The 2012 Ig Nobel Awards
Saturday, September 29th, 2012
This year’s Ig Nobel prizes were awarded on September 20th. Here are some of the winners:
- Peace Prize: The SKN Company, for converting old ammunition into diamonds.
- Neuroscience Prize: Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford, for showing that false positives will occur naturally in fMRI tests—by demonstrating meaningful brain activity in a dead salmon.
- Literature Prize: The US Government General Accountability Office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.
- Anatomy Prize: Frans de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny, for discovering that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends.
- Medicine Prize: Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel Antonietti, for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimize the chance that their patients will explode.
Cigarette taxes are typically justified by earmarking them to cover the increased health care costs for smokers, but I think they’re really imposed in an effort to make the cost so high that smokers will quit. In New York City smokers pay an insanely high cigarette tax rate, $6.46 per pack, yet a recent study shows “no decline in smoking among low-income smokers, despite tax increases since 2003”.
Biometric identification systems such as fingerprint readers, retina scanners, etc. are supposed to make it harder for people to hack your computer. But in the case of the UPEK Protector Suite, the opposite is true. This is due to unsecure programming practices that make it trivial for someone to learn your Windows password. See the linked article for more information.
Texans will soon be able to legally drive at 85 mph, on a highway between Austin and San Antonio. It will be the highest speed limit in the country.