November 10, 2015 • 51 mins
Each year, the Ig Nobel prizes honor the weirdest and wackiest contributions to humanity's scientific understanding of the natural world. In this pair of Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast episodes, Robert, Joe and Christian unpack each of this year's winners. In this episode, explore the wonders of unboiled eggs, urination speed, "huh" literature, police bribes and disastrous managers.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from House Stop
Work dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, I'm showing performant, and I'm
Christian Sager. Hey. So we have been doing periscope for
(00:23):
two weeks now. We've had a bunch of our listeners
sign in and ask us questions and hang out with
us on Friday afternoons. So we wanted to remind you
that we're going to keep doing that as long as
you are interested. So every Friday at noon we will
be on the periscope, and if you want to find
out more about that, you can of course visit us
on all of our social media channels, which is Facebook, Twitter,
(00:45):
or Tumbler, all of those. We are blow the mind.
Don't forget that website Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Wait,
what's that? What's on that website? All the stuff, all
of it? Yeah, is that where the videos are. That's
where the videos are, and that's where the blog posts are,
That's where all the podcasts. Like some of you listen
to this and think all we do is the podcast,
but we've got a lot going on blogging. There's Robert
(01:08):
does some amazing content about butts. Yeaheah, there's a there's
some science on that galories and there's a monster science
both in video form and blog form. The latest one
I liked a lot, the cat Bus one. Oh yeah, yeah,
I just did one on the cat Bus from Totoro.
Just rewatched that film with my family and uh, yeah,
there's some cool science behind cat Bus. I've actually never
(01:29):
seen it. You've got to get on there. Well, you
know the other new thing that we've got going on,
new music at the top of the show, guys, Yeah,
how about that welcome a welcome change that was created
by our fabulous producer Noel Brown. Bravo to you, sir.
But also I didn't notice this until I had heard
it a few times. It reminds me of the Doctor
(01:49):
Who theme, you know, it's with the with the lead part. Well,
I like to think of us as that that. You
know what the Three Doctors is. It's when three friend
doctors from different time periods. I'll meet up together with
their tartises and hang out and and stop bad things
from happening. So we're like the three Doctors, but just
(02:10):
obviously the angry doctor. Yeah, yeah, I'm I'm Yeah, I'm
the curmudgeon doctor. That would be I guess I'm most
like Peter Capaldi. Yeah, that would be the angry doctor. Yeah.
So we've all met up and here we are to
talk about, of course what doctor the doctor would talk
about the ig Nobel Prizes, that's right. Yeah, So that
(02:33):
we all three decided to come together on this one
because there are a lot of studies we want to
We want to roll through them in two episodes, each
of us taking the head on a different study and
not doing a super deep dive, but giving you a
nice overview about what this particular study is, why it's ridiculous,
why in many cases it's actually important, because that's one
of the keys here. The Ignailed Bell Prizes have been around,
(02:55):
uh since I believe, and each year they award ten
prizes to various bits of research, pure viewed studies that
you know, it's not the kind of stuff you're gonna
see capturing the headlines necessarily any scientists do, blind of
American not winning an actual Nobel prize. Right here at
(03:16):
how Stuff Works. We've sort of developed a like sub
theme for studies like this, which is sometimes we publish
these on our Now how stuff works channel, which is
there's a study for that, which is the kind of
like can you believe somebody did this? But at the
same time, I think the thing about the ignobles is
that there's always some value and importance to the research.
(03:37):
So yeah, like I always think of in cases like this,
I think of science as a slime mold amaze. Right now,
the slime mold is expanding outward, exploring its terrain, trying
to find food, and so it's going down all the
hallways to explore. And that's what science does. And just
because a particular area of study seems kind of pointless
at first glance, or it seems just very very specific,
(04:00):
or it's trying to prove something that we already kind
of know in our gut, it's still important that science
go there because science is is mapping the universe. Yeah,
and some of the corners of that map are watching
elephants p exactly. Well, Okay, I mean I slime mold.
Can we stick with the gelatinous cube here? Can we
use a gelatinous cube or is a slim mold like
(04:22):
a very specific metaphor for ignoble science. Um, I like
the slime because slime old this swarm intelligence. Oh okay,
I see what you're saying. Okay, I'll allow it. Uh. So,
let's af familiarize the audience with what these things are,
because the first time I heard about it was in
one of our episodes when we were talking about necrophilia,
and we uh, there was a study that had previously
(04:45):
won the Ignoble, which was about a guy watching a
duck try to have sex with a dead duck. Some
of the big ones. It was like seventy minutes of
of him watching that with a notebook. If you really
want to hear the whole full story, go back and
sense that necrophilia episode. But uh, it's weird, but it
also had value to it, and so uh, let's kind
(05:08):
of encapsulate what these things are for our audience and
then we can dive into the tent studies. Well, the
principal individual here is Mark abrams Um. He's the editor
and co founder of Improbable Research magazine, which you can
find at their website. Let a link to that on
the landing page for this episode. And they regularly cover
(05:28):
research of this nature stuff. It's weird stuff that's a
little wacky, but it's still science and it's always covered
in essentially a loving way. Yeah. They say that it's
supposed to make you laugh but also make you think. Yeah.
I found this was true about a lot of the
studies we looked at this time. I I like the
sense that, um, it is certainly not stroking the ego
(05:50):
of the scientists who perform these studies, but it's not
really making fun of them either, or maybe sort of
making fun of them, but at least not denigrating their work.
I think there have only been a couple of cases
where because for one thing, you can nominate your own work,
and they get about five thousand nominations each year. But
I can only think of two cases offhand where the
(06:11):
individuals did not receive it warmly, one of which was
the U. S. Air Force over their gay bomb, which
they won a prize four two thousand seven. They did
not remember hearing about this. Yeah, they did not see
the humor in it. No, hold on what were the
details of the gay bomb. The gay bomb, as I recall,
was that proposed weaponized afrodisiac that you would be able
(06:35):
to throw into the enemy trenches and harmonomy morale by
making them, Yeah, get friendly, amorous and confused. It was
referenced nicely on an episode of thirty Rocks several years back.
But but yeah, the the the Air Force did not
see the humor in that. And there there have been
a couple of curmudgeons along you know, over the years
that have have come out and said, oh, well, this
(06:56):
is just you know, waste of time. For instance, the
ve Robert May, the British government's chief scientific advisor at
the time, it was a big was a big critic
of the Nobel Prizes and he was saying that it
should only be used to, you know, to ridicule anti
science and pseudo science, and he should leave the the
real scientists alone. Uh again, totally missing the point that
(07:19):
the scientists are the are the ones who enjoy this
the most. Don't you love people who hate humor? So
I let's address that for a second though, because right
before we came in here, I watched the almost all
of the ceremony for awards, which we just which is
what we're going to cover today. I watched a lot
(07:39):
of this too, and and I feel like you definitely
get the tone that they're going for if you watch
the ceremony. They did a great job filming it. It's
got multiple camera angles. It's filmed in this beautiful theater
at Harvard University. Um that I saw Spalding Gray at
that same theater, like god fifteen years ago or something
like that, So it was it was neat to see that.
(08:00):
But uh, the humor is very oh wacky. Yeah, it's
it's that kind of like academic like we don't want
to offend anybody humor that's just a little zany and
goofy and so at this at one on one hand,
I appreciate it, and I totally understand. Uh, I understand
(08:24):
that this guy who was it? Who? Who Robert may
who was so like against it in the first place. Yeah,
I don't understand where he's coming from. But I'm also
somewhat sympathetic because it's just like whacketty schmackt he do
zany like, you know, like jokes and stuff. Even if
(08:44):
you're not laughing with the jokes, you're still like, oh, well,
that's kind of adorable. Watch the old old scientists get
up there and kind of you know, hap uh, you know,
yuck it out. But I will confess though that it
was unbearable for me to a point that I had to.
I watched it on YouTube, and I had to watch
it on double speed, so everybody was talking really fast
(09:05):
like chipmunks. But I got the gist of everything, and
I paid a special Please stop, Christian, I'm bored. Yeah, yeah,
but please please stop. Joe tell them about what's her name,
Pootie Pie or I think it's called Sweetie poop child.
Pot Pie is the guy on YouTube. Oh, I don't
know anyway. Yeah, they have a little character who is
(09:29):
a child who comes up. It's like the Oscar music
that starts to play when people get a little too
much gratitude in their speech at the Oscars. Uh. And
they want to get you off the stage at this ceremony.
They've got a child who runs up to you and
proclaims boredom and tells you to stop talking. And she's precocious.
And then on top of that, then they bring back
all the former Sweetie poos. Did you watch that part? Didn't?
(09:53):
Every former Sweetie pooh is a part of the procession. Uh.
And they are like the van Ol White that kind
of like escort out the winners of the awards and
then escort them back in. And they do this whole
cute see poo thing where they have the sweetie poo's
a'll tease one another in front of the audience. It's
a little much. Um. Also, I grew up you have
(10:17):
a you have a very dark heart that has no
room for for cuteness. Well I do, and I'll allow
this as well. I'm from Boston and I'm very familiar
with Harvard University. I lived right near there for a
long time, and I'm very familiar with this kind of
humor that is, you know, it's very um yeah, twee,
I guess is one way to put it. So um.
(10:39):
I will warn I will warn our listeners ahead of
time that maybe I'm the dark heart here, but I
was a little put off by the zany humor. However,
the studies themselves are amazing. Well, let's launch into them here, Um, Joe,
I believe you're up first, tell us about the chemistry
prize winner, the Ignobil Chemistry Prize winner for two thousand. Okay,
(11:00):
so the Chemistry prize went to I'm gonna say their names,
and there's a lot of them, so bear with me
for a second. Here, Callum Ormond, Colin Raston, Tom Yuan,
Stephen Kudla check Samir and couldn't cha Joshua In Smith,
William A. Brown, Caitlin Pouglisi, Tivoli, Olson, Mariam eft Car,
(11:23):
Greg Weiss. Oh, And that's it them for demonstrating a
mechanical process to unboil an egg. So yes, these scientists
all work together. Now, I think the main scientist who
has involved in this process, the one at least who
has spoken to the media the most about it, was
Greg Weiss. But they came up with this mechanical process
(11:46):
to unboil an egg. Well, hold on part of an egg,
the egg white, and note that this is not uncooking
an egg, and that you can't unfry an egg or
unscramble an egg or on. I wonder if you could
unpoach and egg maybe, but at least what you can
do is unboiled an egg white. So the paper is
(12:06):
called and I love the academic alienation of this title
sheer stress mediated refolding of proteins from aggregates and inclusion bus. Yes,
I can call the paper is a colon and then
another long sentence after that. And that's one of the
beautiful things about the Ignabel Prizes is this is a
(12:27):
great example of where they really got to the heart
of what this study is in the way that the
rest of us can enjoy. Yeah, and so it was
published in January in Kim Bio Kim And here's what happened.
