The 2016 Ig Nobels: Pale Horses, Dead Flies and Quantified Bullroar

Each year, a magazine called The Annals of Improbable Research awards the Ig Nobel prizes to honor the weirdest and funniest scientific projects ever undertaken by humans. In this pair of Stuff to Blow Your Mind episodes, Robert, Joe and Christian discuss this year's winners. In part two, you’ll hear about profiles in lying, pale horses, automotive alchemy, the passion of a fly collector, and people who find profundity in meaningless statements.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
By name is Robert Lamb, I'm Christian Seger, and I'm
Joe McCormick, and we're back for part two of our
two part episode on the Ignoble Prizes of st If

(00:24):
you haven't heard part one yet, you should go back
listen to that first where we covered the first of
five prizes. We were discussing, Well, we covered five prizes.
Now we're going to cover five more. Yeah. Now, if
you're stuck in a vehicle and you can't download the
first one and this is the only one that's primed up,
and then just go ahead. Because it's also kept very
fairly modular. How about we give them just like a
like one to two cents description of what these are

(00:47):
the Ignoble Awards. They are are given out by Improbable
Research Group, and the idea is that they celebrate research
that makes people both laugh and then think. And I
guess I'm going to take the first prize that we
discussed today. I want to talk about their Peace Prize
for sixteen, which went to a piece of research on

(01:09):
BS and before I get into it, I I'm so
sad that I was not able to think of a
non profane and yet non euphemistic word do you use
for this subject? Bull roar? I think bull roar? Okay, well,
the subject is bull roar that that is not the
term they use, but bull roar as a psycho linguistic

(01:29):
phenomenon to take seriously and understand. And so the Peace
Prize went to Gordon Pennycook, James Allen Chain and Nathaniel Barr,
Derek Kohler and Jonathan fugeal Song for their scholarly study
called on the Reception and Detection of Pseudo Profound bull
roar our Substitution, published in the journal Judgment and Decision

(01:52):
Making in November. The second comment I want to make
is that I'm actually gonna give a kind of abbreviated
take on this prize winner, not because it's not interesting,
but because I actually want to come back and devote
an entire full episode to the subject of bull roar.
Uh and Robert. I hope you will join me for that.
Oh yes, I'm always up for a little a little bs.

(02:14):
But anyway, this, this study, in its critics, would probably
be the centerpiece of that because I think bull roar
is a fascinating and honestly world changingly important phenomenon to
recognize and comprehend. But so how do you how do
you conduct research on bs or bull roar that just
seems kind of like it's a phenomenon of everyday conversation.
It's a little bit hard to quantify. But this study

(02:37):
looked into the factors associated with a person's acceptance of
a specific subset of bull roar that they call pseudo
profound bull roar and h The authors define this as
quote seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful,
but are actually vacuous. So are you like an outrageous

(03:01):
overstatement of the obvious? Would know that would not be
an overstatement of the obvious, would be a mundane statement.
A piece of pseudo profound bull roar is a statement
that actually contains no meaningful content, true or false, but
gives the implication of meaningfulness. I want to give you

(03:23):
a few a few examples of potentially profound statements. Let
me know if you think this is profound. Some of
these might be truly profound. Your desire fascinates intrinsic facts
that sounds meaningless to me? No, no, give it? Oh
wait yeah, okay, that's probably meaningless. No no, let's try

(03:43):
another one. Then. How about nature drives the progressive expansion
of destiny. That sounds like a flowery explanation of natural selection.
These are the fortune cookies. How about this your body
creates subjective mortality? That two sets. That's two sounds like

(04:10):
a true statement was translated into one language and back
into English. Yeah. How about perception illuminates ephemeral positivity. M Okay, yeah,
I guess that could be theoretically true. But wait, what
does that mean? If that's true, hit me with it again.
Perception illuminates ephemeral positivity. So if you can perceive with

(04:37):
your senses in some way, but the positivity is ephemeral,
then how could you see it? Surprise? Surprise both? Okay, sorry,
both of you. None of these statements were written by
a human being for any express purpose. They're all auto
generated by a website that assembles random New Age buzzwords

(04:57):
into grammatically correct sentence. This is kind of like that
website that was going around a little while ago where
they took Man of War lyrics and generated lyrics from
Man of War songs that were never written. Yeah, just
taking a selection of vocabulary that you know is uh,
you know that a certain maybe uh rhetorical conversation group

(05:18):
is fond of ye and then just mixing them up
into nonsense. But I want to offer offer some real
proverbs for contrast. So there are such things as proverbs
short statements. How about this one. I found this Russian
proverb on the internet or purportedly. I mean, you're going
to do a Russian accent, No, I won't. It's do
not cross the brook for water, Okay, I thought that

(05:41):
for Yeah, that actually seems profound that that, like it
is making a point about not multiplying labor unnecessarily in
a kind of unthinking way. I have dirty feet, You're
making that water dirt and it retains a certain amount
of meaning cross language, across culture. Because I'm always encountering
little proverbs. What do you hear them and you're like,
there's something's off. Maybe I'm I'm just I don't get

