the man’s own bumbling attempts to defend his device.
What won’t change as quickly are the unfortunate truths this episode has exposed about Pakistani society. For one, it highlighted again how easily the media here buys into seemingly exciting, but always improbable, news stories without any background research or inquiries. Also left looking more ridiculous than Mr Ahmad are the politicians, ministers and especially scientists who jumped on the bandwagon and hailed the car as a giant leap for Pakistan, showcasing in the process the national love of shortcuts and easy glory and the lack of quality education that makes even our leading public figures susceptible to such bogus claims. Meanwhile, no real work, scientific, managerial, technical or otherwise, is being done to actually address the energy crisis. And the fact that at the same time the breakthrough science of an actual national hero — the Nobel-prize-winning Dr Abdus Salam — is being erased from our official history is a telling comment on Pakistan’s commitment to knowledge.
Oh Calcutta!!
July 26, 2012I finished my schooling in Calcutta and in spite of all its problems and challenges it holds special memories for me.
A Geographical quiz
July 20, 2012It took me some time to figure this out (while on an 8 hour flight). Perhaps it will be obvious and very simple for others.
A prize for the first correct answer/explanation of this table !!
Answer next week (if somebody doesn’t get it before then).
??????????
Geographical Trivia
Update – The explanation is here: Explanation
“Even the dead don’t escape the carbon tax”
July 9, 2012Julia Gillard’s carbon tax in action!
AN apology has been issued to a grieving family by a cemetery which told them they were being charged a $55 carbon tax to bury a relative. …..
The family claimed that the cemetery slapped them with a $55 carbon tax bill for burying a relative – saying “even the dead don’t escape the carbon tax” – just days after the tax was introduced.
The outraged family complained to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, describing it as a “tax on the dying”.
Erica Maliki said the Melbourne cemetery told her and two other relatives that a $55 charge would be applied to her father-in-law’s burial due to the carbon tax. …..
Climate Change Minister Greg Combet said it would be “reprehensible” if any cemetery took advantage of grieving families by misleading them over funeral expenses.
It comes as three companies were reprimanded by the consumer watchdog for cashing in on the carbon tax.
The ACCC said that it was investigating solar panel suppliers
Polaris Solar and ACT Renewable Energy for providing false information on the cost impacts of the tax, while bakery chain Brumby’s was caught advising outlets to raise prices and blame the carbon tax.
While cemeteries are not liable entities under the carbon tax, the funeral industry has previously warned of indirect price rises for both burials as well as cremations through higher energy prices and councils passing on their carbon tax costs.
And as ACM points out:
In any event, technically, burial is carbon sequestration. If it had been a cremation, however…
On tour during coldest June in Sweden in 92 years
June 29, 2012
Sami flag
Just back from our “Midsommar” tour of Northern Sweden. A fascinating 3,500km trip and I learned a little more about the Sami peoples and their history. I had not known how coercive and oppressive it had once been in Sweden when the Sami religion and language(s) were banned. There are some 80,000 Samis today ranging across Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.
….. In 1913-1920, the Swedish race-segregation politic created a race biological institute that collected research material from living people, graves, and sterilized Sami women. ……
The strongest pressure took place from around 1900 to 1940, when Norway invested considerable money and effort to wipe out Sami culture. Notably, anyone who wanted to buy or lease state lands for agriculture in Finnmark had to prove knowledge of the Norwegian language and had to register with a Norwegian name. This and similar actions in Scandinavian countries, e.g., the sterilization of Sami women by Swedish authorities, are debated to be an act of ethnic cleansing, and perhaps a genocide.
We did not have too much rain but it was never very warm. Reindeer had calved (a little late this year) and the Sami were busy marking the new calves. While we saw many reindeer we only saw one moose (a large male) munching by the roadside but we were travelling too fast to get any good pictures. Midsommar itself was a very traditional Swedish experience in Sundborn.
Raising the Midsommar pole in Sundborn June 2012
June has been a cool month throughout Sweden (the coldest June in 92 years):
Temperatures have remained below average for the month, at just 13.3 degrees Celsius, compared with the usual 15.2 degrees, SMHI said.
For the month of June, Stockholm usually has an average of 5.3 days with temperatures above 25 degrees, but this year the high for the month was just 21.6 degrees.
That is only the second time since 1920 that the temperature has failed to hit 25 degrees in June in Sweden.
Midsommar
June 21, 2012A week away from blogging as we travel north through the hinterland and into the Arctic Circle for a Swedish Midsommar! With the midnight sun and consequent shortage of sleep I suspect I shall not be blogging much.
Midnight sun Photo: http://www.imagebank.sweden.se Tomas Utsi
Where to view the annular solar eclipse of May 20th
May 15, 2012
Eclipse Anular (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Fifteen days after the “supermoon” of May 5th when the moon was at perigee, the moon will be at apogee and will be too small to obscure the entire disc of the sun when their paths intersect (as viewed from earth). This will give an “annular” eclipse of the sun on May 20th which will be visible from China across the Pacific to North America.
This excellent map by Michael Zoeller of eclipse-maps.com gives a comprehensive picture of where the eclipse will be visible and the magnitude of the eclipse visible:
map by michael zoeller http://www.eclipse-maps.com
The k2p blog 