So the Ig Nobel Prize awards ceremony took place at Harvard last night, and the hilarity of the achievements thus rewarded is now available online.
While the Medicine Prize was of the greatest general interest, as judged from the mainstream media’s interest in silicone dog testicles, my personal favorite is the Fluid Dynamics Prize, the citation for which is “for using basic principles of physics to calculate the pressure that builds up inside a penguin, as detailed in their report “Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh — Calculations on Avian Defaecation.” I find the abstract completely hilarious, along with the mind-bending picture given at the end:
[W]e calculated that fully grown penguins generate pressures of around 10 kPa (77 mm Hg) to expel watery material and 60 kPa (450 mm Hg) to expel material of higher viscosity similar to that of olive oil. The forces involved, lying well above those known for humans, are high, but do not lead to an energetically wasteful turbulent flow
What’s up with penguins, by the way? First there was the March of the Penguins, which was an unexpected box office hit this summer (which actually probably says a whole lot about the quality of this year’s offerings), then there’s the story my fellow second-year told me yesterday about the Big Conference in California, which included a trip to the San Diego Aquarium: she found the sight of academic big-wigs exclaiming “Ooh! A penguin! Look at the cute penguin! *preen*” too funny for words.
Maybe clowns aren’t just for surgery; they should have them for graduate students too. Maybe I’m just feeling bleah because I have present a poster at next week’s on-campus symposium.
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SkipAgagooga: Feminism is everything to everybody.
acakadut: oopps, old article. but still interestin g to read though
andrew: Side note. Derek Loewe̵ 7;s recent article here is quite...