(06:03):
the joke because I'm not in the culture. I want
to give you one that I think is actually really good.
Knowing is half the battle. Oh, yeah, I know that.
I think that's g I Joe. I think that's actually
a great proverb. That's the thing. You've got to understand
a problem before you can fight it. Yeah, it's like, say,
implicit racial bias, Like the first step to overcoming at
it all on a personal or institutional level is just recognized,

(06:27):
recognizing that it exists exactly. Uh so, Yeah, so there
are real proverbs that have meaning. Uh. There are statements
that you could say are Monday. You could also put
mundane statements in here. There aren't really profound, but they're
at least true and have content like pain don't hurt.
Account No, I'd say that might actually that's either truly

(06:48):
profound as a proverb, or that might be some some
bull roar pain don't hurt. That's a good one. No,
no, no no, that The straightforward mundane ones would be something like, uh,
babies require constant attention. That's an example they've given the study.
It's just it's not profound. It's just a statement of
a fact that seems pretty well true. It could be

(07:10):
profound depending on the context. Yeah, that's true in a
nurse ry, not profound on a on a fortune cookie. Maybe. Well,
I think a lot of these pseudo profound statements could
be profound in the right context, if you like, define
all the words in a certain way, you know, but anyway,
So to come back to the study, So while while
some of the philosophical study of BS has looked into

(07:33):
the behavior of the b S or this study actually
tries to understand the behavior of the b SC, what
makes a person receptive to this particular type of BS
that we've just been sharing here. The pseudo profound statements
statements that seem at first glance to suggest some kind
of importance or profundity, but then you start picking at

(07:56):
them and you they don't seem to actually mean anything.
I have a new name for this, uh, this theory,
the matrix theory. Right, it's at least the second and
the third matrix movie. Right. They seemed like they had
a profound meaning to them, but then ultimately when you
pull it apart, there's nothing there. Well, it kind of
comes back to lyrics too, because I think there are
plenty of examples who can think of where you have

(08:18):
like is part of a complete package. They'll have these
lyrics that you know, they're throwing some some cool words around,
some cool almost like you know, keywords for the song
and with the music, with the vibe, with the beat,
you kind of take it. Your brain takes it and
it forms its own logic out of info, so narrative

(08:38):
out it. And I think maybe that's part of it too,
because like, if you have this empty bit of like
new age BS that's coming at you, it's it may
just be un a fortune cookie, but it may be
presented by a charismatic person. Uh maybe in the context
of a you know, a sacred space, someone who has
some kind of institutional authoritative validation. Just by the fact

(09:02):
that that some major publisher has put out a book
with lots of statements like this in it. Don't Fear
the Reaper Baby, how's that one? I think that's actually
more really profound, like making a statement that has that
has content. But anyway, so so there are people obviously
who do get this feeling. They look at statements like

(09:24):
this and they find meaning in them. They say, yeah, yeah,
that's profound in vacuous pseudo profound statements. So what these
people were looking at in the study was are their
personality factors correlated with people who find profundity in vague
nonsense in pseudo profound BS, And was the answer was yes.
They claimed to find some things though there there are

(09:45):
some critics of the study. I want to mention that
in a minute. But the people that they they might
be but we'll see. But so anyway, the experimenters ran
several tests where they ask participants to rate the profundity
of randomly generated sentence is just like the ones that
I was reading to you a minute ago, So they said, uh,
you know, we are interested in how people experience the

(10:07):
profound below or a series of statements taken from relevant websites.
Please read each statement and take a moment to think
about what it might mean. Then rate how profound do
you think it is? Profound in this case means of
deep meaning, of great and broadly inclusive significance. But in conjunction,
so they're testing people saying how profound do you think

(10:27):
these vacuous statements are? But in conjunction with this, they
also did a battery of all these different types of
personality and intelligence tests. For example, one of their major
hypotheses was that people who find these types of statements
profound are people who tend to be intuitive or reactive thinkers,
as opposed to what would be referred to in psychology

(10:48):
as reflective thinkers. Reflective means like analytical using deliberate analytical skills. Yeah,
analytical thinking, um and uh. And so they tested for
plenty of their factors as well, and in the end
they claim to find some correlations. So I'm just going
to read a quote from their conclusion quote. Those more
receptive to bull roar are less reflective, so they didn't

(11:11):
think that they were more intuitive, less analytical, less reflective,
lower incognitive ability i e. Verbal and fluid intelligence numerous e.
Are more prone to ontological confusions that means, uh, having
trouble telling the difference between literal statements and metaphorical statements, um.
Conspiratorial ideation conspiracy thinking, and more likely to hold religious

(11:36):
and paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary
and alternative medicine. Dear God, if you applied this to
the American election, So it's it's obvious already, right. This
is a minor hit on the internet, where any new
study that can be construed to show that other people
are dumb tends to play well. Uh. And So I've

(11:56):
read some really interesting criticisms of both the popular media
coverage of this study when it was released, because uh,
like there there were some media outlets that covered it
with headlines like do you love why sounding quotes? Surprise,
You're probably dumb. As you can tell from my description,
that's not really an accurate characterization of the study. And

(12:17):
on top of that, there there might be some reasons
to question the methodology of the study itself. But like
I said, I want to save that full discussion for
our future episode that we're going to do on bull
roar in all its glory. Um. But anyway, that that
is the paper. But why is it amusing? I'd say
a couple of major reasons. One because as a cuss
word in the title. Yeah, I'm surprised they got it

