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posted by Fnord666 on Friday September 13 2019, @05:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the takes-some-balls-for-that-one dept.

Cubed Wombat Poop, why Your Left Scrotum Runs Hot, Among Ig Nobel Winners:

Prizes honor "achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think."

Over the years, curious intrepid scientists have gleaned insight into why the wombat's poo is cube-shaped, explored the magnetic properties of living and dead cockroaches, and determined that a man's left testicle really does run hotter than the right. These and other unusual research topics were honored tonight in a ceremony at Harvard University's Sanders Theater to announce the 2019 recipients of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes.

Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes and honor "achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." The unapologetically campy award ceremony features mini-operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures, whereby experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds, and the second in just seven words. Acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds. And as the motto implies, the research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn't mean it is devoid of scientific merit.

The winners receive eternal Ig Nobel fame and a ten-trillion dollar bill from Zimbabwe. It's a long-running Ig Nobel gag. Zimbabwe stopped using its native currency in 2009 because of skyrocketing inflation and hyperinflation; at its nadir, the 100-trillion dollar bill was roughly the equivalent of 40 cents US. (Earlier this year the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe introduced the "zollar" as a potential replacement.) The 2009 Ig Nobel Prize for Mathematics was awarded to the then-head of the RBZ, Gideon Gono, "for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers — from very small to very big — by having his bank print bank notes with denominations ranging from one cent ($.01) to one hundred trillion dollars ($100,000,000,000,000)."

[...] If you happen to be in the Cambridge, Massachusetts, area on Saturday afternoon, September 14, most of the new winners will give free public talks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The lectures will also be webcast.

My personal favorite, in a just-how-do-you-stop-the-squirming kind of way was the Engineering Citation awarded to Iman Farahbakhsh "for inventing a diaper-changing machine for use on human infants."


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @09:25PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @09:25PM (#894164)

    I think you are missing the obvious. This person is mentally ill. No, I am not being pejorative; I'm quite serious. More and more, I am seeing the signs of mental illness on display in online communication.

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 15 2019, @01:06AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 15 2019, @01:06AM (#894205)

    I think you are missing the obvious. This person is mentally ill. No, I am not being pejorative; I'm quite serious. More and more, I am seeing the signs of mental illness on display in online communication.

    While what you say is correct, this is nothing new for this guy. He is Alexander Peter Kowalski and has been venting his disturbed spleen since the 1990s.

    I first encountered him in the mid 2000s on the green site, where he would hawk his host file and harass people.

    The links below are pretty telling too. The third one should look quite familiar.

    https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=821190&start=40 [arstechnica.com]
    http://www.thorschrock.com/2008/05/19/how-to-respond-when-people-threaten-to-sue-you-on-the-web/ [thorschrock.com]
    http://retrobbs.novabbs.com/index.php?t=tree&goto=1933922& [novabbs.com]

    Apparently, he has a bug up his ass with one of our users (Barbara Hudson [soylentnews.org]) and has brought his mentally unbalanced drivel to us.

    My recommendation is to continue modding his obvious spam as spam. Eventually he'll probably go away.

    And if not, perhaps we can prevail on the site admins to give us all an extra couple of mod points a day just for him.

    Regardless, he's no more than a minor inconvenience and should be spam modded/ignored like that other whacko with the violence against women spam. He's long gone, and I'm sure this moron soon will be too.

    • (Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 15 2019, @02:47PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 15 2019, @02:47PM (#894353)

      "You’re the one who started it" by BarbaraHudson (3785311) July 13, 2019 yet barbara hudson said quoted "trolling the hosts file guy in one easy step The next time you see a post by him, just reply anonymously." by tomhudson (43916) March 31, 2011 and barbara hudson after ending up in jail for a year then IMMEDIATELY on return to /. https://tech.slashdot.or/comments.pl?sid=14311560&cid=58890562 [slashdot.or] started with APK again since APK completely destroyed that tranny bullshitter on C and C++ inferiority to Pascal on string security and speed publicly all verifiable in the post beneath barbara hudson the deluded lunatic that cut its balls off thinking incorrectly "it" is a woman.

  • (Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 15 2019, @02:56PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 15 2019, @02:56PM (#894356)

    Do you have psychiatric evidence of APK being mentally ill? No. You are libeling him. From what I saw quoted from barbara hudson the tranny fake woman deluding itself it is a real woman in this exchange it instigated a concerted effort of libel by unidentifiable anonymous posts stalking of APK on slashdot. If anyone is mentally ill it is barbara hudson who was in jail for a year.

  • (Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 15 2019, @03:08PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 15 2019, @03:08PM (#894358)

    Real evidence of insanity exists in "barbara" hudson itself (really tomhudson) literally slicing off its testicles and penis in a delusion it can become a real woman! 99.999% of real men would declare anyone doing that insane on common sense alone not to mention barbara/tom hudson is caught admittedly stalking apk by unidentifiable anonymous posts https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=33605&page=1&cid=894353#commentwrap [soylentnews.org] easily verified on slashdot.