18/10/02

Man's Quest for Knowledge

Not everybody can work on a cure for things like cancer and AIDS. Funding has to be diverted for such crucial issues as why shower curtains billow inwards.

My dictionary defines "People" as "A silly species wasting its aptitudes on foolish pursuits."

We are not talking about Arafat, the UN or European diplomacy today.

We are talking about US patent #3,216,423, a birthing device: the woman is strapped onto a circular table which is then rotated at high speed.

We are talking about the Japanese Meteorological Agency, which spent God knows how many yen on a seven-year study on whether earthquakes are caused by catfish wiggling their tails.

This stuff is real, of course, and readily available on the Internet, if you know where to look. (Oh, sure, I had to read the entire Internet to research this column.) The nutcases mentioned here were recipients of the Ig Nobel Prize, a whimsical takeoff of the real thing. Though if you ask me, it's the other way around: the Nobel, which honored both Arafat and the UN as the world's greatest contributors to peace (European diplomacy is a cinch next year), seems to be a spoof of the farce, a lampoon of the parody.

The Annals of Emergency Medicine reported in 1991 that a US Marine who was bitten by his pet rattlesnake (what'd I say about foolish?) tried to cure himself by connecting sparkplug wires between a car and his lip, then having the engine revved to 3,000 rpm for five minutes. Nice try, fella, but what followed was a sober medical report titled "Failure of Electric Shock Treatment for Rattlesnake Envenomation."

At least he didn't suffer like the guy in Wales who was the subject of a medical report called "A Man Who Pricked His Finger and Smelled Putrid for Five Years."

In other health-hazard news, a woman in Nuuk, Greenland, where possibly they need to know about such things, researched "Transmission of Gonorrhea Through an Inflatable Doll." The life expectancy of Glaswegians improved after the publication of a report, "The Collapse of Toilets in Glasgow." And think of all the lives that have been saved in Montreal, where Peter Barss of McGill University researched his study, "Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts."

I don't want to think about how James Nolan, Thomas Stillwell and John Sands did their research for the, uh, painstaking report, "Acute Management of the Zipper-Entrapped Penis."

Judy Siegel-Itzkovich forgot to mention this in her Health Page: nicotine is definitely not addictive. It must be true, because it was testimony given to the US Congress by American tobacco companies, and wouldn't they know best?

The ultimate in health hazards is probably death. Harold Hillman of the University of Surrey, England, provided insight on the best and worst ways to go, with his report, "The Possible Pain Experienced During Execution by Different Methods."

Anybody about to be executed, and given one last request, should ask to read Dr. Mara Sidoli's 14-page report, "Farting as a Defence Against Unspeakable Dread."

Research on borborygms (that's the polite term for the abovementioned F word) has yielded excellent results, as you've probably noticed in recent years, with such valuable inventions as Under-Ease, the charcoal-filtered gas-absorbing underwear, and Alan Kligerman's incomparable invention, Beano, which took cholent out of the (water) closet and gave it respectability.

UP THERE in Canada (as they say down there in America), where they don't have wars on average every 9.5 years like in Israel, they have other important issues to focus on. Like the guy at York University, Toronto, who did his PhD thesis on the sociology of Canadian donut shops. Or Troy Hurtubise, of North Bay, Ontario, who was a bit more adventurous, personally testing a suit of armor he created that is impervious to grizzly bears.

Look, not everybody can work on a cure for things like cancer and AIDS. Funding has to be diverted for such crucial issues as why shower curtains billow inwards (David Schmidt, University of Massachusetts), and how Prozac can make clams happier (Peter Fong, Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania), and proof that water is an intelligent liquid that possesses memory (Jacques Benveniste, France), and the difference in brainwave patterns in people chewing various flavors of gum (a worldwide collaboration of experts from Switzerland, the Czech Republic and Japan), and identifying insect splats on windshields (which merits an entire book, ג€œThat Gunk On Your Car,ג€ by the University of Florida's Mark Hostetler, Ten Speed Press), and how listening to Muzak helps prevent the common cold.

In England, it is not world peace or happier clams that's important, it's tea. Tea loss from a dripping teapot spout is a national dilemma, or was, until a professor at the University of East Anglia calculated how to prevent teapot-spout dripping. Meanwhile, in Bath, Dr. Len Fisher spent a fortune in funding to determine the absolute best way to dunk a biscuit.

I am not exaggerating. You should know that the British Standards Institution wrote a six-page specification (BS-6008) on the proper way to make a cup of tea. The Israeli way is not recommended.

Over to America, and coffee. John Martinez of Atlanta invented the world's most expensive coffee, and if you're going to invest in a cup of it, you should know how it's made. The Indonesian luak, a bobcat-like animal, ingests the coffee beans, and excretes them, then you drink it, wondering about that special flavor. That's luak coffee.