(12:39):
published with that. Oh, I don't know. I feel like
the concept of bull roar in its original linguistic form
is um is an accepted concept in philosophy, especially going
back to there's a really good essay If you haven't
read it, you should read it by Harry Frankfurt published
in two thousand five called on BS. That is is

(13:01):
a philosophical attempt to define BS and distinguish it from
other forms of communications such as lying. Uh So, it's interesting,
but they also I think it's also funny to people,
because it's just funny to mock people who seem to
find profundity and vacuous statements. And I, you know, I
don't want to be you know, elitist or whatever, but

(13:23):
I can't. I must admit I get a giggle when
I see people post like inspirational quotes and I'm like,
that doesn't mean anything. Surely, surely I'll share the su Yeah, yeah, no, no,
I was just it was making me think, because you know,
there's that there's that extra level. It's kind of like
a really bad movie, right where if you accept if
you love the bad movie, like on face level, almost

(13:48):
like it's not necessarily a good thing. I mean, I
love the movies you love. That's that's how I live
my life. But I think of the bad movies that
I can acknowledge that they're they're they're not rate, but
that I love them all the same. A lot of times,
I am I'm bringing additional readings into what's happening, and
I'm kind of I'm kind of spinning off and and

(14:11):
fan theorizing and and trying to stitch it all together
into a form that makes more sense. And has more
meaning to me. You're saying they're different ways to appreciate
Michael based Transformers films. Yeah, so don't you even go there.
You know, I cried at the first one, and you
saw the fourth one with me. I think saw is

(14:31):
a generous word. I sat in a room where some
lights were going on in front of me. It's amazing.
Mike Mark Wahlberg in that movie alscar worthy performance. Well, like, like,
here's an example of a of a just a quick phrase,
and this is actually like a Bible quote. Uh, my,
my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Right
on this. On the surface, it's a it's a basic analogy. Hey,

(14:54):
I've got this, uh, this thing for you, but don't worry,
it's going to be easy to carry and tow. Uh,
You're gonna this is gonna be easy going for you.
But anytime I see it, I always do ation a
different read on it. And I think of light as
in illumination, as in knowledge, as in revelation, and which
makes it this kind of frightening statement to say that, like,

(15:14):
if you enter into my burden is illumination. Yeah, the
light that blinds me can consus me for you can
also blind me that sort of thing. So I like that. Man,
that's interesting. So I'm not saying I can do that
with everything, or that every b S statement is susceptible
to some sort of a different read. But I wonder
if that is sometimes the case with these b S

(15:35):
statements that get really picked up, like there's maybe I'm
dismissing them because I'm just judging them to face value.
So I have a question for you, Joe. One thing
our listeners may not know is Joe went to graduate
school to study poetry. So now I'm thinking about this
study in context of reviewing poetry, whether it's written by

(15:58):
the great poet of the world or by you know, um,
maybe your classmates or maybe the students that you're teaching, Right,
So does this apply to that the idea of there
being something profound in a poem when maybe there's not
and it's just vacuous. But yeah, maybe maybe that's a
good point. I mean, so if I read a poem,

(16:19):
A lot of great poetry contains intentionally like self contradictory
or kind of absurd, uh, statements that that are designed
to create an effect, but they're not necessarily designed to
communicate information that's true. So I mean it's a yeah.
Maybe some people participate with these profound New Age quotes

(16:42):
just they're interacting with them in the same way that
I would interact with the poem. I'm not expecting it
to tell me something that is an insightful, true statement
about reality, but I'm expecting to have an experience with language.
I think this would be a really interesting study to
subsequently apply to the field of poetry in some way,

(17:03):
you know, like what they're always telling you when you're
in a discipline, especially a discipline in the humanities, right,
like you have to take something that pre exists, that's
been studied before, and then you have to take it
to the next level. You have to add something new
to it. This seems like it could be a very
interesting way of studying certain types of language use. Poetry

(17:23):
immediately comes to mind. But I mean, you could say
it about anything. Are you really just suggesting that you
think poetry is BS? Well, no, but you I don't
think that. But you could. You could boil it down
and you could say all poetry is BS in the
same way that you could say all acting is lying. Uh, jeez,
I don't know if I would agree with either of those. No,

(17:44):
I mean I would not agree with them, but you
could if you just boil it down, you strip it
away of all complex. You could say one actor is
just somebody who gets on a stage and lies about
who they are. Yeah, I guess I'm just imagining. Here's
an imaginary scenario, right, You've got a poetry professor who's
just doing it for thirty years. They've seen everything come
across their desk, and they're grading freshman poems and they're

(18:07):
coming through it and they're at home alone, they're drinking
a whiskey. Uh, and they're they're going through all these
with the red pen and they just go, oh, this
is just bs, this is vacuous, there's nothing here f
and then they flip it over. Well, I mean I
think most of the time, you know, I don't know,
maybe some professors do. I think most professors don't grade

(18:28):
poems as like you get a grade for how good
your poem was. But uh, but I don't know that. Yeah,
I mean, if it does not induce delight, or if
it does not make you feel anything that is worth feeling,
then it is not a good poem. Right, So I guess,
like That's That's where I'm going at with this thing, right,
is that, like both in the in the study and

(18:50):
practice of poetry, they're sort of subjective nature of what
it it's supposed to do or what it may do.
It seems like the same thing could be said of
some of these proverbs. I mean, not the like the
computer generated ones that you used earlier, like made me
feel anything, but they might for somebody. Well yeah, I
mean with some of these statements that are generated by
the computer every now and then, i'd see one other thing.