The researchers took an egg and then they divided the
whites from the yolk, and then they boiled the egg
whites for twenty minutes at about a hundred ninety four
(12:48):
degrees fahrenheit or ninety degrees c. And if you have
ever seen the white part of a hard boiled egg,
you know what we're dealing with is the final product here.
And so egg whites in their natural state are a
mixture of water and proteins, including the protein lysozyme, which
is a protein associated with immune function and more on
(13:08):
that in a minute. When you boil egg whites, the
folded proteins that are in the egg whites get d natured,
meaning that they sort of lose their precisely folded structure.
And that folded structure is what makes a protein do
the things that it does, sort of like what determines
its role in the in the tiny bio world that
(13:30):
it inhabits. And they also get all tangled together, and
they end up forming this solid block of bio jello
that we recognize as cooked egg white. Um, so that's
what normally happens when you when you boil an egg white.
It of course happened in this case as it always does.
And how do you fix this problem? So the researchers
(13:50):
took the boiled egg whites and dissolved them in a
urea solution to turn basically all of it into an
untangled up liquid of of unfolded proteins. So that's pretty gross.
It's a cooked egg white slurry. Then the solution was
placed into what they called a vortex fluid device. And
(14:11):
what this does is it's kind of like a centerfuge
but different. It spins a test tube a really high intensity.
I read one source saying it was about five thou
rpm s, so very very fast for a short time,
introducing an amazing amount of sheer stress to the film
of fluid, which is about one micron thick that built
up on the walls of the tube. And in a
(14:33):
quote given to the Washington Post, Greg Wise said about
the proteins in this process, they're like little elastic bands.
This stretches and unstretches them and gives them their shape back.
So it's kind of like if you, you know, stretch
out a tangled up slinky and then get it to
reform back into its original shape. But help me out
here for a second. So my understanding of the I
(14:54):
didn't read this study, but my understanding of what how
you're presenting it here is the dn turing process. By
zipping around at this high speed, are they they're renaturing.
They're refolding back into the original shape that the proteins
were before they were denatured by the heat. So it's
not just that they're moving something at such a high
(15:15):
speed that it like liquefies. No, it's it's actually re
applying the process. Yeah, they're they're undoing the work of
cooking by applying this mechanical stress. And so at the
end they were able to refold some of the proteins
back into their original shapes without it becoming tangled up
(15:36):
with one another in the process. That's another problem that
can happen, and it worked at the end. The solution
contained proteins comparable to uncooked egg whites, and that immune
related protein I mentioned lycenseyme that was also found to
be present in the final product and functional. Okay, So
what I want to know though, is did they make
(15:56):
a quiche with this afterwards? And how did it take?
You know, you couldn't because it's just the egg whites
and you really need some miolks for keysh We could
otherwise that would be pretty gross and you could make
a few different mixed drinks though, right, Oh, you probably could.
The New Orleans was sour fizz. What's it? What's it
called when you put an egg white in there? Something
jim fizz something something fizz. Gross. That's like when people
(16:22):
drink like oyster shots and stuff like that. It's nasty.
I have no idea what an oyster? You add oysters,
like raw oysters to it, like like a real oyster. Yeah,
that's about like having an oyster though. I mean, you
need to stop talking. You just mix it with like
booze and I think like tomato juice or something like that.
Disgusting study. Okay, So so they did it. They managed
(16:45):
to unboil egg whites and get them back to the
original state. A couple of things we I guess, in
case it needs stating, Why is this ridiculous? Well, I
guess it just sort of seems to contradict the folk
understanding of entropy that you can't fix what's broken. You
can't unscramble an egg, I think is an actual expression.
(17:05):
You might not be able to unscramble an egg, but
you can unboil an egg. Well, there's so many fun
metaphors that you can reverse with this, right. I think
it's also funny because it involves eggs, which apparently some
people just think are inherently funny objects, and slightly more
when they're boiled, especially because it's life. But but this
(17:26):
process actually does have real, very important and interesting applications,
not just for fun. It can make a big difference
in many kinds of research involving proteins. For example, cancer
research in the lab often deals with proteins that have
exactly the same problem that cooked egg whites do. They
can become tangled in misshape, and so the proteins get
(17:48):
d natured, or they're they're folding gets messed up, or
they get tangled together or both, and then scientists have
to waste a lot of time trying to restore them
to to the original folded shape and structure, to get
them to be useful and by conventional means, this is
a really time consuming and wasteful process. So this sheer
(18:08):
stress method that they introduced with this the vortex fluid device,
could actually make cancer research much more efficient in terms
of time and cost. So it was reported in their
study that the refolding of protein by sheer stress was
faster than the conventional method of quote, overnight dialysis by
a factor of more than a hundred times, more than
(18:29):
a hundred times faster. So that's why it took eleven
people to to write this paper. There were different people
involved with different aspects of it. Like I know, some
of the people cited in the paper were people who
were working with the vortex fluid device itself. Like the
stories like ten more times. I want to just see
how many times we can say vortex fluid device throughout
(18:51):
the sentence, right, So there's some people working with that,
some people who are presumably working with the science of
the proteins. Yeah, yeah, routine labs. So probably some I'm
guessing like graduate students in there who did like the
scut work. Possibly, I don't know what every single name
corresponds to. It's one of those, uh, one of those
(19:12):
features of Modern Sciences. That you get a lot of
names listed. Yeah, let's see if we can find which
one of these has the most people applied to it. Okay, okay,
so I'm keeping track. We got eleven on this one. Well,
let's check out the next prize awarded in the physical science.
And this one was a lot of fun. I actually
read about this before this episode, but Robert, it was
about urine, right, oh, yes, And you're definitely uh, you're
(19:36):
in for a treat on this one because this is
the Physics Prize for bladder speed. And noticed I said
physics and not biology here. That's gonna be a key
as we move forward. The paper in particular is a
duration of urine does not change with body size by
Georgia Institute of Technology researchers Patricia ja Yanga, Jonathan Fama,
(19:57):
Jerome Choah, Dave and Dave at l Q. And this
was published in the summer two thousand fourteen edition of
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And they're just
right down the street these Yeah. I have read several
times about the research involving David who in one way
or another. Yeah, I mean we were talking before the
(20:19):
episode of the field of fluid dynamics. You see some
of the most amazing papers coming up and and this
one definitely uh fits the bill. Did they use a
vortex fluid device? Not as such. No. So basically, in
a nutshell, the study investigated how quickly thirty two different
animals you're inate now? Sixteen of these are live viewing
(20:41):
the rest or YouTube videos. Um, because they were they
were interesting to animals of varying size. It's YouTube research. Yeah.
So the interesting initial finding here though, is that it
turns out that it's all about the same at least
for animals that weigh at least six point six pounds
or three kilograms. They found all animals that weigh more
(21:02):
than that urinate in the same space of time. Um.
So it doesn't matter if it's an elephants bladder that
is thirty undred times larger than a cat's. Both animals
are going to get their being over with and about
uh twenty seconds. Okay. And the reason here is, the
paper explores, is that as diverse as all these different
(21:23):
bladder systems are, um and and all the plumbing, they
all rely on the fundamental principles of fluid mechanics. The
researchers found that quote the urethra is a flow enhancing device,
enabling the urinary system to be scaled up by a
factor of thirty six in volume without compromising its function.
(21:43):
One of the idea here is that it's possible that
larger animals have a longer urethras, and since the weight
of the fluid in the urethra is pushing the fluid out,
the long urethra increases the flow rate. So this is
why if you've ever gone online like our researchers and
watched a whole bunch of animals uh urinate, you might
see the larger animals just really pushing it out there
(22:04):
like a sheet of urine hose. Yeah, whereas the smaller creatures,
definitely the ones under that six point six pound limit. Uh,
they're just throwing out some droplets. Uh. For instance, mice
and rats less than two seconds spent urinating bats just
a fraction of the speed. So this would be important,
of course, keeping your your p speed up for an
(22:26):
elephant because uh, if if an elephant had a shorter
ure threat, it would take longer to urinate, and during
that time, of course, it would be more susceptible interpretation. Wow,
so okay, never, I've never really thought about the evolutionary
pressures on urination speed. That just doesn't really occur to
me as a thing having a big having a big
(22:50):
impact on your survival or reproduction. Well, it's how much
time that you're you're you have to remain stationary and
you're somewhere not paying attention to your surrounding. You have
to remain stationary and pooping on the move. I haven't tried.
I don't know. You've seen you've both seen Burdenmic, I have,
so you know what happened. It can't happen when their
predators about and you need to go potty. And I'm
(23:12):
thinking about my dog, who definitely breaks the twenty second rule.
I mean, he pees for a long time when we
go out first thing in the morning, and that's probably
because he's got a cushy life and he doesn't have
to worry about the pressures of survival. That's a good point.
That's a good point. So I probably don't have didn't
measure humans as well. I'm not sure if humans were
(23:34):
in the in the study. To be honest, you know,
I wonder one thing that could be affecting the different
times of domesticated animals versus whatever they used in the study.
I'm sure some of those were domesticated, would be whether
they are being prompted the urinate or whether they're just
urinating whenever they feel like it, because it could be
(23:55):
that in under natural circumstances, you will naturally let the
amount of urine and build up in your bladder that
it will take to evacuate in twenty or twenty one second.
But if you're a dog who's inside and can't pee
until it's time to go out, you might go beyond
that threshold when and accumulate a lot. You're thinking, okay,
so I probably don't have to tell anybody why this
(24:16):
study is ridiculous, because of course it involves urine, and
urine like eggs, is inherently funny. Um. But as to
why it's important for starters, it's an understudied topic. Not
a lot of people are putting a lot of time
and effort into the question of urination times for animals,
And additionally, the study may help to diagnose urine a
(24:38):
problems and animals as well as inspired of the design
of quote scalable hydro dynamic systems based on those in nature,
So there's a biomimicry potential here. Um, you don't need
to necessarily use external pressure to get rid of fluids
in a system quickly. Rather, you can let gravity do
the trick with the right bio mimicry. So possible applications
(25:00):
include water tanks, UM, backpacks that are used to you know, uh,
fire hoses, and UM. A couple of examples here in
which the team actually engaged with some additional experimentation. Uh.
