Ig Nobel Prizes 2023

The 2023 Ig Nobel Prize Winners The 2023 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on September 14. Video and details of the ceremony are at improbable.com/ig/2023-ceremony 

I wrote about the ceremony and emcee Marc Abrahams in 2018: 

https://armynow.blogspot.com/2018/10/marc-abrahams-turned-strange-science.html

Here are the new winners. Details here:  improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2023 

I recently met a physicist on a train in Germany who had a photo from an Ig Nobel Prize winner on his phone:

https://armynow.blogspot.com/2023/08/ig-nobel-moment-on-german-train.html

CHEMISTRY and GEOLOGY PRIZE [POLAND, UK] Jan Zalasiewicz, for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks. 

LITERATURE PRIZE [FRANCE, UK, MALAYSIA, FINLAND] Chris Moulin, Nicole Bell, Merita Turunen, Arina Baharin, and Akira O’Connor for studying the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times. 

MECHANICAL ENGINEERING PRIZE [INDIA, CHINA, MALAYSIA, USA] Te Faye Yap, Zhen Liu, Anoop Rajappan, Trevor Shimokusu, and Daniel Preston, for re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools. 

PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE [SOUTH KOREA, USA] Seung-min Park, for inventing the Stanford Toilet, a device that uses a variety of technologies — including a urinalysis dipstick test strip, a computer vision system for defecation analysis, an anal-print sensor paired with an identification camera, and a telecommunications link — to monitor and quickly analyze the substances that humans excrete.  

COMMUNICATION PRIZE [ARGENTINA, SPAIN, COLOMBIA, CHILE, CHINA, USA] María José Torres-Prioris, Diana López-Barroso, Estela Càmara, Sol Fittipaldi, Lucas Sedeño, Agustín Ibáñez, Marcelo Berthier, and Adolfo García, for studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backward. 

MEDICINE PRIZE [USA, CANADA, MACEDONIA, IRAN, VIETNAM] Christine Pham, Bobak Hedayati, Kiana Hashemi, Ella Csuka, Tiana Mamaghani, Margit Juhasz, Jamie Wikenheiser, and Natasha Mesinkovska, for using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person's two nostrils. 

NUTRITION PRIZE [JAPAN] Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura, for experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food. 

EDUCATION PRIZE [CHINA, CANADA, UK, HONG KONG, THE NETHERLANDS, IRELAND, USA, JAPAN] Katy Tam, Cyanea Poon, Victoria Hui, Wijnand van Tilburg, Christy Wong, Vivian Kwong, Gigi Yuen, and Christian Chan, for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students. 

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE [USA] Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz for experiments on a city street to see how many passersby stop to look upward when they see strangers looking upward 

PHYSICS PRIZE [SPAIN, GALICIA, SWITZERLAND, FRANCE, UK] Bieito Fernández Castro, Marian Peña, Enrique Nogueira, Miguel Gilcoto, Esperanza Broullón, Antonio Comesaña, Damien Bouffard, Alberto C. Naveira Garabato, and Beatriz Mouriño-Carballido, for measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies.

 

Post COVID, Laundromats are Lonely Places

In three of the seven countries I visited on this trip, I went to a laundromat. When you travel with just a backpack, clean clothes run out fast.  In Vienna, Paris and Brussels I washed my clothes, in each case wearing the last clean shorts and t-shirt I had left.

Earlier this year, in Zurich, I got help with getting change for a laudromat.  But since the COVID pandemic, I don't talk to fellow travelers in laudromats anymore. The laundromats are empty.  We go to nearby coffee shops or parks while the clothes are washing and drying.  The delightful conversations I have had in laundromats in Paris with tourists from from Australia, and three sisters from America are a thing of the past.  And the amazing conversations I had in a Jerusalem laundromat will not be duplicated.    

But laundromats are still far cheaper than baggage fees or dragging a big suitcase, so I will still be searching "laundromat" on Google wherever I go.

 

Eurail Pass App--So Much Better and Cheaper than Tickets

When I wrote about airlines, good and bad, my conclusion was: choose the airline with the best app, because data matters.  This year I bought a Eurail pass rather than individual tickets partly based on great reviews of the app.  My experience was better than my best expectations. 

I bought a seven-day pass in one month. It allowed me to pick any seven travel days in a thirty-day period and travel as much as I want on those days.  I could book the tickets in advance or just take the next train as I arrived in the station. I did both. 

The advance ticket was for the last travel day. I took the Eurostar from Brussels to London.  It required a reserved seat which I bought through the app two weeks in advance.  Many trains require buying seat reservations and on the most popular trains the seats can only be reserved on line well in advance.  

But in major stations you can buy a seat any time up to departure in their ticket offices. I had to do this with several tickets.  But in person the reservations are often cheaper than on line.  

When buying tickets from on line apps, the prices rise cheap to pricey to crazy as the departure approaches.  The Eurail app allows last-minute changes with no penalty.  Any train in the network (most trains) are included in the price of the pass.  I have seen Eurostar tickets costing nearly $300.  Mine cost $51--one seventh of the $358 cost of my Eurail pass.  