(19:12):
Oh yeah, maybe I could. I could sort of make
sense of that if if I was trying, even though
you know, it's, uh, it's just random words. Yeah. What's
the what's the monkey? Uh? The infinite monkey theorem? Yeah,
so that one where you have an infinite amount of
monkeys in their hammering away on typewriters, and yet one

(19:34):
of them will eventually write what is it? Like the
Great Novel or something like that, or Shakespeare. But I
think that's given infinite time as a parameter. Yeah, okay, okay, Well,
I mean it just goes to show you how language
is subjective in general. Wow, so we've tread, we've actually
tread into the library of babble. Now in this conversation.
Oh boy, Uh, sorry, I gotta say one more thing.

(19:55):
Then we're done with this. Uh. We can argue about
why it might be important or might not be important
as an individual study, but one thing I definitely will
stand up for is that the subject of BS or
bull roar uh, and the human propensity to be impressed
by bull roar is a truly profound important phenomenon in education, politics, culture,

(20:17):
and religion, advertising and so on. BS makes up a
significant portion of all human communication and everything from political
speeches to first state chatter, self help literature. It's all
over the place, and it is for that reason worth
our time and attention to understand its rhetorical function. It's
not just filling time. It's also making us do things

(20:40):
we need to understand. As a piece of rhetoric. It's
persuading people to either do things, or think things, or
believe things, but in a very strange and oblique way.
Because it's not necessarily communicating content and whether it's making
it's making impressions that influence our behavior in in indirect
ways that are hard to understand, but any we should
take a quick break and when we come back, we

(21:02):
will hear about some more deceptive thinking in the Psychology
Prize for Lies and Liars. All right, we're back, Okay,
So this one's mine. This is the Psychology Prize from
the ig Nobles and it was published an Actor Psychologia.

(21:23):
In the paper is called from Junior to Senior Pinocchio,
A cross sectional lifespan Investigation of Deception. Basically, they're looking
at how people lie. Uh. The authors on this were
Gordon Logan, Evelyn dB Martin, Dave Shriver, Christina Sukotsky, and

(21:45):
Bruno Versure. Uh. Sorry, some of those were Belgian names
that I'm probably butchering. I apologize. Here's the gist of
this paper. Gordon Logan sort of like the lead on this.
He's professor out of Vanderbilt University. Uh, and he and
his colleagues they wanted to look into lying. They wanted

(22:08):
to study the active deception across the human lifespan, looking
for age related differences in the proficiency of lying and
how often we as human beings lie. So they sampled
over a thousand people between the ages of six and
seventy seven and they had them perform reaction time based

(22:29):
deception tasks to assess how proficient they were at lying.
So so we're six year olds the best at lying? Well,
you're about to find out they're pretty good, uh, as
with as Robert probably knows. Although Vastion's four now. Yeah,
I honestly I'm not sure he's told to lie yet

(22:49):
in life with him like it like that. I think
I mentioned this in a previous episode. His lying ability
doesn't seem to have really come online yet. So it's
a magical time get to children start to lie, I'm
not certain off the top of my head. Well, these
people have a theory. Their theory and and the results
somewhat conformed to this is that with most age related

(23:12):
changes there's a U shaped pattern, but here it's specifically
with inhibition control and lying. Uh. So they think that
we start getting more accurate at lying during childhood, So
we start learning how to lie at six? Sorry, quickly,
what do you mean by accurate at lying? Like better

(23:32):
at convincing people of a lie? Okay? Uh? And we
excel at it in young adulthood and then we get
worse at it through adulthood. Now it seems to peak
in adolescence and decrease in adulthood. For the purposes of
their study, they define young adults as eighteen to twenty
nine years old. Young children were six to eight, so

(23:53):
you've got two more years before we start lying to either.
And the eldest participants were sixty over. Now the U
shape comes back around again, though, right, so when they
start getting into the sixty and over range, they seem
to start lying more. They're not necessarily better at it,

(24:14):
but for some reason there and this is based on
self reporting, they're saying that they lie more often now.
Their subjects were members of the public who visited the
Science Center NEMO, which is in Amsterdam, and they basically
pulled them in and they asked them to participate in
the study. The questions that they were giving were very simple,
general knowledge things like can pigs fly? Or is the

(24:39):
grass green? And they were supposed to give yes or
no answers. A skilled liar could answer yes very quickly
to can pigs fly, while a poor liar would delay
or accidentally give you the honest answer. While they're answering,
the participants would push a button if the stay it

(25:00):
was supposed to be true or false. They also had
a color flag that would pop up on a screen
in front of them, and that would instruct them whether
they were supposed to lie or tell the truth. So
they had like kind of multiple stimuli going on here.
That was sort of a complex cognitive task. Yeah, exactly. Now,
to measure their lying frequency, the researchers asked them to

