FEEDBACK鈥橲 favourite prizes, the Ig Nobels, were handed out last week in a ceremony at Harvard University to celebrate achievements that make people laugh, then think.
Coca-Cola earned the Ig Nobel prize in chemistry for a purification and taste-enhancement process that managed to ruin the water delivered to London鈥檚 taps. The firm filtered the tap water, added a dash of calcium chloride to enhance its taste, then bubbled ozone through it before bottling it as premium-price Dasini water. Unfortunately, the calcium chloride was contaminated with bromide, which the ozone converted to bromate. That鈥檚 a carcinogen which was not present in the original water, and it reached levels above government standards.
We know that music can induce a wide range of emotions. But that is intuition, and the mission of science is to quantify. Which is what Steven Stack of Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, and Jim Gundlach of Auburn University in Alabama did for the impact of listening to American country music, famed for telling in mournful tones tales of life gone wrong in all ways imaginable and some not. They earned the Ig Nobel prize in medicine for reporting that listening to country music tends to push the suicide-prone over the brink, accounting for 51 per cent of the variation in urban white suicide rates (Social Forces, vol 71, p 311).
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Another type of music that invokes strong emotions earned the Ig Nobel peace prize for Daisuke Inoue of Hyogo, Japan 鈥� for he is the inventor of karaoke. Feedback can only echo the Ig Nobel citation praising Inoue for 鈥減roviding an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other鈥�.
Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Christopher Chabris of Harvard earned the Ig Nobel prize in psychology for their 鈥淕orillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events鈥� (Perception, vol 28, p 1059). In a study that has already gained some notoriety, they asked students to count how many times a group of people threw a basketball in a video. Over a third failed to notice a woman in a gorilla suit walking through the scene. See and for the full Ig Nobels go to
ONE of our winning questions to Stephen Hawking was 鈥淲hy, when two socks pass the washday event horizon, do they so often become singularities?鈥� (11 September). Peter Hicks鈥檚 proposal prompted reader Geoff Levick to recall investigating this very serious matter in the 1970s.
He reports discovering that the board of New Zealand鈥檚 largest sock manufacturer and the board of the country鈥檚 only washing-machine manufacturer had two directors in common. He deduced that collaboration between the two companies had resulted in a device for the washing machine that extracted socks on a random basis, shredded them, and expelled them in the wash water.
Some time spent upside down in the machine bowl with a torch in an unsuccessful search for the device only led him to conclude that it was very cleverly hidden.
READER Catherine Dunn writes to trump our tale of hormone-free chickens (25 September). A few months ago, when the Canadian poultry industry was suffering mass culls in British Columbia due to an outbreak of avian flu, she saw some meat advertised in a local organic grocery store as 鈥済uaranteed 100 per cent avian-free chicken鈥�. So was it mammalian chicken, or some other class of creature she would rather not know about?
THIS is possibly the oddest submission yet to the Department of Unusual Units: 鈥淵ou can drive the [Lexus Hybrid] 400h from Los Angeles to New York and back nine times and produce less smog-forming emissions than painting a room with a gallon of house paint,鈥� Toyota vice-president Irv Miller told industry analysts, as reported by reader Stephen Casey. So what does an old Trans Am emit, in parlours per continent?
Anyway, the Lexus 400h looks to us like the marketing of a contradiction in terms: an environmentally friendly SUV. On fuel consumption, Toyota so far says only that it is expected to do better than 8 litres/100km (28 miles per US gallon).
FINALLY, and still automotively, a gem from Jeremy Clarkson, columnist for UK tabloid newspaper The Sun and presenter of TV motoring programmes. New 杏吧原创鈥檚 report of a vaccine that suppresses sheep farts and burps was, oddly enough, picked up widely (25 September, p 18). The Sun reported it as an 鈥渆xclusive鈥� 鈥� which may have referred to its coy coinage 鈥渟heep parps鈥� 鈥� and asked the very wise Clarkson to comment. 鈥淭his confirms what I鈥檝e been saying for years,鈥� he opined, 鈥渃ars do not cause global warming.鈥� A nomination for next year鈥檚 Ig Nobel prize in logic is in the post already.
Hoping for information on diet, Lisa Miles typed 鈥�5 a day鈥� into a well-known internet search engine. Quick as a flash, it came back: 鈥�5.787 脳 10鈭�5 hertz鈥�. So if your diet is poorer than 50 microhertz, watch out