They actually created a demonstration that empties a teacup, court
and gallon of water in the same duration for each
(25:22):
using varying links of connected tubes, thus standing in for
the varying urethra links UM links among these animals. And
then they connected a second experiment in which the team
filled three cups with the same amount of water then
empty them at varying rates by using different lengths of tube.
So again you don't have to use you know, varying
(25:44):
amounts of external pressure to move water through a system.
You can use to use gravity and tube length. This
is uh, they're like modern day Da Vincis like this
is this is the kind of stuff that Da Vinci
used to sit around and ponder about and work on
in his sketch books like how to move water more Efficiently.
They're just looking to nature's way of doing it. Yeah, yeah,
it's it's basically a bio on the medic exercise. Now,
(26:06):
so that makes me wonder if the next thing we're
going to hear about associated with David who is an ornithopter.
That would be great. Well wait, let's define that for
our audience for a second. Oh, if you've listened to
the Dune episode, you know all about ornithopters. No, didn't
da Vinci designed some mornithopters flapping flapping wing aircraft. Now,
(26:26):
I'm afraid that's wrong. That did he design propeller driven
or I can't remember other than from playing an Assassin's
Creed game where Da Vinci was the guy who made
He was like your que to your to your James
Bond and he made one of those things for you
to fly around in. Oh nice. Yeah. I don't think
there's any evidence that da Vinci made a working flying machine.
I think he just yeah, I don't think right, Yeah,
(26:49):
I don't think it was. And we'll have to ask
Jonathan Strickland. He would probably know. Uh So The next
one here, and this is a short one, is the
Literature Prize, and it specifically goes to a paper called
is Huh a Universal Word? Conversational Infrastructure and the Convergent
Evolution of Linguistic Items? By Mark Dinge Manze, Francisco Torrieira,
(27:16):
and Nick j Enfield Uh. And this was in p
l OS one published. Okay, so the basics of this
study are essentially that the writers involved take a look
at the the word sound huh. Specifically throughout the piece
they spell it h u h question mark. Yeah, I
(27:40):
asked to have the question mark. They used a phrase
to describe it that I thought was very appropriate and
very interesting. They called it a repair initiator. Yeah. I'll
get to that in a second. But that's essentially the
gist of their argument and and why it's important. So
they argue, one that is universal, regardless of language, all
(28:03):
human beings use a version of huh. And then the
second thing they argue is that it is a word.
It's not just a grunt. Yeah. Apparently there was some
uh people, some conflict apparently about whether or not it
was a word or not. And they defined it because
they said it's used similarly across cultures, and it's also
(28:24):
a learned, conventional form. And like you said, it's not grunting,
it's not crying, it's not just a noise. It's a
word that we use that has purpose to it, right,
It has a it has a semantic definition. It it
means something in conversation. It means I didn't understand what
you just said exactly so. And that's where the other
initiated repair thing comes in, right, So huh is used
(28:47):
for us to express to someone else, whether they speak
the same language or not, that there is something going
on where we're having trouble understanding, right, whether it's like
some all understanding or actual problem with the noise in
your ears, you know the problem hearing it now. They
found that across different languages it wasn't always pronounced exactly
(29:10):
the same. That it's sort of the essence of the
word hah that comes through yeah. And it has the
same variation in form as you would find in any
other regular words. So as words kind of spread across
cultures and they change slightly, uh, Like they use dog
as an example, and how dog changes across different cultures,
huh is similar. Well, I mean even in our own
(29:31):
usage of it. You have huh, but then you also
have yeah. Yeah, so I mean we have I think
multiple versions in English exactly. Yeah. And the way that
they conducted the study is and I feel bad for
whoever had to sit down and go through all this data. Uh.
They compiled data from published literature and thirty one languages
to see how it was used in written form, And
(29:52):
then they collected data from recordings of naturally occurring conversations
from ten languages across five different continents, and basically, you know,
looked for usage of huh uh and and how it
was understood. And there's the you know, I won't go
through it here too because I think it would be
kind of boring, but there's this really interesting uh cable
(30:14):
visual table that they applied to the study itself. It
wouldn't work well on a podcast to talk about it,
basically showing all the different languages and all their locations
across the world and how huh is used throughout them.
So of course, why is it ridiculous? Well, it's we're
studying such a basic part of human existence that seems
(30:34):
like it doesn't really require that deep of an analysis,
right uh. And and it's also, you know, just kind
of a silly The term itself means I don't understand,
and here we are speaking to understand. Yeah, but they
make a good case. I think that this is an
interesting thing to study, especially because they point out how
huh is such a useful and powerful tool in conversation
(30:58):
because it has this uh. It has this complex sort
of conversation management role that happens in such a short
time span and really helps keep conversations on track and
moving quickly because you don't have to stop every time
and say I don't understand what you just said. Right. Yeah,
It's It's interesting though, because it's easy to dismiss hunt
(31:21):
as um, it's just a needless break in a conversation.
But but I guess the the the the idea here
is that it's as small a break as is necessary.
It's not a verbal pause because it has meaning to it.
But yeah, it's a very short, quick, efficient way to
say I don't get it. Uh. It's feedback essentially, it
with within conversation. Just let the other person you're speaking
(31:45):
with no that you need more. Though, this also made
me think about how I feel like the word huh
has multiple different meanings in English. It certainly is what
they're talking about the repair initiators. So you're in the
middle of saying something I miss here part of it,
say huh and you repeat. But there's also I noticed
(32:05):
I often use huh as a punctuation that essentially means
that's curious. Yeah, that's I feel like that's my primary
usage of it is someone will say something interesting, especially
if it's like an audio interview over the phone, and
you feel like you need to give some feedback that
you are interested, and still on the line, you go, yeah.
(32:28):
It can also mean now I'm waiting for the listeners
to send us in like a super cut of all
the times we've all gone to each other. Can do that?
You know that Nolan makes electronic music out of our
verbal pauses and weird mouth noises. Right, No, but I'm
not surprised. Yeah, he keeps a folder and one day
he's going to get rich and famous by using all
(32:51):
of ours. Well, there's there's one other thing that I
just want to add about this study, and this is
they do a little kind of naval gazing dive here
in linguistic studies. But it's important because we've actually talked
about stuff like this before, especially when we did that
Feral Children episode on the Unlanguaged Mind. They have a
kind of universal grammar post structuralist argument going on, or
(33:16):
at least they get into that stuff by saying, huh,
isn't part of our genetic makeup? They're not. Just because
we all use it doesn't mean it's like built into
the human code, right, It's not like screaming in pain, Yeah, exactly.
And that Rather, what they're saying is that it's the
result of convergent cultural evolution, that as we as humans
(33:39):
have evolved together and built up our societies together, this
word has been it's it's like this one. I mean,
I'm sure there's many other constants, but it is one
constant that is between all of these cultures. Mhm. Hey,
so I think it's time to take a quick break
to hear about our sponsor for this episode. But after out,
(34:00):
we're gonna come right back and talk about more weird science.
All right. Well, well, let's move on to another prize here.
What do we have in terms of management? The Ignobile
Management Prize? I got a good one for you guys.
This is this is especially Oh, this is gonna hit
(34:21):
a little close to home for for those of us
who work in the digital media field. Uh. So this
is a paper uh that is called what Doesn't Kill
You Will Only make You More? Risk Loving colin Early
Life Disasters and CEO Behavior. It was written in September
published rather Uh and let me see if I can
(34:42):
pronounce these names. So I'm gonna butcher these but sorry,
guys if you're listening. Jennaro Berneil Vanite bag Wat and
p Rugga Vendra raw I believe are their names. So
this study finds that CEOs who have experienced fatal disasters
without stream negative consequences are more likely to be risky
(35:04):
and aggressive businessmen. So I'm assuming by extremely fatal disasters here,
that's an extremely fatal to people that are not him,
and they can they're still alive. Yeah, they have to be.
They're not undead sea. But then also they haven't lost
loved ones exactly. Yeah, that's that's the gist of it,
is that they whether the event had fatal consequences or not,
(35:25):
or they all do, but it didn't affect them directly. Now,
by your use of the term businessmen, does this indicate
that all of the people studied in this were male.
You know, I'm pretty sure that they were. Yeah. I
can't say definitively, but I want to say throughout the
paper that they used the pronoun him a lot. But
(35:47):
you know, there wasn't any discussion of gender as far
as I can remember, So yeah, but it's safe to
assume that they were mostly male. Uh. There is also
another part of this argument, which is that, uh. There
they also found that similarly, CEOs who witnessed extreme negative
consequences during a natural disaster, so like probably seeing their
(36:11):
loved ones die in front of them, are more conservative
in business. This includes how they deal with cash holdings, leverage,
and acquisitions, whereas the other guys are more likely to
create debt rather than equity, and they're more likely to
make their companies go through bankruptcy. Hold on, how many
ceo s did they find who had been through a
(36:31):
natural disaster? Well, let me tell you about their methodology,
which I think is a little although okay, I should
back up with that. The way the way that they
gathered their information is a little weird to me. However,
they put it through rigorous, rigorous testing to make sure
that they their data was I guess accurate. Okay, but well,
(36:54):
why don't you guys judge by the time we get
to the end of this and tell me what you think.
So the first thing that they do is they look
at a sample of firms from to two thousand and
twelve and they identified the CEOs of all these companies
and found their basic demographic information, you know, their age,
where they grew up, where they were born, YadA, YadA. Right.
(37:14):
Then they cross reference that with a database of all
the natural disasters that happened in the United States during
those times, and these include earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes,
severe storms, floods, landslides, and wildfires. And they specifically focused
on the period of time when these CEOs would be
(37:36):
between the ages of five and fifteen, because they say
that medical research shows that this is when our most
lasting childhood memories tend to start and then stop. So, okay,
the I want to pause for a second here and
say that the research itself, it's very easy to like
read and abstract and say, well, these CEOs are more
(37:59):
likely to do this thing, and these CEOs are less
likely to do this thing. Right, So the actual numbers
here what they call leverage ratios. They seem pretty small
to me. So the first group is three point four
percent higher than the norm, and then the second group
is negative three point seven percent lower. So to me,
(38:19):
this seems like it would fall into the margin of
error for many other studies that we would look at,
So you know, keep that in mind. Uh, it just
it's it seems a little low. I I was expecting
based on the conclusion that they had, it would be
a much higher percentage. To be fair, though, like I said,
they built in a lot of safeguards into this to
keep data bias and variables out of the studies results.