(25:20):
self report on the number of times they had told
a lie in the last twenty four hours. On average,
these people reported telling two lies in the last twenty
four hours. Again, this was you shaped teens lied the most,
and then it dropped off in adulthood and then increased
again in older age. So parents of teens in the audience,

(25:41):
is this the case, Yeah, we'd love to hear from you.
So do you do you think your your adolescens are
lying to you more and more tell the truth all
the time. I feel like I was at my most
deceptive when I was a teenage Yeah. Apparently the oldest
group lied at the same frequency as the youngest participants.
So they also wanted to test inhibitory control. So the

(26:03):
researchers had the participants perform what was called they stop
signal task, where they pressed a button to indicate as
fast as possible whether an X or an O had
appeared on screen. Now of the time a tone would
sound to tell them that they had to cancel their response.
The later the tone sounded in the task, the harder

(26:25):
it became for them to withhold their responses. So think
about it like you're you're hammering the keys for X
and O X and o X and no. You get
into a pattern, and then the later in that the
tone sounds off, the harder it is to stop yourself.
So the participants with greater inhibitory control, they found that
they could usually cancel their response even when the signal

(26:49):
was given very late. Now, this ability increased through childhood
and peaked in adults. Performance after that age remained stable,
So basically adulthood onward. Yeah, your your ability to control
your inhibitions kind of levels out. Now, what's important about
this is the performance on the stop signal tasks did

(27:11):
not correlate strongly with the lying proficiency. Okay, so why
is this amusing? Well, ha ha, because it's all about lying, right,
and how how good we are at deceiving one another
or how often we lie. Old people and children lying
is funnier than adults lying. Yeah, I guess I guess
that is yeah. Uh. This study also doesn't really tell

(27:33):
us anything about one person's ability and propensity to lie.
It's just sort of broadly based on these people. And
then this is the funny thing. They even asked Logan
this in one of the interviews I read with him,
and they said, well, how do you know your subjects
weren't lying to you? And he just said self reporting. Yeah,
and the self reporting and he goes, oh, we don't.
So it's all like you know, it's all based on

(27:55):
self reporting, so who knows. Um, there are some important
lessons to be learned year though. The first thing is
this is a quote from Logan. He says, I don't
know why they selected this for the Ignoble Prize. It's
supposed to make you laugh, and then think he's referring
to the Ignoble Prize. Maybe the laughing is quote why
would anyone study lying? And the thinking is because lying

(28:16):
presents interesting cognitive challenges that liars must overcome. It confirms
our assumption, for instance, that young adults lie the most
and the best, so we get that out of it, right.
They also found that most people don't lie very often,
but a few people lie a lot. Their theory is
that this is all part of age related inhibitory control.

(28:40):
But now going back to the actual results, when they
compared the lying results with the inhibitory control results, they
found that they didn't correlate right, so their their theory
was actually proven wrong. The researchers, however, kind of backpedaled
a little bit and they said, well, there are different
types of inhibitory control, and we might need to do
some more studies and find some different way to measure that.

(29:03):
The results, I want to point this out to The
results are a little skewed. Half the participants reported that
they didn't tell any lies in the last twenty four hours,
so over fifty percent of the lies were told by
what they referred to as prolific liars, and only nine
percent made up the total sample as prolific liars. So

(29:26):
it gets skewed because you get nine percent of these
people were just lying a lot according to yeah exactly
self reporting, and then said they weren't lying at all.
So I don't know. Well, I mean, if I don't know,
if you're a prolific liar, would you also lie about
whether or not you had lied? Yes, yes, I would

(29:48):
think so. I would I would think that, like it's
almost like addictive, right, based on what I've I've seen
on television recently. This is that the show what is
it called Just Liar? I don't know what you're about. No, no,
I was talking about a different television series that I
think is the three part series this fall. I was

(30:08):
thinking of the Tim Roth TV show Lie to Me,
where like he can just like immediately tell whether somebody's
lying or funny story. Just last night, Robert on your recommendation,
Rachel and I, my wife Rachel and I have been
watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the first time. Neither
of us had seen it before. It's on Netflix. We're
working our way through it now. It's uh cheesy in
the first season, but also kind of delightful. And we

(30:30):
just watched the episode called Lie to Me that's about
kids who want to become vampires. I don't remember this
episode at all. Oh, it's pretty season one. Season two, okay,
that's when it started really picking up. Yeah, my favorite
so far is the horrible episode in season one about
the demon that gets on the Internet. I don't remember
that one anytime in the nineties when somebody got on

(30:52):
the Internet that it's just it's ridiculous. Remember the X
Files episode when the Internet was like possessed, which was
the hell Raiser move where Pinhead goes online? Oh god, yeah,
it was like it was one of them. The several
they were like doing one directed video sequel a year
where they brought in Doug Bradley for like one scene
on each film. Okay, okay, I think it's time to

(31:14):
move on to the next study. How how about we
talk about some horses. Oh yeah, let's uh, let's let's
bring on the white Horse. Well, what do you a
gentleman think of when I when I mentioned the white Horse,
you mentioned it earlier and I immediately said, wait, is
that a Patti Smith's song? But it turned out that
it was. She just has an album called Horses. That's
a great album by the way, I love it. But yeah,

