Steampunk Exhibition

Wired has a photo gallery article  from an amusing exhibition, Steampunk: Form and Function: An Exhibition of Innovation, Invention and Gadgetry, described as “the Jules-Verne-meets-Bill-Gates school of contraption art”, being shown at the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation in Waltham, Massachusetts, just outside Boston.

The Steampunk Time Machine Antique Master Bathroom Computer Workstation, designed by Bruce Rosenbaum and Walter Parker, melds a modern computer with antique plumbing components, including a ribcage shower, toilet and pipes.

I don’t think the plumbing components are intended to be functional.  There is also a computer desk built from an Eastman Kodak Century No. 1 Studio Camera.  I particularly like the Victorian “Sojourner” Keyboard, by Rich Nagy, and the Waterproof USB Drives by Derrick Culligan.

The show includes more than 30 digitally rejiggered antiques, including clocks, coffeemakers, humidifiers, workstations and grand pianos. It’s all displayed, appropriately enough, in a former textile factory built in 1814.

The exhibit runs through January 15, 2012.

 

Ig®Nobel Prizes, 2011

Yesterday evening, in  a ceremony at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater, the Journal of Improbable Research awarded the Ig® Nobel Prizes for 2011.    The prizes are awarded for research that “first makes people laugh, and then think”.   The awards are generally based on real published research that also has elements of humor or absurdity.  The complete list of winners is available at the Journal‘s site; some of my favorites are:

• CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami of JAPAN, for determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi (pungent horseradish) to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency, and for applying this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm.
• LITERATURE PRIZE: John Perry of Stanford University, USA, for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which says: To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that’s even more important.
• BIOLOGY PRIZE: Darryl Gwynne (of CANADA and AUSTRALIA and the UK and the USA) and David Rentz (of AUSTRALIA and the USA) for discovering that a certain kind of beetle mates with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle.

There are two of the awards this year that deserve special mention.  The first is the Mathematics Prize, awarded jointly to a group of people who have predicted that the world would end at various times in the past.  The award citation was to:

Dorothy Martin of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1954), Pat Robertson of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1982), Elizabeth Clare Prophet of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1990), Lee Jang Rim of KOREA (who predicted the world would end in 1992), Credonia Mwerinde of UGANDA (who predicted the world would end in 1999), and Harold Camping of the USA (who predicted the world would end on September 6, 1994 and later predicted that the world will end on October 21, 2011), for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.

Finally, the Ig® Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania, Arturas Zuokas, who decided to discourage wealthy people with expensive cars from parking illegally: he ran over the parked cars with an armored personnel carrier, crushing them (YouTube video).

The list of winners, linked above, also has citations for the research papers.  Ars Technica also has an article on this year’s prizes.  I’ve written here previously about the Ig® Nobel awards in 2010 and 2009.

Real Causes of the Financial Crisis

Yesterday’s Washington Post has an amusing article by Michael Lewis (author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short, and others) on the true causes of the financial crisis.  It’s short, but entertaining; here’s an excerpt to give you the flavor:

Government policies have emboldened ordinary Americans to borrow money they never intended to repay, just like rich people do, and cowed the financial elite into lending it to them. You can’t forget to bear-proof the garbage cans and expect the bears won’t notice.

I’ve been a fan of Lewis’s writing since I read his first book, Liar’s Poker; it was the first honest inside account of what Wall Street is like that I ever read, and still one of very few.

Enjoy.

Ig® Nobel Prizes, 2010

Thursday evening, in Cambridge MA, the Journal of Improbable Research announced the 2010 winners of the Ig® Nobel Prize, given  “For achievements that first make people LAUGH, then make them THINK”.  I should note that most of these prizes are given for real research that nonetheless has an element of humor, or absurdity, included.  Ars Technica has an article in its “Nobel Intent” blog about the prizes; a similar article at New Scientist reports that, for the first time, this year’s awards included a cash prize.  The lucky recipients received a 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollar bill.

You may recall that the 2009 Ig® Nobel Prize for Mathematics was awarded to Gideon Gono, governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, for allowing the country’s citizens to become comfortable with a wide range of numbers, by issuing bank notes in denominations ranging from Z$ 0.01 to Z$ 10,000,000,000,000.  In February 2009, the Reserve Bank announced a reverse split of the Zimbabwe dollar, at a rate of 1:10¹²; in other words, you would get Z$ 1 new (fourth series) for Z$ 1 trillion old.

Here are a couple of my favorites from this year’s awards:

• PEACE PRIZE: Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston of Keele University, UK, for confirming the widely held belief that swearing relieves pain.
• ECONOMICS PRIZE: The executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Magnetar for creating and promoting new ways to invest money — ways that maximize financial gain and minimize financial risk for the world economy, or for a portion thereof.
• ENGINEERING PRIZE: Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin of the Zoological Society of London, UK, and Diane Gendron of Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Baja California Sur, Mexico, for perfecting a method to collect whale snot, using a remote-control helicopter.

The official announcement has references to the relevant articles in the literature for most of the prizes.  There is no reference available for the Economics Prize; but then one would not expect the firms involved to publish the secret of getting such phenomenal results.  Unfortunately, too, none of the firms that shared the Economics Prize sent a representative to the ceremony.  Probably they are too engrossed in figuring out new ways to work their economic magic.

I was also glad to see that a group of researchers from Japan and the UK were honored for their work in using slime molds to model transportation networks, which I wrote about back in January.  It’s reassuring to know that one is keeping up with the cutting edge of research.

Happy Birthday, Rube Goldberg

Today is Independence Day in the United States; it is also the anniversary of the birth, in 1883, of the cartoonist Rube Goldberg.  Although he was a newspaper political cartoonist, and won a Pulitzer Prize for this work, he is most widely remembered for his cartoons of “Rube Goldberg Machines” that used a convoluted, chain reaction process to carry out a simple task.  In honor of Goldberg’s birthday, and of Independence Day, Google has a Rube Goldberg version of their logo, on the main search page.    Click on the “Stars and Stripes” arrow at the left to see how the skyrocket is launched.

First Official State Microbe

It’s official.  For many years, there have been official state flowers, state birds, state songs, and so on.  Now the New York Times is reporting that Wisconsin is the first to have an official state bacterium.   The recipient of this unique honor was Lactococcus lactis, the organism used to make several kinds of cheese.  (Wisconsin produces more cheese than any other state.  Another bill is pending to make cheese the official state snack.)  As the Times article points out, there are numerous other official state things: Texas has a state vehicle, and Pennsylvania a state toy.  One wonders where this all might end.

The New Scientist also has a report on this development on its “Short, Sharp Science” blog.  In case this becomes the next big thing, they have suggestions for appropriate microbes for different states.  My personal favorites: for California, Clostridium botulinum, the organism responsible for botulism and BoTox; for Kansas, in honor of its continued efforts to  resist the teaching of evolution, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus [MRSA].