(38:41):
They even tested the robustness of their own methodology afterwards
by applying it in various forms over and over and
over again. Uh. And so they argue that this supports
the idea that CEOs who have not experienced extreme consequences
are desensitized to the negative consequences of risk. Subsequently, those
(39:01):
who are are more likely to be cautious. Okay, so
what do you think do you think? Like this methodology
sounds valid? You know, in the face of it, it's
weird because the study definitely matches up with the stereotype
that we a lot of us carry around for the
(39:22):
sort of inhuman CEOs that we that we ultimately have
very little personal interaction with. And they they're just this,
they seem to be this individual has no connection with
the suffering of others, right, And it seems like we,
I don't know, we should always be especially careful about
scientific results that seem to confirm our intuitions because we're
(39:43):
I don't know, we're just susceptible to being lenient with them.
That's why I thought that there was a sort of
inherent ridiculousness to this for the Ignoble prizes rights, it
seems like it's looking for causality between two seemingly unrelated
experiences just to confirm our pre existing bias. But uh,
like I said, I mean, I didn't go into it
here because again, like it's very dense uh and math
(40:06):
essentially that they that they went through here. I don't.
I have to respect them for the diligence that they
did in the study, but I don't know necessarily that
all that diligence adds up to being able to say
that this is accurate. What I would rather see is
a study that correlates CEO risk taking behavior with how
(40:29):
they play the board game risk. Well, are they a
table flipper? Oh nice? Yeah, well, you know, suggest that
to the board and maybe they can do that for
the next for next year's I Nobel Prizes, although those
are probably getting published already. Uh, but there is all right,
So all that aside is an important study though, in
(40:52):
the sense that they found a link between CEOs and
disaster experience and their corporate policies, and subsequently this has
real economic consequences. Right, So basically what they're trying to
do is say, like, all right, this is a predictor
I assume for hiring or you know, in in some
sense a predictor of how well this person is going
to run a company. Yeah. I do think one thing
(41:14):
that's useful here is it's just one more thing that
helps us remember that ceo s and the people who
make top level business decisions are human, and they're very
much subject to human biases prejudices towards certain types of actions.
They're not. I think there's sometimes this, uh, at least
(41:34):
in the pro business mindset, there is this type of
thinking that these people are efficiency optimizing machines who just
you know, they make the decision that makes the most
money all the time. But I mean there are people there.
They make emotion driven the decisions they they are informed
by their experiences and their feelings about the world based
(41:56):
on the things that have happened to them. It's good
to keep that in mind. Then this is one more
tally in that corner. Yeah, and plus it also it's
another study that looks at how Evan shape who we
are um and in this in this case, it reminds
me a lot of discussions I've had with people about comedians,
like you have a comedian who didn't who is Jimmy
(42:19):
Fallon comes to mind. I remember hearing an interview with
Jimmy Fallon where he basically, you know, he wasn't picked
on as a kid. He had pretty much had a
nice rhyn of things. And maybe that explains why I
don't find Jimmy Fallon all that funny, because he's not
coming from this place of bankst or suffering like comedians
that you identify with. Yeah, he's not. He's not Schopenhauer's comedian.
(42:43):
So maybe he's the CEO of of comedy, you know.
As it lines up with this study, Wow, Oh man,
you just really blew my mind with that Robert like
I am. That gives me pause because I really don't
like Jimmy Fallon's humor. Um, I'm gonna have to think
further on this and come back on another episode. And
I'm not saying I dislike Jimmy Fallone. Seems like a
(43:04):
nice guy, but like Comedy has never spoken to just
this comedy. Yeah, I don't know him as an individual.
He's like a CEO. I don't know those guys in
he stole my car once. Really well, here's what I
think that I got from this study is that what
we need to do is make sure that all people
who become CEOs of companies saw their parents murdered in
(43:27):
front of them when they were children, because then they'll
be like Batman Bruce Wayne, and they will run the
company really well and clean up all the crime in
their city. Is there any evidence of support the idea
that Bruce Wayne was was Slashy is a good CEO? Though,
We're gonna have to do some contextual analysis to figure
that one out. In fact, I would I would be
interested as anyone looked into the various CEOs in the
(43:50):
comic book world. He's a better CEO, is it like
or is it Wayne? Yeah? Just in terms of a
business perspective, Yeah, you know Tony Star, which is a
bad or industry go to working like, who is it like?
Sometimes having an evil corporation over your shoulder if they're
if they have could benefit. I was gonna say that
the benefits at lex Corp Are great, Great, They've got
(44:12):
fantastic four O one K, nice hs A package. I mean,
business is good when you just manufacture toxic chemicals. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, okay,
getting back to the seriousness of this though. Um, the
researchers were specifically interested in the strength of the dosage of,
you know, experiencing these natural disasters and what their effects
(44:32):
would be. And this is a quote from the study.
They say the intensity of life experiences can result in
nonlinear effects on subsequent risk taking. All right, we have
one more study to look at in this episode, and
I believe this one to you again, Christian, the two
thousand fifteen Ignobile Prize for Economics. Yeah, so this actually
doesn't go to an academic paper. This Uh, this is
(44:56):
a pretty funny one. But also I can I can
see why they picked it. Uh, the organizers awarded the
Thai Land the Thailand Metro Police directly for their efforts
to combat rampant bribe taking among traffic police. So apparently
in Thailand it's not all that uncommon for you know,
(45:16):
if you break the traffic rules, police pulls you over
and you just throw them like three or four bucks
or whatever and say, hey, let's why do you forget
about this? Okay, So to combat the rampant bribe taking
that's going on among these traffic police, the officers in
charge said, okay, if you refuse these bribes, you will
receive a cash reward of up to ten thousand bot. So,
(45:39):
just for our listeners out there, ten thousand as of
today converts roughly into two eighty one dollars or comparison,
a police salary in Thailand right now is is on
average six thousand bought a month as of data, so
they make about a hundred and sixty nine dollars a month.
(45:59):
So you know, if they would refuse these bribes, they'd
be getting more than a month's paycheck. This raises so
many questions about it makes you wonder how much they're
making off bribes in the first place. Oh yeah, yeah, definitely. Um,
I guess I can preface this by saying that my
family lived in Thailand for a couple of years. I
didn't live there with them, but I went and visited
(46:22):
and stayed with them. Um, so I'm I visited Thailand.
I'm somewhat familiar with Thailand, but I can't really speak
to its you know, overall culture and the corruption and
the government. I do know, as many people do that
you know, Bangkok is infamous for uh, drugs, prostitution, you
name it, you know, and so I think that that
was kind of part of the impetus here for this
(46:44):
kind of weird policy that they enacted, was to clean
up the reputation of Bangkok. But of course, so it's
it's sort of ridiculous, so ridiculous that after two weeks
the police canceled this policy. Uh. There were so there's
so much back to your bribe social media criticism about
this that they thought it was damaging the forces reputation. Uh,
(47:07):
and two cops received the maximum award based on them
taking three dollar bribes. Yeah, well it's not rather not
taking those bribes. It's it's kind of like the whole
scenario where somebody unloads the dishwasher and then expects praise
for it, like you're supposed to unload the dishwasher. You
did your job. Yeah, you did your job. Congratulations. Yeah,
(47:30):
there shouldn't be a monetary reward for not taking the bribe,
which is what you're supposed to do to Kenwin. Unsurprisingly,
the Metropolitan Police Bureau did not send any representatives to
Harvard to receive the award at the ceremony. I wish
they did because that would have probably made it quite
a bit funnier. Did they not even send a video acceptance? Well,
(47:50):
you know what, I didn't catch that they might have,
but they didn't get to have what's her name sit
there and tell them that they're boring. Oh yeah, it's sweetie. Pooh.
I g I forgot, I forgot to Okay. Uh So,
just another thing is that Thailand also received the Ignoble
Award for Public Health because they had research that was
(48:13):
published about surgical solutions to involuntary penis amputation. I remember
this one. Yeah, so you know, they're racking up the
points in the Ignoble category. But let's get serious for
a second here. Okay, here's why this is important. So
the state officials and the police in Thailand are supposed
to face life in jail if they're convicted of taking
(48:35):
a bride. Life in jail. Yeah, but it's pretty common,
it's extremely common. Uh. Though. The Thai army took power
after ousting the first female prime minister uh and they
claimed that they had to restore order to the nation
because nearly thirty people were killed in political protests against
(48:58):
her being elected. Okay, so that's where this all came from.
Uh And after they took power, that's when they launched
this campaign to clean up Thailand's image. So this measure,
the traffic bribe measure, was part of that campaign. Uh
And specifically because that prime minister's brother is an ousted
(49:19):
and influential politician who is also a former police officer,
and he's known to have allies in the police force
and he's got some you know, political influence with them.
He fled the country in two thousand and eight. But
really the speculation is that, like, if you look deeper
at this, this is more about the military trying to
take back control of the police from this you know,
(49:41):
allegedly corrupt politician. All right, Well, there you have it.
We're gonna cut off right there, and we're gonna pick
up in the next episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
where will roll through five more of the winners from
the two thousand fifteen Ignoble Prizes. Uh, there's some gonna
be some fun stuff in there, So give you joined
this come back from what we're gonna talk about kissing
(50:02):
and how many babies you can have in a lifetime. Yeah,
we're talking about sticking essentially plungers on the butts of chickens.
It's it's gonna be. It's gonna be a golden bees
to your genitals. Science. Hey, So in the meantime, be
sure to check out stuff to bow your Mind dot com.
That's we'll find all the podcasts. You'll find videos, you'll
find blog posts, you'll find links out that those social
(50:23):
media accounts such as tumbler, Facebook, and Twitter. Yeah, and
that is where you can also find the address to
write into us if you were, you know, particularly inspired
by one of these papers that we discussed, or maybe
you're one of the authors of one of them and
want to communicate to us what was actually going on
with your research, or perhaps you're involved in the Ignoble Prizes.