(31:35):
white why I think of what cocaine? Is that? Right? Yeah? Yeah,
I've been through the desert on a horse with her name. Wait, no,
that's Heroin? Right? Um? Was that about Heroin? I I
don't know horses usually, I mean just from my time
on the street, that's usually what people refer to Heroin
as well. There there is a song if you want
to ride ride the white horse, it's about about the

(31:57):
white horse has drug culture we're not encouraging. But the
white horse, of course is also the white horse, the
pale horse, what death rides in on. Correct, It's also
the steed of many a heroic night. Uh. Many of
the noble prints rides in on a white horse. We
like the image of the white horse. We've bred to

(32:21):
to to select white horses as much as possible. In
many cases, black horses are black beauties. Well they're beauties.
I mean, all horses are beautiful, you know, dapples and grays,
pintos and bays, all of them. But but the but
the white horse has a particular status with us, you know,
both symbolically and as an actual animal. But with that privilege,

(32:42):
s that is Uh, there are a few negatives as well.
I mean, on one hand, in the wild, white horses
suffer from predation more stand out, and I imagine it
would makes sense. I imagine this probably makes the most
sense in places that are not covered in snow. But yeah,
it's going to draw the attention of predators more. Uh.
And then another big thing is that they're highly susceptible

(33:05):
to ultra violent solar radiation due to their coloring, so
they frequently suffer from align skin cancer and visual deficiencies. Yeah.
But and this is where we get to our Ignobele
Prize winner and the Physics Prize. As a two thousand
and ten Hungarian study published in the Proceedings of the
Royal Society be reveal white horses have one excellent advantage

(33:28):
that has nothing to do with how pretty we think
they are or what drugs they represent. Um white gray
like light gray, you know, and and albino horses are
far less susceptible to being uh to being fed on
by blood sucking uh. Two banded flies, which are you know,
like a mini a blood sucking insect is a known

(33:48):
disease vector, so as they reveal in their studies. UH.
In their study, the flies used reflected polarized light from
a horse's coat at the signal to find a suitable
host to feed upon. So that means they're attracted mainly
to black and brown fur coats throwing a white fur
coat and they're not not going to be a drawn

(34:10):
to that animal and that the researchers learned this by
conducting field observations followed by experiments that involve horse models,
and then they measured the reflection polarization patterns of living
horses with special optical equipment. Specifically, they investigated via polarimetry.
This is the measurement and interpretation of the polarization of

(34:34):
transverse waves, in this case light waves. So I have
to admit that that I didn't quite get the humor
on this. Yeah, I don't, right, because it seems seem yeah,
I mean, if you're if you're rearing animals, I mean,
parasite management is an inherent part of the process. Maybe
it's just funny because it's uh, I don't know, flies

(34:56):
on horses, I guess, I mean, but it's it's a
it's not a goat horses. Horses are not as funny
as good But it seems like you're implying that there's
a punch line somewhere down the road here in a
in a sense. So this is one of those instances
where the researchers were honored for not one, but two papers.
So there's the the white horses and their susceptibility to

(35:19):
the attention of blood sucking insects. But they also apply
their techniques to another issue that I imagine is not
close to anyone's heart, and that has dragonflies landing on
gravestones in uh cemeteries. But is that like a bad
luck omen in the Ukraine? No, I I don't think
at all. Like basically what happened is the researchers, you know,

(35:41):
we're just hanging out near some Hungarian cemeteries and they noticed, hey,
there there are a lot of dragonflies landing on those
blood those specifically on those black shiny headstuffs. Yeah, they said, well,
what's going on there? And they they found that, yeah,
that the insects were actually treating the gleaming head tombstones

(36:02):
as if they were water. Okay, so and this, this,
this lines up with three different modes of behavior. They
perched persistently in the immediate vicinity of the chosen gravestones
and then defended the perch against other dragonflies. Flying individuals
repeatedly touched the horizontal surface of the shiny black tombstone
with the the ventral side of their body and pairs

(36:24):
in tandem position i mating um. They frequently circled around
these black gravestones. So so our our grave markers are
sex beacons for the dragonflies of the world. Ye uh so,
so it would seem, and so that they busted out
their polar ametry equipment again and they found that indeed,

(36:47):
the black gravestones, like smooth water surfaces, reflect highly and
horizontally polarized light under natural conditions. This means dragonflies detect
water by means of the horizontally polarized reflected light. Now
this is funny, of course, because could there be on
the surface of things, Could there be anything more absurd

(37:09):
than studying flies landing on a tombstone? Like what does that?
How does that affect anybody? Yeah? Well, well, at least
we get a better understanding of dragonfly relationships to their
ecosystem and water. Yeah. But but here's the thing, and
this is and I had to take the step of
reading this and then it's sun come for me. So

(37:29):
dragonflies not only do they land on water, not only
do they land on it when they're tandem they're they're mating,
they also deposit their eggs in water. So this is
where we get to the idea that gleaming tombstones could
constitute a potential ecological trap. It's like discarded bottles stealing

(37:50):
all of the mates for the Beatles exactly. Yeah, yeah,
the idea is that and there's not only there's not
any data to backs up to say that these these
headstones are definitely impact acting dragonfly reproduction and dragonfly population.
But it kind of serves as, Ah, it's interesting and
potentially important because it serves an example of just a

