Dabsie, you're being quite productive this week!
I think you've posted more stories this week than you have in the past month combined.
You must be imbibing quite a bit of caffeine.
Please don't overstress yourself!
Magnetic cockroaches, dirty money, wombat poo and posties' balls: It's the Ig Nobels 2019
The Annals of Improbable Research held its annual award-giving ceremony – the Ig Nobel Prize – on Thursday night at Harvard's Sanders Theatre, and the entries were as worthy as ever. Host for the event, top-hatted Annals editor Mark Abrams, introduced the 10 winners during a glittering evening peppered with science opera, …
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Saturday 14th September 2019 14:33 GMT Nick Kew
Re: Dabsie, you're being quite productive this week!
He has a cunning plan.
He's just back from hols, and demonstrating high productivity. So he can say to them, "gimme more hols, and you'll get yet more productivity". Ultimate goal: perma-hols (I've hyphenated perma hols for the benefit of your screen reader, lest it make something incomprehensible of permahols).
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Saturday 14th September 2019 22:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Engineering? Why?
> Why is the wheel always in that list? If you think about it, the truly great invention was the axle.
What the inventor of the wheel did next.
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Sunday 15th September 2019 19:45 GMT jake
Re: Engineering? Why?
Modern store-bought bread in general ranges from "garbage that the hogs won't eat" to "almost, but not quite edible". Make your own bread, it's hardly rocket surgery. (There are still small mom&pop bakeries out there that make good bread .... if you have one in your area, feel blessed!)
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Saturday 14th September 2019 21:56 GMT Chris G
Re: Two future poop Ig Nobels
"create a Poopba that follows your dog on walkies and picks the poop up so you don't have to."
That's why I prefer cats, they don't require walkies and they go to next door's flower beds to carefully excavate a hole and then bury their contribution to fertilising the neighbour's plants.
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Saturday 14th September 2019 22:48 GMT jake
Re: Two future poop Ig Nobels
Our acreage belongs to the (mostly feral[0]) cats, but they share it with us in return for fresh water, a place to sleep away from the coyotes, and a little quality chow. They also share with the folks east, west, and south of us (all of whom understand cats). The cats pee and poop at the outer corners of the ranch, where it won't get in anybody's way ... and in the fancy rose garden and pool area of the asshole who lives just north of us. He hates cats, and they carefully return the favo(u)r ...
The idiot to the north is clueless. And has had a serious rodent problem for the decade and a half that he has lived there ... Strangely enough, we don't, and neither do the neighbors to the east, west and south. I wonder why.
[0] Most of them get trapped at least once for spay/neuter and basic injections (difficult or impossible to live trap a feral cat more than once) ... According to the vet, they probably titer out for things like rabies for as long as they live, which isn't long. Sad to say, the ferals are part of the food chain here in Northern California.
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Monday 16th September 2019 11:36 GMT phuzz
Re: Two future poop Ig Nobels
It took me many years to work out why people who hate cats complained about cats shitting in their gardens. I'd always lived with cats, and knew that they take care to crap in quiet, out of the way spots where you're unlikely to stumble on (in) it.
Then I realised, cats don't crap in their own territory, or at least the nice part, but if you don't own a cat (because you hate them) then your garden is no cat's territory, and hence a perfect place for a feline waste dump.
Well, it's either that or cats know who doesn't like them, and enjoy shitting on them...
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Monday 16th September 2019 10:29 GMT 's water music
Re: Two future poop Ig Nobels
Second, create a Poopba that follows your dog on walkies and picks the poop up so you don't have to.
regular Roomba's will pick up pet scat already. There may be room for improvement but rebranding is pretty much the same as reengineering after all
Icon for an alternate containment approach that also may also have issues to iron out-->
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Sunday 15th September 2019 17:28 GMT TrumpSlurp the Troll
Wombat cubes!
I read that research and thought it was shit hot (sorry) research because of the applications in extruding manufactured products (for example).
Sausages with flat sides are much easier to cook, to pick just one thing.
Also fascinating that apparently male wombats mark their territory with piles of crap (hang on, sounding uncomfortably familiar here) and the cube shape stops the turds rolling away.
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Sunday 15th September 2019 20:57 GMT Mike 16
Re: Wombat cubes!
-- poop and sausages aren't the same thing ... --
Well, they share some inputs and means of production.
While pondering such things, there was a documentary a while back about the airships of The Great War. One fascinating snippet was that the gas-bags (or at least their liners) were made of "sausage casing", slit to make sheets out of tubes and "laminated" by heat and pressure to form _big_ sheets, and thus gasbags. The show also discussed the invention of the incendiary bullet and the refinement of aircraft tactics on the part of the RAF, but the bit of this manufacturing method and the Wurst Famine stuck in my mind. There appears to be a (text) summary at:
https://www.history.com/news/londons-world-war-i-zeppelin-terror
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Sunday 15th September 2019 23:33 GMT FozzyBear
The little girl on stage
Stamping her feet I think should be Introduced into every actors award show, oscars, emmy's, etc. Most importantly, the same concept should be a permanent fixture in every democratic parliament, Differing catch phrases based on the "Speech" at the time.
Please stop bullshitting.
Please stop you're talk out your arse
Please stop the lies.
You are not paid to waste the tax payers money
Please answer the question, Just answer the bloody question
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Monday 16th September 2019 09:25 GMT chrishansenhome
This comment is not about wombat poo at all
While wombat poo is something that we can discuss for aeons, a more pressing subject is the name of the presenter of the awards. He's not Mark Abrams, he's Marc Abrahams.
As I have twice won Annals of Improbable Research's monthly limerick contest, I am well acquainted with his name and hope you'll correct the error precipitously. Or else I'll come on stage after a minute shouting "Please stop...you're incorrect."
Biting the hand that feeds IT