(50:44):
If you want to contact us directly, Joe, what's the
address below the mind at how stuff works dot com
For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
a house stuff works dot com U
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from House Stop
Work dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, I'm showing performant, and I'm
Christian Sager. Hey. So we have been doing periscope for
(00:23):
two weeks now. We've had a bunch of our listeners
sign in and ask us questions and hang out with
us on Friday afternoons. So we wanted to remind you
that we're going to keep doing that as long as
you are interested. So every Friday at noon we will
be on the periscope, and if you want to find
out more about that, you can of course visit us
on all of our social media channels, which is Facebook, Twitter,
(00:45):
or Tumbler, all of those. We are blow the mind.
Don't forget that website Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Wait,
what's that? What's on that website? All the stuff, all
of it? Yeah, is that where the videos are. That's
where the videos are, and that's where the blog posts are,
That's where all the podcasts. Like some of you listen
to this and think all we do is the podcast,
but we've got a lot going on blogging. There's Robert
(01:08):
does some amazing content about butts. Yeaheah, there's a there's
some science on that galories and there's a monster science
both in video form and blog form. The latest one
I liked a lot, the cat Bus one. Oh yeah, yeah,
I just did one on the cat Bus from Totoro.
Just rewatched that film with my family and uh, yeah,
there's some cool science behind cat Bus. I've actually never
(01:29):
seen it. You've got to get on there. Well, you
know the other new thing that we've got going on,
new music at the top of the show, guys, Yeah,
how about that welcome a welcome change that was created
by our fabulous producer Noel Brown. Bravo to you, sir.
But also I didn't notice this until I had heard
it a few times. It reminds me of the Doctor
(01:49):
Who theme, you know, it's with the with the lead part. Well,
I like to think of us as that that. You
know what the Three Doctors is. It's when three friend
doctors from different time periods. I'll meet up together with
their tartises and hang out and and stop bad things
from happening. So we're like the three Doctors, but just
(02:10):
obviously the angry doctor. Yeah, yeah, I'm I'm Yeah, I'm
the curmudgeon doctor. That would be I guess I'm most
like Peter Capaldi. Yeah, that would be the angry doctor. Yeah.
So we've all met up and here we are to
talk about, of course what doctor the doctor would talk
about the ig Nobel Prizes, that's right. Yeah, So that
(02:33):
we all three decided to come together on this one
because there are a lot of studies we want to
We want to roll through them in two episodes, each
of us taking the head on a different study and
not doing a super deep dive, but giving you a
nice overview about what this particular study is, why it's ridiculous,
why in many cases it's actually important, because that's one
of the keys here. The Ignailed Bell Prizes have been around,
(02:55):
uh since I believe, and each year they award ten
prizes to various bits of research, pure viewed studies that
you know, it's not the kind of stuff you're gonna
see capturing the headlines necessarily any scientists do, blind of
American not winning an actual Nobel prize. Right here at
(03:16):
how Stuff Works. We've sort of developed a like sub
theme for studies like this, which is sometimes we publish
these on our Now how stuff works channel, which is
there's a study for that, which is the kind of
like can you believe somebody did this? But at the
same time, I think the thing about the ignobles is
that there's always some value and importance to the research.
(03:37):
So yeah, like I always think of in cases like this,
I think of science as a slime mold amaze. Right now,
the slime mold is expanding outward, exploring its terrain, trying
to find food, and so it's going down all the
hallways to explore. And that's what science does. And just
because a particular area of study seems kind of pointless
at first glance, or it seems just very very specific,
(04:00):
or it's trying to prove something that we already kind
of know in our gut, it's still important that science
go there because science is is mapping the universe. Yeah,
and some of the corners of that map are watching
elephants p exactly. Well, Okay, I mean I slime mold.
Can we stick with the gelatinous cube here? Can we
use a gelatinous cube or is a slim mold like
(04:22):
a very specific metaphor for ignoble science. Um, I like
the slime because slime old this swarm intelligence. Oh okay,
I see what you're saying. Okay, I'll allow it. Uh. So,
let's af familiarize the audience with what these things are,
because the first time I heard about it was in
one of our episodes when we were talking about necrophilia,
and we uh, there was a study that had previously
(04:45):
won the Ignoble, which was about a guy watching a
duck try to have sex with a dead duck. Some
of the big ones. It was like seventy minutes of
of him watching that with a notebook. If you really
want to hear the whole full story, go back and
sense that necrophilia episode. But uh, it's weird, but it
also had value to it, and so uh, let's kind
(05:08):
of encapsulate what these things are for our audience and
then we can dive into the tent studies. Well, the
principal individual here is Mark abrams Um. He's the editor
and co founder of Improbable Research magazine, which you can
find at their website. Let a link to that on
the landing page for this episode. And they regularly cover
(05:28):
research of this nature stuff. It's weird stuff that's a
little wacky, but it's still science and it's always covered
in essentially a loving way. Yeah. They say that it's
supposed to make you laugh but also make you think. Yeah.
I found this was true about a lot of the
studies we looked at this time. I I like the
sense that, um, it is certainly not stroking the ego
(05:50):
of the scientists who perform these studies, but it's not
really making fun of them either, or maybe sort of
making fun of them, but at least not denigrating their work.
I think there have only been a couple of cases
where because for one thing, you can nominate your own work,
and they get about five thousand nominations each year. But
I can only think of two cases offhand where the
(06:11):
individuals did not receive it warmly, one of which was
the U. S. Air Force over their gay bomb, which
they won a prize four two thousand seven. They did
not remember hearing about this. Yeah, they did not see
the humor in it. No, hold on what were the
details of the gay bomb. The gay bomb, as I recall,
was that proposed weaponized afrodisiac that you would be able
(06:35):
to throw into the enemy trenches and harmonomy morale by
making them, Yeah, get friendly, amorous and confused. It was
referenced nicely on an episode of thirty Rocks several years back.
But but yeah, the the the Air Force did not
see the humor in that. And there there have been
a couple of curmudgeons along you know, over the years
that have have come out and said, oh, well, this
(06:56):
is just you know, waste of time. For instance, the
ve Robert May, the British government's chief scientific advisor at
the time, it was a big was a big critic
of the Nobel Prizes and he was saying that it
should only be used to, you know, to ridicule anti
science and pseudo science, and he should leave the the
real scientists alone. Uh again, totally missing the point that
(07:19):
the scientists are the are the ones who enjoy this
the most. Don't you love people who hate humor? So
I let's address that for a second though, because right
before we came in here, I watched the almost all
of the ceremony for awards, which we just which is
what we're going to cover today. I watched a lot
(07:39):
of this too, and and I feel like you definitely
get the tone that they're going for if you watch
the ceremony. They did a great job filming it. It's
got multiple camera angles. It's filmed in this beautiful theater
at Harvard University. Um that I saw Spalding Gray at
that same theater, like god fifteen years ago or something
like that, So it was it was neat to see that.
(08:00):
But uh, the humor is very oh wacky. Yeah, it's
it's that kind of like academic like we don't want
to offend anybody humor that's just a little zany and
goofy and so at this at one on one hand,
I appreciate it, and I totally understand. Uh, I understand
(08:24):
that this guy who was it? Who? Who Robert may
who was so like against it in the first place. Yeah,
I don't understand where he's coming from. But I'm also
somewhat sympathetic because it's just like whacketty schmackt he do
zany like, you know, like jokes and stuff. Even if
(08:44):
you're not laughing with the jokes, you're still like, oh, well,
that's kind of adorable. Watch the old old scientists get
up there and kind of you know, hap uh, you know,
yuck it out. But I will confess though that it
was unbearable for me to a point that I had to.
I watched it on YouTube, and I had to watch
it on double speed, so everybody was talking really fast
(09:05):
like chipmunks. But I got the gist of everything, and
I paid a special Please stop, Christian, I'm bored. Yeah, yeah,
but please please stop. Joe tell them about what's her name,
Pootie Pie or I think it's called Sweetie poop child.
Pot Pie is the guy on YouTube. Oh, I don't
know anyway. Yeah, they have a little character who is
(09:29):
a child who comes up. It's like the Oscar music
that starts to play when people get a little too
much gratitude in their speech at the Oscars. Uh. And
they want to get you off the stage at this ceremony.
They've got a child who runs up to you and
proclaims boredom and tells you to stop talking. And she's precocious.
And then on top of that, then they bring back
all the former Sweetie poos. Did you watch that part? Didn't?
(09:53):
Every former Sweetie pooh is a part of the procession. Uh.
And they are like the van Ol White that kind
of like escort out the winners of the awards and
then escort them back in. And they do this whole
cute see poo thing where they have the sweetie poo's
a'll tease one another in front of the audience. It's
a little much. Um. Also, I grew up you have
(10:17):
a you have a very dark heart that has no
room for for cuteness. Well I do, and I'll allow
this as well. I'm from Boston and I'm very familiar
with Harvard University. I lived right near there for a
long time, and I'm very familiar with this kind of
humor that is, you know, it's very um yeah, twee,
I guess is one way to put it. So um.
(10:39):
I will warn I will warn our listeners ahead of
time that maybe I'm the dark heart here, but I
was a little put off by the zany humor. However,
the studies themselves are amazing. Well, let's launch into them here, Um, Joe,
I believe you're up first, tell us about the chemistry
prize winner, the Ignobil Chemistry Prize winner for two thousand. Okay,
(11:00):
so the Chemistry prize went to I'm gonna say their names,
and there's a lot of them, so bear with me
for a second. Here, Callum Ormond, Colin Raston, Tom Yuan,
Stephen Kudla check Samir and couldn't cha Joshua In Smith,
William A. Brown, Caitlin Pouglisi, Tivoli, Olson, Mariam eft Car,
(11:23):
Greg Weiss. Oh, And that's it them for demonstrating a
mechanical process to unboil an egg. So yes, these scientists
all work together. Now, I think the main scientist who
has involved in this process, the one at least who
has spoken to the media the most about it, was
Greg Weiss. But they came up with this mechanical process
(11:46):
to unboil an egg. Well, hold on part of an egg,
the egg white, and note that this is not uncooking
an egg, and that you can't unfry an egg or
unscramble an egg or on. I wonder if you could
unpoach and egg maybe, but at least what you can
do is unboiled an egg white. So the paper is
(12:06):
called and I love the academic alienation of this title
sheer stress mediated refolding of proteins from aggregates and inclusion bus. Yes,
I can call the paper is a colon and then
another long sentence after that. And that's one of the
beautiful things about the Ignabel Prizes is this is a
(12:27):
great example of where they really got to the heart
of what this study is in the way that the
rest of us can enjoy. Yeah, and so it was
published in January in Kim Bio Kim And here's what happened.
