Velocity of Change
Posted on October 4th, 2007 by Bob Hall in TangentsI prepared a suitable Sputnik and velocity of technology post. Here is the first paragraph:
I turned 40 years old in February. Less than ten years before I was born the Soviet Union orbited the first artificial satellite around our planet. October 4th 2007 marks the fiftieth anniversary of this feat. Less than twelve years later Americans walked on the surface of the moon. Barely more 100 years ago on December 17, 1903 powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight was achieved by the Wright brothers.
It was drier than the last post so I spiked it. Instead, I recommend the Ig Nobel awards that honor crazy science. Here is a quote from AP writer Mark Pratt covering the event:
“Good news for your Viagra-using hamster: On his next trip to Europe he’ll bounce back from jet lag faster than his unmedicated friends.”
http://improbable.com/ig/
Here is a better link that now includes the 2007 results
Their site really is ugly/slow (here are the winners?)
MEDICINE: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, USA, for their penetrating medical report “Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects.”
PHYSICS: L. Mahadevan of Harvard University, USA, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled.
BIOLOGY: Prof. Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night.
CHEMISTRY: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin — vanilla fragrance and flavoring — from cow dung.
LINGUISTICS: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.
LITERATURE: Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word “the” — and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order.
PEACE: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon — the so-called “gay bomb” — that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.
ECONOMICS: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a device, in the year 2001, that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them. REFERENCE: U.S. patent #6,219,959, granted on April 24, 2001