In other breakfast news, the Institute of Food Research, Norwich, England, analyzed relative sogginess of breakfast cereals ('A Study of the Effects of Water Content on the Compaction Behavior of Breakfast Cereal Flakes); Robert Matthews of Aston University, England, demonstrated that toast does, in fact, often fall on the buttered side; and there was a first-hand report on "The Comparative Palatability of Some Dry-Season Tadpoles from Costa Rica." (Who's to say that eating tadpoles is any more disgusting than eating soggy cereal?)

The eating habits of the leech was worth a page in the British Medical Journal. Notwithstanding our presumption that they only eat blood, it turns out their cuisine is not much different from the British pub denizen. The study is titled "Effect of Ale, Garlic, and Soured Cream on the Appetite of Leeches."

Chicken news: Bernard Vonnegut of the State University of Albany, reported on "Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed."

A 35-page research paper by one man, Alan Sokal, proved that reality does not exist. On the other hand, a certain kind of reality -- "The relative efficacy of streptokinase and tissue plasminogen activator and the roles of intravenous as compared with subcutaneous heparin as adjunctive therapy in acute myocardial infarction" -- was proven to exist in only nine pages, yet it took 976 co-authors in 15 countries at 1,081 hospitals, using 41,021 patient-subjects, to prove it. Amazing, no?

ON AUGUST 2, 2001, John Keogh of Hawthorn, Australia, tried to patent "the circular transportation facilitation device." The Australian Patent Office looked at him funny, and said, "but that's just a wheel." And Keogh said "yup." Well, this was the first time anyone tried this, so they granted him Innovation Patent #2001100012 for the invention of the wheel.

Stupendously stupider is the invention in Michigan of AutoVision, an image projection device that makes it possible to drive a car while watching TV. The worst of it is, the Michigan state legislature made it legal to do so.

Other worthwhile contributions to society include Chris Niswander's invention PawSense, software that detects when a cat is walking across your computer keyboard; spiceless jalapeno chili peppers; S-Check, an infidelity detection spray that wives can apply to their husbands' underwear; and some guy in Lithuania opened an amusement park called "Stalin World."

But the height of 20th century progress was Ivette Bassa's ingenious invention of bright blue Jell-O.

By comparison, putting a man on the moon is nothin.

It has been discovered that our favorite orbital mass haevidence of life: Richard Hoagland of New Jersey detected ten-mile high buildings on the far side of the moon (apparently, there are no Arab terrorists on the moon). He also noticed a human face on Mars. No, not his ex-wife's.

This one I think is very interesting: Jack Van Impe Ministries, in Michigan, proposed a theory that black holes fulfill all the technical requirements to be the location of Hell.

As for who's going, the Southern Baptist Church conducted county-by-county estimates of how many Alabama citizens will go to Hell if they don't repent.

That would not include Mikhail Gorbachev, who is not from Alabama. Robert Faid of Greenville, South Carolina calculated the exact odds -- 8,606,091,751,882:1 -- that Gorbachev is the Antichrist (margin of error, 0%). Ariel Sharon comes in at 2:1.

If not enough Alabamans are going to Hell as estimated, there's a reason. Two researchers concluded that people manage to postpone their deaths if that that would qualify them for a lower rate on inheritance tax.

The only Israelis to win an Ig Nobel were Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg, together with Michael Drosnin of the US, for exhibiting that the Bible contains a secret code. (So does Ruthie Blum's column. Read it very carefully, and you'll see.)

Ever notice there are no apostrophes in the Bible's original text? I mention that because there is an Apostrophe Protection Society, which strives to protect, promote and defend the differences between plural and possessive.

There was important progress in the field of military tactics, and let this be a dire warning to Saddam: The British Royal Navy ordered its sailors to stop using live cannon shells, and to instead just shout "Bang!"

If that's how we're going to wage war from now on, fine, but for car theft, I prefer the newly-devised burglar alarm equipped with a flamethrower.

Turning to environmentalism, a youth group called Eclaireurs de France has assumed the noble task of removing grafitti. That's nice. Unfortunately, in the process, they erased the ancient paintings off the walls of the Meyrieres Cave near Bruniquel.

Those kids should have undergone training by Shigeru Watanabe, Junko Sakamoto, and Masumi Wakita of Japan's Keio University, who taught pigeons to discriminate between the paintings of Picasso and those of Monet.

Dumb birds probably judge art better than humans. The US National Endowment for the Arts supported Jim Knowlton, creator of the anatomy poster "Penises of the Animal Kingdom," by encouraging him to extend his work in the form of a pop-up book.

What is love? Now we know. Four researchers proved that, biochemically, romantic love may be indistinguishable from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Let's see ... apostrophes, Hell, tea, shower curtains: that about covers it.

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