The researchers took an egg and then they divided the
whites from the yolk, and then they boiled the egg
whites for twenty minutes at about a hundred ninety four
(12:48):
degrees fahrenheit or ninety degrees c. And if you have
ever seen the white part of a hard boiled egg,
you know what we're dealing with is the final product here.
And so egg whites in their natural state are a
mixture of water and proteins, including the protein lysozyme, which
is a protein associated with immune function and more on
(13:08):
that in a minute. When you boil egg whites, the
folded proteins that are in the egg whites get d natured,
meaning that they sort of lose their precisely folded structure.
And that folded structure is what makes a protein do
the things that it does, sort of like what determines
its role in the in the tiny bio world that
(13:30):
it inhabits. And they also get all tangled together, and
they end up forming this solid block of bio jello
that we recognize as cooked egg white. Um, so that's
what normally happens when you when you boil an egg white.
It of course happened in this case as it always does.
And how do you fix this problem? So the researchers
(13:50):
took the boiled egg whites and dissolved them in a
urea solution to turn basically all of it into an
untangled up liquid of of unfolded proteins. So that's pretty gross.
It's a cooked egg white slurry. Then the solution was
placed into what they called a vortex fluid device. And
(14:11):
what this does is it's kind of like a centerfuge
but different. It spins a test tube a really high intensity.
I read one source saying it was about five thou
rpm s, so very very fast for a short time,
introducing an amazing amount of sheer stress to the film
of fluid, which is about one micron thick that built
up on the walls of the tube. And in a
(14:33):
quote given to the Washington Post, Greg Wise said about
the proteins in this process, they're like little elastic bands.
This stretches and unstretches them and gives them their shape back.
So it's kind of like if you, you know, stretch
out a tangled up slinky and then get it to
reform back into its original shape. But help me out
here for a second. So my understanding of the I
(14:54):
didn't read this study, but my understanding of what how
you're presenting it here is the dn turing process. By
zipping around at this high speed, are they they're renaturing.
They're refolding back into the original shape that the proteins
were before they were denatured by the heat. So it's
not just that they're moving something at such a high
(15:15):
speed that it like liquefies. No, it's it's actually re
applying the process. Yeah, they're they're undoing the work of
cooking by applying this mechanical stress. And so at the
end they were able to refold some of the proteins
back into their original shapes without it becoming tangled up
(15:36):
with one another in the process. That's another problem that
can happen, and it worked at the end. The solution
contained proteins comparable to uncooked egg whites, and that immune
related protein I mentioned lycenseyme that was also found to
be present in the final product and functional. Okay, So
what I want to know though, is did they make
(15:56):
a quiche with this afterwards? And how did it take?
You know, you couldn't because it's just the egg whites
and you really need some miolks for keysh We could
otherwise that would be pretty gross and you could make
a few different mixed drinks though, right, Oh, you probably could.
The New Orleans was sour fizz. What's it? What's it
called when you put an egg white in there? Something
jim fizz something something fizz. Gross. That's like when people
(16:22):
drink like oyster shots and stuff like that. It's nasty.
I have no idea what an oyster? You add oysters,
like raw oysters to it, like like a real oyster. Yeah,
that's about like having an oyster though. I mean, you
need to stop talking. You just mix it with like
booze and I think like tomato juice or something like that.
Disgusting study. Okay, So so they did it. They managed
(16:45):
to unboil egg whites and get them back to the
original state. A couple of things we I guess, in
case it needs stating, Why is this ridiculous? Well, I
guess it just sort of seems to contradict the folk
understanding of entropy that you can't fix what's broken. You
can't unscramble an egg, I think is an actual expression.
(17:05):
You might not be able to unscramble an egg, but
you can unboil an egg. Well, there's so many fun
metaphors that you can reverse with this, right. I think
it's also funny because it involves eggs, which apparently some
people just think are inherently funny objects, and slightly more
when they're boiled, especially because it's life. But but this
(17:26):
process actually does have real, very important and interesting applications,
not just for fun. It can make a big difference
in many kinds of research involving proteins. For example, cancer
research in the lab often deals with proteins that have
exactly the same problem that cooked egg whites do. They
can become tangled in misshape, and so the proteins get
(17:48):
d natured, or they're they're folding gets messed up, or
they get tangled together or both, and then scientists have
to waste a lot of time trying to restore them
to to the original folded shape and structure, to get
them to be useful and by conventional means, this is
a really time consuming and wasteful process. So this sheer
(18:08):
stress method that they introduced with this the vortex fluid device,
could actually make cancer research much more efficient in terms
of time and cost. So it was reported in their
study that the refolding of protein by sheer stress was
faster than the conventional method of quote, overnight dialysis by
a factor of more than a hundred times, more than
(18:29):
a hundred times faster. So that's why it took eleven
people to to write this paper. There were different people
involved with different aspects of it. Like I know, some
of the people cited in the paper were people who
were working with the vortex fluid device itself. Like the
stories like ten more times. I want to just see
how many times we can say vortex fluid device throughout
(18:51):
the sentence, right, So there's some people working with that,
some people who are presumably working with the science of
the proteins. Yeah, yeah, routine labs. So probably some I'm
guessing like graduate students in there who did like the
scut work. Possibly, I don't know what every single name
corresponds to. It's one of those, uh, one of those
(19:12):
features of Modern Sciences. That you get a lot of
names listed. Yeah, let's see if we can find which
one of these has the most people applied to it. Okay, okay,
so I'm keeping track. We got eleven on this one. Well,
let's check out the next prize awarded in the physical science.
And this one was a lot of fun. I actually
read about this before this episode, but Robert, it was
about urine, right, oh, yes, And you're definitely uh, you're
(19:36):
in for a treat on this one because this is
the Physics Prize for bladder speed. And noticed I said
physics and not biology here. That's gonna be a key
as we move forward. The paper in particular is a
duration of urine does not change with body size by
Georgia Institute of Technology researchers Patricia ja Yanga, Jonathan Fama,
(19:57):
Jerome Choah, Dave and Dave at l Q. And this
was published in the summer two thousand fourteen edition of
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And they're just
right down the street these Yeah. I have read several
times about the research involving David who in one way
or another. Yeah, I mean we were talking before the
(20:19):
episode of the field of fluid dynamics. You see some
of the most amazing papers coming up and and this
one definitely uh fits the bill. Did they use a
vortex fluid device? Not as such. No. So basically, in
a nutshell, the study investigated how quickly thirty two different
animals you're inate now? Sixteen of these are live viewing
(20:41):
the rest or YouTube videos. Um, because they were they
were interesting to animals of varying size. It's YouTube research. Yeah.
So the interesting initial finding here though, is that it
turns out that it's all about the same at least
for animals that weigh at least six point six pounds
or three kilograms. They found all animals that weigh more
(21:02):
than that urinate in the same space of time. Um.
So it doesn't matter if it's an elephants bladder that
is thirty undred times larger than a cat's. Both animals
are going to get their being over with and about
uh twenty seconds. Okay. And the reason here is, the
paper explores, is that as diverse as all these different
(21:23):
bladder systems are, um and and all the plumbing, they
all rely on the fundamental principles of fluid mechanics. The
researchers found that quote the urethra is a flow enhancing device,
enabling the urinary system to be scaled up by a
factor of thirty six in volume without compromising its function.
(21:43):
One of the idea here is that it's possible that
larger animals have a longer urethras, and since the weight
of the fluid in the urethra is pushing the fluid out,
the long urethra increases the flow rate. So this is
why if you've ever gone online like our researchers and
watched a whole bunch of animals uh urinate, you might
see the larger animals just really pushing it out there
(22:04):
like a sheet of urine hose. Yeah, whereas the smaller creatures,
definitely the ones under that six point six pound limit. Uh,
they're just throwing out some droplets. Uh. For instance, mice
and rats less than two seconds spent urinating bats just
a fraction of the speed. So this would be important,
of course, keeping your your p speed up for an
(22:26):
elephant because uh, if if an elephant had a shorter
ure threat, it would take longer to urinate, and during
that time, of course, it would be more susceptible interpretation. Wow,
so okay, never, I've never really thought about the evolutionary
pressures on urination speed. That just doesn't really occur to
me as a thing having a big having a big
(22:50):
impact on your survival or reproduction. Well, it's how much
time that you're you're you have to remain stationary and
you're somewhere not paying attention to your surrounding. You have
to remain stationary and pooping on the move. I haven't tried.
I don't know. You've seen you've both seen Burdenmic, I have,
so you know what happened. It can't happen when their
predators about and you need to go potty. And I'm
(23:12):
thinking about my dog, who definitely breaks the twenty second rule.
I mean, he pees for a long time when we
go out first thing in the morning, and that's probably
because he's got a cushy life and he doesn't have
to worry about the pressures of survival. That's a good point.
That's a good point. So I probably don't have didn't
measure humans as well. I'm not sure if humans were
(23:34):
in the in the study. To be honest, you know,
I wonder one thing that could be affecting the different
times of domesticated animals versus whatever they used in the study.
I'm sure some of those were domesticated, would be whether
they are being prompted the urinate or whether they're just
urinating whenever they feel like it, because it could be
(23:55):
that in under natural circumstances, you will naturally let the
amount of urine and build up in your bladder that
it will take to evacuate in twenty or twenty one second.
But if you're a dog who's inside and can't pee
until it's time to go out, you might go beyond
that threshold when and accumulate a lot. You're thinking, okay,
so I probably don't have to tell anybody why this
(24:16):
study is ridiculous, because of course it involves urine, and
urine like eggs, is inherently funny. Um. But as to
why it's important for starters, it's an understudied topic. Not
a lot of people are putting a lot of time
and effort into the question of urination times for animals,
And additionally, the study may help to diagnose urine a
(24:38):
problems and animals as well as inspired of the design
of quote scalable hydro dynamic systems based on those in nature,
So there's a biomimicry potential here. Um, you don't need
to necessarily use external pressure to get rid of fluids
in a system quickly. Rather, you can let gravity do
the trick with the right bio mimicry. So possible applications
(25:00):
include water tanks, UM, backpacks that are used to you know, uh,
fire hoses, and UM. A couple of examples here in
which the team actually engaged with some additional experimentation. Uh.
