{"id":16,"date":"2009-10-04T00:24:43","date_gmt":"2009-10-04T06:24:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.talyarkoni.org\/blog\/?p=16"},"modified":"2009-10-07T22:01:10","modified_gmt":"2009-10-08T04:01:10","slug":"2009-ig-nobel-prizes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/2009\/10\/04\/2009-ig-nobel-prizes\/","title":{"rendered":"diamonds, beer, bars, and pandas: the 2009 Ig Nobel prizes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Apparently I missed this, but the <a href=\"http:\/\/improbable.com\/ig\/2009\/\">2009 Ig Nobel prizes<\/a> were awarded a couple of days ago. There&#8217;s a lot of good stuff this year, so it&#8217;s hard to pick a favorite; you have people making <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/ftp\/arxiv\/papers\/0806\/0806.1485.pdf\">diamonds from tequila<\/a>,\u00c2\u00a0 demonstrating that <a href=\"http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.1016\/j.jflm.2008.07.013\">beer bottles can crack human skulls<\/a>, turning <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/patents?id=z_WAAAAAEBAJ&amp;dq=7255627\">bras into facemasks<\/a>, and reducing garbage mass by 90% using&#8230; wait for it&#8230; <a href=\"http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.1016\/S1389-1723(01)80326-1\">panda poop<\/a>. That said, I think my favorite is this one right here&#8211;the winners of the Economics prize:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The directors, executives, and auditors of four Icelandic Banks \u2014 Kaupthing Bank, Landsbanki, Glitnir Bank, and Central           Bank of Iceland \u2014 for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly           transformed into huge banks, and vice versa \u2014 and for demonstrating           that similar things can be done to an entire national economy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And yes, I do feel bad about myself for finding that funny.<\/p>\n<p>[h\/t: <a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=1784\">Language Log<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Apparently I missed this, but the 2009 Ig Nobel prizes were awarded a couple of days ago. There&#8217;s a lot of good stuff this year, so it&#8217;s hard to pick a favorite; you have people making diamonds from tequila,\u00c2\u00a0 demonstrating that beer bottles can crack human skulls, turning bras into facemasks, and reducing garbage mass &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/2009\/10\/04\/2009-ig-nobel-prizes\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">diamonds, beer, bars, and pandas: the 2009 Ig Nobel prizes<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[18,17,16,15,19,691],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pEZxN-g","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions\/18"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}