One of my travel days was from Vienna to Geneva--11 hours on two trains. The prices on Omio range from $227 to $304. With the Eurail pass, it was $51 plus a $12 seat reservation. My trip from Amsterdam on the four-hour express train would be $180. The 6.5-hour slower train $94. I took an unreserved fast train. 

When I was in Grenoble, I could not book a seat reservation for Paris. Grenoble did not have a ticket office. So I took an unreserved train to Lyon, then got a seat reservation to Paris for $20. 

When I left Paris for Caen in Normandy, I could not book the seat reservations on line. I went to Gare Montparnasse and made the reservations in Person using the SNCF on line system in the station. The seat reservations were $2 each way. 

The seven days of rail travel:

August 26: Amsterdam to Frankfurt

August 29: Darmstadt to Vienna

August 31: Vienna to Geneva

(September 1, bought a $20 local train ticket from Geneva to Grenoble to avoid using a travel day.)

September 3: Grenoble to Paris (through Lyon)

September 8: Paris to Caen

September 9: Caen to Brussels (through Paris)

September 13: Brussels to London

Musee de l'Armee in Paris: A Vast Museum of French Military History

On this trip to Paris, I visited the Musee de l'Armee or the Army Museum. With more than 500,000 artifacts in 12,000 square meters (3 acres) of space, I walked a couple of miles seeing nearly a millennium of French military history.  The museum is located in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower on the south bank of the Seine River in the Invalides area of Paris.  
 

The featured exhibit currently is about the the French Resistance and about the Deportation of Jews to death camps. More than 250,000 Jews were sent east, mostly to die under Nazi occupation.  

The collection also includes suits of armor from Medieval France. 

Weapons and uniforms from the Napoleonic era up through World War II

Paris Training Race and Recovery

 

After riding in the Alps on the weekend, I was able to ride in Paris twice.  On Tuesday, I went to the Hippodrome in the southwest corner of the city and rode in the daily training race.  The two-mile circular road around the horse racing track is closed to car traffic every day at 10am and open to bicyclists.  I have been riding at L'Hippodrome since 1999. This link has a map.

Groups of bicycles form peletons of every speed and ride the circle.  I joined a group of twenty and did seven laps at 22-23mph before dropping off. The circle is roughly one km flat, one km slightly uphill and one km slightly downhill. On my sixth lap I dropped off the group on the uphill, then caught up on the downhill. On the seventh lap, I was done. 

 I rode to a local village, ate lunch. Rode back and joined a slower group before returning the bicycle.  

On Thursday, I rode back circle. I  rode four laps with a group riding a little slower than the Tuesday group. The group dissolved after four laps so I rode to Chatou, a lovely village on the Seine about five miles west of Paris.  Between Paris and Chatou is short, steep Mont Valerien. I could barely climb the 3km hill. 

Before that ride I was thinking I might ride on the weekend. As I rode at walking speed up Mont Valerien, it was clear that the ride in the Alps and the Tuesday speed workout  had left me deeply tired.  One of the difficulties riding, or any kind of training, as we get older is that we need more rest.  And it was clear that the huge effort of the weekend before was not a great idea as far as my body was concerned.

I decided to listen to my body and visit museums in Normandy rather than ride.  I am sure it was the best plan. It seems strange to be sensible. 

Autoworld Brussels--The American Cars

Autoworld Brussels has many groups of cars in its huge collection. One big group is American  cars.  Mostly mid century. Some real beauties, some strange ones.

1975 AMC Pacer

1965 Lincoln Convertible

1958 Cadillac Fleetwood

Harley Hog

1948 Chrysler New Yorker Convertible

1965 Amphicar 770

1956 DeSoto Diplomat Custom Convertible

1956 Chevrolet Nomad

Auto World in Brussels--300 cars from 1896 to Today

In a huge complex of buildings connected to a park is AutoWorld Brussels.  The museum is near a huge stone arch commemorating Belgian independence and opposite another huge museum of Belgian military history. Another large museum of fine arts and antiquities is on the other side of the arch.

Auto World displays 300 cars and motorcycles from 1896 to the present.  Belgium has no history of making cars, but this small country is at the center of northern Europe and is also the political center of the European Union and NATO. Belgium is also a center of racing. The Spa-Francorchamps race track is considered the best track, especially by drivers, in the Formula 1 World Championship. 

Just inside the entrance of the museum was a display of new Bugatti luxury high-performance cars costing $3 million to $5 million and other models made over the past century.

2020 Bugatti Centodieci, W16, 4-turbo, 1600-horsepower, 380kmh top speed

2021 La Voiture Noire, W16, 4-turbo, 1600-horsepower, 420kmh top speed

Bugatti luxury cars from the 1920s and 30s

Bugatti race car from the 1930s

Little Cars and car shop dioramas ringed the main display area.

Trabant

A bright red Jeep

1968 Honda S800

1954 Moretti Grand Sport Berlinetta, 748cc, 71hp

1951 Renault R4 CV 750cc, 17hp

Garage dioramas

Renault 2CV

Strange little cars