They actually created a demonstration that empties a teacup, court
and gallon of water in the same duration for each
(25:22):
using varying links of connected tubes, thus standing in for
the varying urethra links UM links among these animals. And
then they connected a second experiment in which the team
filled three cups with the same amount of water then
empty them at varying rates by using different lengths of tube.
So again you don't have to use you know, varying
(25:44):
amounts of external pressure to move water through a system.
You can use to use gravity and tube length. This
is uh, they're like modern day Da Vincis like this
is this is the kind of stuff that Da Vinci
used to sit around and ponder about and work on
in his sketch books like how to move water more Efficiently.
They're just looking to nature's way of doing it. Yeah, yeah,
it's it's basically a bio on the medic exercise. Now,
(26:06):
so that makes me wonder if the next thing we're
going to hear about associated with David who is an ornithopter.
That would be great. Well wait, let's define that for
our audience for a second. Oh, if you've listened to
the Dune episode, you know all about ornithopters. No, didn't
da Vinci designed some mornithopters flapping flapping wing aircraft. Now,
(26:26):
I'm afraid that's wrong. That did he design propeller driven
or I can't remember other than from playing an Assassin's
Creed game where Da Vinci was the guy who made
He was like your que to your to your James
Bond and he made one of those things for you
to fly around in. Oh nice. Yeah. I don't think
there's any evidence that da Vinci made a working flying machine.
I think he just yeah, I don't think right, Yeah,
(26:49):
I don't think it was. And we'll have to ask
Jonathan Strickland. He would probably know. Uh So The next
one here, and this is a short one, is the
Literature Prize, and it specifically goes to a paper called
is Huh a Universal Word? Conversational Infrastructure and the Convergent
Evolution of Linguistic Items? By Mark Dinge Manze, Francisco Torrieira,
(27:16):
and Nick j Enfield Uh. And this was in p
l OS one published. Okay, so the basics of this
study are essentially that the writers involved take a look
at the the word sound huh. Specifically throughout the piece
they spell it h u h question mark. Yeah, I
(27:40):
asked to have the question mark. They used a phrase
to describe it that I thought was very appropriate and
very interesting. They called it a repair initiator. Yeah. I'll
get to that in a second. But that's essentially the
gist of their argument and and why it's important. So
they argue, one that is universal, regardless of language, all
(28:03):
human beings use a version of huh. And then the
second thing they argue is that it is a word.
It's not just a grunt. Yeah. Apparently there was some
uh people, some conflict apparently about whether or not it
was a word or not. And they defined it because
they said it's used similarly across cultures, and it's also
(28:24):
a learned, conventional form. And like you said, it's not grunting,
it's not crying, it's not just a noise. It's a
word that we use that has purpose to it, right,
It has a it has a semantic definition. It it
means something in conversation. It means I didn't understand what
you just said exactly so. And that's where the other
initiated repair thing comes in, right, So huh is used
(28:47):
for us to express to someone else, whether they speak
the same language or not, that there is something going
on where we're having trouble understanding, right, whether it's like
some all understanding or actual problem with the noise in
your ears, you know the problem hearing it now. They
found that across different languages it wasn't always pronounced exactly
(29:10):
the same. That it's sort of the essence of the
word hah that comes through yeah. And it has the
same variation in form as you would find in any
other regular words. So as words kind of spread across
cultures and they change slightly, uh, Like they use dog
as an example, and how dog changes across different cultures,
huh is similar. Well, I mean even in our own
(29:31):
usage of it. You have huh, but then you also
have yeah. Yeah, so I mean we have I think
multiple versions in English exactly. Yeah. And the way that
they conducted the study is and I feel bad for
whoever had to sit down and go through all this data. Uh.
They compiled data from published literature and thirty one languages
to see how it was used in written form, And
(29:52):
then they collected data from recordings of naturally occurring conversations
from ten languages across five different continents, and basically, you know,
looked for usage of huh uh and and how it
was understood. And there's the you know, I won't go
through it here too because I think it would be
kind of boring, but there's this really interesting uh cable
(30:14):
visual table that they applied to the study itself. It
wouldn't work well on a podcast to talk about it,
basically showing all the different languages and all their locations
across the world and how huh is used throughout them.
So of course, why is it ridiculous? Well, it's we're
studying such a basic part of human existence that seems
(30:34):
like it doesn't really require that deep of an analysis,
right uh. And and it's also, you know, just kind
of a silly The term itself means I don't understand,
and here we are speaking to understand. Yeah, but they
make a good case. I think that this is an
interesting thing to study, especially because they point out how
huh is such a useful and powerful tool in conversation
(30:58):
because it has this uh. It has this complex sort
of conversation management role that happens in such a short
time span and really helps keep conversations on track and
moving quickly because you don't have to stop every time
and say I don't understand what you just said. Right. Yeah,
It's It's interesting though, because it's easy to dismiss hunt
(31:21):
as um, it's just a needless break in a conversation.
But but I guess the the the the idea here
is that it's as small a break as is necessary.
It's not a verbal pause because it has meaning to it.
But yeah, it's a very short, quick, efficient way to
say I don't get it. Uh. It's feedback essentially, it
with within conversation. Just let the other person you're speaking
(31:45):
with no that you need more. Though, this also made
me think about how I feel like the word huh
has multiple different meanings in English. It certainly is what
they're talking about the repair initiators. So you're in the
middle of saying something I miss here part of it,
say huh and you repeat. But there's also I noticed
(32:05):
I often use huh as a punctuation that essentially means
that's curious. Yeah, that's I feel like that's my primary
usage of it is someone will say something interesting, especially
if it's like an audio interview over the phone, and
you feel like you need to give some feedback that
you are interested, and still on the line, you go, yeah.
(32:28):
It can also mean now I'm waiting for the listeners
to send us in like a super cut of all
the times we've all gone to each other. Can do that?
You know that Nolan makes electronic music out of our
verbal pauses and weird mouth noises. Right, No, but I'm
not surprised. Yeah, he keeps a folder and one day
he's going to get rich and famous by using all
(32:51):
of ours. Well, there's there's one other thing that I
just want to add about this study, and this is
they do a little kind of naval gazing dive here
in linguistic studies. But it's important because we've actually talked
about stuff like this before, especially when we did that
Feral Children episode on the Unlanguaged Mind. They have a
kind of universal grammar post structuralist argument going on, or
(33:16):
at least they get into that stuff by saying, huh,
isn't part of our genetic makeup? They're not. Just because
we all use it doesn't mean it's like built into
the human code, right, It's not like screaming in pain, Yeah, exactly.
And that Rather, what they're saying is that it's the
result of convergent cultural evolution, that as we as humans
(33:39):
have evolved together and built up our societies together, this
word has been it's it's like this one. I mean,
I'm sure there's many other constants, but it is one
constant that is between all of these cultures. Mhm. Hey,
so I think it's time to take a quick break
to hear about our sponsor for this episode. But after out,
(34:00):
we're gonna come right back and talk about more weird science.
All right. Well, well, let's move on to another prize here.
What do we have in terms of management? The Ignobile
Management Prize? I got a good one for you guys.
This is this is especially Oh, this is gonna hit
(34:21):
a little close to home for for those of us
who work in the digital media field. Uh. So this
is a paper uh that is called what Doesn't Kill
You Will Only make You More? Risk Loving colin Early
Life Disasters and CEO Behavior. It was written in September
published rather Uh and let me see if I can
(34:42):
pronounce these names. So I'm gonna butcher these but sorry,
guys if you're listening. Jennaro Berneil Vanite bag Wat and
p Rugga Vendra raw I believe are their names. So
this study finds that CEOs who have experienced fatal disasters
without stream negative consequences are more likely to be risky
(35:04):
and aggressive businessmen. So I'm assuming by extremely fatal disasters here,
that's an extremely fatal to people that are not him,
and they can they're still alive. Yeah, they have to be.
They're not undead sea. But then also they haven't lost
loved ones exactly. Yeah, that's that's the gist of it,
is that they whether the event had fatal consequences or not,
(35:25):
or they all do, but it didn't affect them directly. Now,
by your use of the term businessmen, does this indicate
that all of the people studied in this were male.
You know, I'm pretty sure that they were. Yeah. I
can't say definitively, but I want to say throughout the
paper that they used the pronoun him a lot. But
(35:47):
you know, there wasn't any discussion of gender as far
as I can remember, So yeah, but it's safe to
assume that they were mostly male. Uh. There is also
another part of this argument, which is that, uh. There
they also found that similarly, CEOs who witnessed extreme negative
consequences during a natural disaster, so like probably seeing their
(36:11):
loved ones die in front of them, are more conservative
in business. This includes how they deal with cash holdings, leverage,
and acquisitions, whereas the other guys are more likely to
create debt rather than equity, and they're more likely to
make their companies go through bankruptcy. Hold on, how many
ceo s did they find who had been through a
(36:31):
natural disaster? Well, let me tell you about their methodology,
which I think is a little although okay, I should
back up with that. The way the way that they
gathered their information is a little weird to me. However,
they put it through rigorous, rigorous testing to make sure
that they their data was I guess accurate. Okay, but well,
(36:54):
why don't you guys judge by the time we get
to the end of this and tell me what you think.
So the first thing that they do is they look
at a sample of firms from to two thousand and
twelve and they identified the CEOs of all these companies
and found their basic demographic information, you know, their age,
where they grew up, where they were born, YadA, YadA. Right.
(37:14):
Then they cross reference that with a database of all
the natural disasters that happened in the United States during
those times, and these include earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes,
severe storms, floods, landslides, and wildfires. And they specifically focused
on the period of time when these CEOs would be
(37:36):
between the ages of five and fifteen, because they say
that medical research shows that this is when our most
lasting childhood memories tend to start and then stop. So, okay,
the I want to pause for a second here and
say that the research itself, it's very easy to like
read and abstract and say, well, these CEOs are more
(37:59):
likely to do this thing, and these CEOs are less
likely to do this thing. Right, So the actual numbers
here what they call leverage ratios. They seem pretty small
to me. So the first group is three point four
percent higher than the norm, and then the second group
is negative three point seven percent lower. So to me,
(38:19):
this seems like it would fall into the margin of
error for many other studies that we would look at,
So you know, keep that in mind. Uh, it just
it's it seems a little low. I I was expecting
based on the conclusion that they had, it would be
a much higher percentage. To be fair, though, like I said,
they built in a lot of safeguards into this to
keep data bias and variables out of the studies results.