(38:10):
wild accidental means, just one of many in which we
are we are manipulating and disturbing um a natural organism's
life cycle, you in ways we didn't even think of,
because they could conceivably be then laying their eggs on
these tombstones and there you know, to with with no

(38:31):
you know, potential survivability. It's interesting because I guess I
just assumed that the dragonflies would land and through tactile
sense by touching them, would go oh this isn't water
and fly away. But but I guess it comes down
to it's kind of like with with sea turtles, you know,
and depending on the light of the moon, and then
you throw in this artificial thing that that lines up

(38:54):
with the expectations for moonlight and at least two key areas,
that's all it takes. Hilarious, Yeah, the hilariteous is subjective
on this one. But but certainly I think the the
sort of the aspect of it definitely works. I don't
know about you, guys. I am going to have a
hearty chuckle the next time I see dragonflies in tandem

(39:16):
on a tombstone. So next up is the Chemistry Prize
from the Ignobles this year, which was actually given not
to a scientific researcher but to an auto manufacturer, Volkswagen
for quote solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions
by automatically electro mechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the cars

(39:39):
are being tested. Yeah, no, it's not well, actually kind
of is. I guess it's kind of funny, because I
mean the effects are not funny. There was no study here. Obviously,
it would be amazing if Volkswagen had some team of
chemists that came up with a way of carrying on
false fuel combustion and giving the same performance in the

(40:02):
car while producing fewer emissions. But it didn't happen. That
is not what happened. Instead, this is a joke prize
going to Volkswagen for the fact that in they got
caught cheating, specifically and intentionally engineering their cars to cheat
on emissions testing. I didn't know that, really, No, I didn't.

(40:24):
I must have missed that news. Well, I think I
may have an explanation for this. Did you allow in
the last couple of years, did you allow Volkswagen to
install any devices on your body? Oh? Yeah, the brain
computer in face? That that was what it was was
I was trying to share dreams with the Volkswagen and
that must be what it was. I just it filters
out any bad information, negative publicity about Volkswagen. I must say.

(40:47):
This is a very clever and ingenious way to get
around the problem of automobile emissions. Yeah, so how did
this work? How did they get around this? Well, modern
cars are very computerized. We all know that now. They're
not dumb mechanical machines of the nineteen fifties. Uh. And
because they're so computerized, it is possible to alter their
performance in response to pre specified sets of conditions. And

(41:10):
this could mean, you know, some really nice, kind of
sci fi seeming features to to present in future cars,
Like maybe you could have a car that has sensors
that automatically detect fog or I see roads, and when
it detects those conditions, the car shifts into a performance
mode called safety mode, where it changes certain things about
how the car operates to be safer. Or it could

(41:31):
mean that the car detects when it's having itself probed
for emissions testing and automatically shifts the car's performance into
eco friendly mode. That's what I do whenever I'm being
probed for eco friendly testing. It's kind of like if
right before you go to the doctor, you're really healthy
the week, but you like, you stop eating all the
junk food and you know, doing your drugs and everything,

(41:55):
but doesn't seem illegal at all. So it was highly illegal.
Many diesel vehicles manufactured by Volkswagen were created with a
function that does exactly this. It was known as a
defeat device that was designed to get around the emissions testing,
and it was done entirely without the knowledge of the driver.
I want to be clear about that. The drivers weren't
at fault. They thought that they I mean, they paid

(42:18):
a car that they thought was ecologically friendly exactly. So
these were diesel vehicles, and with diesel, it's not exactly
the same emissions profile that you would get with a
normal like gas burning car. With diesel, the main problem
in these emissions were nitrogen oxides or in O X.
But anyway, so in the case of the Volkswagen cars

(42:38):
in question, there were just functions in the computer that
controls the car said, hey, when the cars being driven,
you can just turn off all those pollution controls and
the car drive great. You know, it feels really zippy
peak performance. But then when the car detects, uh, I'm
feeling some pokeing and things are lining up, Yeah, it

(42:58):
looks like it's time for an emission test. When the
car detects that a test is going on, it alters
the performance to turn on pollution limiting features to make
it look like the car is an eco friendly, low polluter.
How much harder do you think it was to install
that device than to just make the car ecologically friendly? Oh?

(43:19):
I think it was. This was the easy solution. No, definitely,
this solution was easier because the problem is that things
were you had design considerations in conflict, like you can't
have a car at least with today's technology, nobody's figured
out a way to make a car that performs as
well as they wanted the car to perform at the

(43:39):
same time having this lower emissions profile, and so their
way around that was to cheat. And so why did
this happen? Obviously the design priorities I mentioned, but for
some of these vehicles it ended up with in o
X emissions that were maybe like ten times or even
forty times what they were host to be. And yeah,

(44:02):
so that that obviously was very bad. They got caught.
Investigators figured out this is what they were doing, and
they have been cited by the US government for violations
of the Clean Air Act. And so, yeah, why why
is this amusing? Why is the study amusing? I was
going to say, it's not a study. I guess why
is this R and D corporate R and D amusing?