(38:41):
They even tested the robustness of their own methodology afterwards
by applying it in various forms over and over and
over again. Uh. And so they argue that this supports
the idea that CEOs who have not experienced extreme consequences
are desensitized to the negative consequences of risk. Subsequently, those
(39:01):
who are are more likely to be cautious. Okay, so
what do you think do you think? Like this methodology
sounds valid? You know, in the face of it, it's
weird because the study definitely matches up with the stereotype
that we a lot of us carry around for the
(39:22):
sort of inhuman CEOs that we that we ultimately have
very little personal interaction with. And they they're just this,
they seem to be this individual has no connection with
the suffering of others, right, And it seems like we,
I don't know, we should always be especially careful about
scientific results that seem to confirm our intuitions because we're
(39:43):
I don't know, we're just susceptible to being lenient with them.
That's why I thought that there was a sort of
inherent ridiculousness to this for the Ignoble prizes rights, it
seems like it's looking for causality between two seemingly unrelated
experiences just to confirm our pre existing bias. But uh,
like I said, I mean, I didn't go into it
here because again, like it's very dense uh and math
(40:06):
essentially that they that they went through here. I don't.
I have to respect them for the diligence that they
did in the study, but I don't know necessarily that
all that diligence adds up to being able to say
that this is accurate. What I would rather see is
a study that correlates CEO risk taking behavior with how
(40:29):
they play the board game risk. Well, are they a
table flipper? Oh nice? Yeah, well, you know, suggest that
to the board and maybe they can do that for
the next for next year's I Nobel Prizes, although those
are probably getting published already. Uh, but there is all right,
So all that aside is an important study though, in
(40:52):
the sense that they found a link between CEOs and
disaster experience and their corporate policies, and subsequently this has
real economic consequences. Right, So basically what they're trying to
do is say, like, all right, this is a predictor
I assume for hiring or you know, in in some
sense a predictor of how well this person is going
to run a company. Yeah. I do think one thing
(41:14):
that's useful here is it's just one more thing that
helps us remember that ceo s and the people who
make top level business decisions are human, and they're very
much subject to human biases prejudices towards certain types of actions.
They're not. I think there's sometimes this, uh, at least
(41:34):
in the pro business mindset, there is this type of
thinking that these people are efficiency optimizing machines who just
you know, they make the decision that makes the most
money all the time. But I mean there are people there.
They make emotion driven the decisions they they are informed
by their experiences and their feelings about the world based
(41:56):
on the things that have happened to them. It's good
to keep that in mind. Then this is one more
tally in that corner. Yeah, and plus it also it's
another study that looks at how Evan shape who we
are um and in this in this case, it reminds
me a lot of discussions I've had with people about comedians,
like you have a comedian who didn't who is Jimmy
(42:19):
Fallon comes to mind. I remember hearing an interview with
Jimmy Fallon where he basically, you know, he wasn't picked
on as a kid. He had pretty much had a
nice rhyn of things. And maybe that explains why I
don't find Jimmy Fallon all that funny, because he's not
coming from this place of bankst or suffering like comedians
that you identify with. Yeah, he's not. He's not Schopenhauer's comedian.
(42:43):
So maybe he's the CEO of of comedy, you know.
As it lines up with this study, Wow, Oh man,
you just really blew my mind with that Robert like
I am. That gives me pause because I really don't
like Jimmy Fallon's humor. Um, I'm gonna have to think
further on this and come back on another episode. And
I'm not saying I dislike Jimmy Fallone. Seems like a
(43:04):
nice guy, but like Comedy has never spoken to just
this comedy. Yeah, I don't know him as an individual.
He's like a CEO. I don't know those guys in
he stole my car once. Really well, here's what I
think that I got from this study is that what
we need to do is make sure that all people
who become CEOs of companies saw their parents murdered in
(43:27):
front of them when they were children, because then they'll
be like Batman Bruce Wayne, and they will run the
company really well and clean up all the crime in
their city. Is there any evidence of support the idea
that Bruce Wayne was was Slashy is a good CEO? Though,
We're gonna have to do some contextual analysis to figure
that one out. In fact, I would I would be
interested as anyone looked into the various CEOs in the
(43:50):
comic book world. He's a better CEO, is it like
or is it Wayne? Yeah? Just in terms of a
business perspective, Yeah, you know Tony Star, which is a
bad or industry go to working like, who is it like?
Sometimes having an evil corporation over your shoulder if they're
if they have could benefit. I was gonna say that
the benefits at lex Corp Are great, Great, They've got
(44:12):
fantastic four O one K, nice hs A package. I mean,
business is good when you just manufacture toxic chemicals. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, okay,
getting back to the seriousness of this though. Um, the
researchers were specifically interested in the strength of the dosage of,
you know, experiencing these natural disasters and what their effects
(44:32):
would be. And this is a quote from the study.
They say the intensity of life experiences can result in
nonlinear effects on subsequent risk taking. All right, we have
one more study to look at in this episode, and
I believe this one to you again, Christian, the two
thousand fifteen Ignobile Prize for Economics. Yeah, so this actually
doesn't go to an academic paper. This Uh, this is
(44:56):
a pretty funny one. But also I can I can
see why they picked it. Uh, the organizers awarded the
Thai Land the Thailand Metro Police directly for their efforts
to combat rampant bribe taking among traffic police. So apparently
in Thailand it's not all that uncommon for you know,
(45:16):
if you break the traffic rules, police pulls you over
and you just throw them like three or four bucks
or whatever and say, hey, let's why do you forget
about this? Okay, So to combat the rampant bribe taking
that's going on among these traffic police, the officers in
charge said, okay, if you refuse these bribes, you will
receive a cash reward of up to ten thousand bot. So,
(45:39):
just for our listeners out there, ten thousand as of
today converts roughly into two eighty one dollars or comparison,
a police salary in Thailand right now is is on
average six thousand bought a month as of data, so
they make about a hundred and sixty nine dollars a month.
(45:59):
So you know, if they would refuse these bribes, they'd
be getting more than a month's paycheck. This raises so
many questions about it makes you wonder how much they're
making off bribes in the first place. Oh yeah, yeah, definitely. Um,
I guess I can preface this by saying that my
family lived in Thailand for a couple of years. I
didn't live there with them, but I went and visited
(46:22):
and stayed with them. Um, so I'm I visited Thailand.
I'm somewhat familiar with Thailand, but I can't really speak
to its you know, overall culture and the corruption and
the government. I do know, as many people do that
you know, Bangkok is infamous for uh, drugs, prostitution, you
name it, you know, and so I think that that
was kind of part of the impetus here for this
(46:44):
kind of weird policy that they enacted, was to clean
up the reputation of Bangkok. But of course, so it's
it's sort of ridiculous, so ridiculous that after two weeks
the police canceled this policy. Uh. There were so there's
so much back to your bribe social media criticism about
this that they thought it was damaging the forces reputation. Uh,
(47:07):
and two cops received the maximum award based on them
taking three dollar bribes. Yeah, well it's not rather not
taking those bribes. It's it's kind of like the whole
scenario where somebody unloads the dishwasher and then expects praise
for it, like you're supposed to unload the dishwasher. You
did your job. Yeah, you did your job. Congratulations. Yeah,
(47:30):
there shouldn't be a monetary reward for not taking the bribe,
which is what you're supposed to do to Kenwin. Unsurprisingly,
the Metropolitan Police Bureau did not send any representatives to
Harvard to receive the award at the ceremony. I wish
they did because that would have probably made it quite
a bit funnier. Did they not even send a video acceptance? Well,
(47:50):
you know what, I didn't catch that they might have,
but they didn't get to have what's her name sit
there and tell them that they're boring. Oh yeah, it's sweetie. Pooh.
I g I forgot, I forgot to Okay. Uh So,
just another thing is that Thailand also received the Ignoble
Award for Public Health because they had research that was
(48:13):
published about surgical solutions to involuntary penis amputation. I remember
this one. Yeah, so you know, they're racking up the
points in the Ignoble category. But let's get serious for
a second here. Okay, here's why this is important. So
the state officials and the police in Thailand are supposed
to face life in jail if they're convicted of taking
(48:35):
a bride. Life in jail. Yeah, but it's pretty common,
it's extremely common. Uh. Though. The Thai army took power
after ousting the first female prime minister uh and they
claimed that they had to restore order to the nation
because nearly thirty people were killed in political protests against
(48:58):
her being elected. Okay, so that's where this all came from.
Uh And after they took power, that's when they launched
this campaign to clean up Thailand's image. So this measure,
the traffic bribe measure, was part of that campaign. Uh
And specifically because that prime minister's brother is an ousted
(49:19):
and influential politician who is also a former police officer,
and he's known to have allies in the police force
and he's got some you know, political influence with them.
He fled the country in two thousand and eight. But
really the speculation is that, like, if you look deeper
at this, this is more about the military trying to
take back control of the police from this you know,
(49:41):
allegedly corrupt politician. All right, Well, there you have it.
We're gonna cut off right there, and we're gonna pick
up in the next episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
where will roll through five more of the winners from
the two thousand fifteen Ignoble Prizes. Uh, there's some gonna
be some fun stuff in there, So give you joined
this come back from what we're gonna talk about kissing
(50:02):
and how many babies you can have in a lifetime. Yeah,
we're talking about sticking essentially plungers on the butts of chickens.
It's it's gonna be. It's gonna be a golden bees
to your genitals. Science. Hey, So in the meantime, be
sure to check out stuff to bow your Mind dot com.
That's we'll find all the podcasts. You'll find videos, you'll
find blog posts, you'll find links out that those social
(50:23):
media accounts such as tumbler, Facebook, and Twitter. Yeah, and
that is where you can also find the address to
write into us if you were, you know, particularly inspired
by one of these papers that we discussed, or maybe
you're one of the authors of one of them and
want to communicate to us what was actually going on
with your research, or perhaps you're involved in the Ignoble Prizes.
(50:44):
If you want to contact us directly, Joe, what's the
address below the mind at how stuff works dot com
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