(44:24):
Obviously because they're cheating. Their company's solution to a problem
in design was just too cut corners and cheat. I
feel like I remember they the ignobiles did something similar
to this last year. Maybe this is like an annual
part of the ceremony is that they choose something that's
not an actual study and they just kind of make
fun and they occasionally fare times when no one is

(44:47):
going to accept the award because yeah, I'm wondering, Yeah,
there probably wasn't a representative from Volks You watched the ceremony.
Did anybody show up to accept this? Watching it on
double speed and I definitely didn't see anybody from Volkswagen show. Yeah.
So you know, here's one of the interesting things about it,
Like you can't help but think and the grant is
not a one to one, but you can't help but
think of of of technology as as an evolution of

(45:13):
form and in in natural uh selection, nobody comes around
and says, okay, hold on all these um this particular
lightning bug that is um that is mimicking this other
type of lightning bug, deception, this against the rules, were
shutting it down? Right, That doesn't doesn't happen exactly like that.

(45:33):
But also in I mean in nature, it's just real performance.
Real performance is the only thing that's really tracked. There's
no like way to cheat on a regulations test because
I guess nature has no regulation. But it's kind of
a survival thing, right, like this is is it is
the Volkswagen in question able to perform at a high
enough level without being caught. You know what, it's it's

(45:55):
perverse incentives in a way or not perfect. I mean,
the problem is that the emissions test doesn't test the
thing they're actually trying to test, which is, how is
the car performing normally during most of its operating time.
It's impossible to test that without I guess, like having
some kind of reporting device installed on the car that's

(46:16):
going to be always sending feedback to I don't know,
government agency or something. It sounds like that's something people
probably wouldn't want. That sounds like some communist stuff right there.
But are you trying to suggest, yeah, you've got this
problem that if you if you can make a car
that can figure out when the emissions are being tested,
it can alter its performance accordingly. But also why is

(46:37):
the study important? Well, obviously this type of pollution has
serious consequences. As I said. According to the EPA, the
Volkswagen's actions were a gross violation of the Clean Air
Act UH and could also be the cause of disastrous
secondary effects like as a pollutant, ino X has been
linked to health effects like asthma attacks and other respiratory diseases.
I know, I've seen it implicated in emphysema, bronchitis, and

(47:00):
ino X also contributes to ground level ozone, in particular
matter concentration, which in turn has been implicated in premature
death from cardiovascular illness and respiratory effects. Yeah, this is uh,
this is no good what they did. And uh and
I'm I'm glad they were caught there. I can't argue
with that. Part of me just thinks, well, wait a minute,

(47:20):
why couldn't Why wasn't the solution here just to uh,
you know, find a find an audience for the car
that doesn't care so much about performance. I don't know.
I don't think about if I if I'm like in
the market for a car. Maybe I'm just not a
car person. I'm not in the market for one that,
oh I want the one that feels like it really

(47:41):
accelerates quickly and and oh my god, the torque. It's amazing.
More communism, more communism. You clearly don't understand a car
like a real American, does I guess I maybe don't.
I don't know. We'll we'll have to. I mean, it's
a scot Off Scott Scott. Probably I wouldn't be surprised

(48:01):
with the car. Scoff car stuff. Guys did an episode
on this, well, actually, we did an episode of forward
thinking on the Volkswagen scandal that Scott and Ben came
as guest hosts on. Okay, okay, we we'll have to
include a link to that episode on the landing page
for this episode. Yeah. But hey, we have one more
prize to discuss, and I believe it has something to

(48:23):
do with dead flies. Yeah. So we're going from the
sublime to the ridiculous here, although I have an affinity
for this studying here. Uh So, this is the literature prize. Uh.
It goes to Frederick Schuberg and he wrote this has
actually been out for a while now, but it's only
recently been translated into English. He wrote a three volume

(48:45):
autobiographical work about the pleasures of collecting flies. Uh, flies
that are dead and flies that are not dead. The volume,
the first volume is called The Fly Trap, but the
three volume series is called The Path of the Fly
Collector or a Flag Collector. Um. He attended the ceremony.
He's a Swedish writer and biologists and the award goes

(49:07):
to all three volumes. So he lives on this sparsely
populated island in Sweden and catches flies on them. That's
just his thing. And he wrote these books about the
experience of that and just kind of being part of
nature and hanging out and catching flies and collecting them. Um.
They're very popular in Sweden. They've sold hundreds of thousands

(49:31):
of copies there and in Germany, France, Russia and Norway.
It's only recently been translated and released in Britain, Italy,
Spain in the US. Now, the island he lives in
is called, I believe it's run Maru, small island that's
part of the Stockholm Archipelago. He's lived there since nineteen
eight six. And this, the whole thing is only fifteen

(49:52):
square miles. They get this. When his family first moved there,
they lived in a derelict house for ten without any
running water. They now they still live there, but they
now live there in their own house that they've built there. Right,
But like an interview I read with him, he was
basically like, we wanted to live there, I wanted to

(50:13):
hang out with the flights, but we couldn't really afford
to build the home that we we could, So his
poor kids and his wife and him didn't have running
water for ten years. So why is this amusing beyond
the running water situation, Well, people seem to see the
act of catching and cataloging hoverflies as useless. Uh. And

(50:34):
they find it hard to categorize these books too, like
what are they? Are they natural history? Are they popular science?
Are they autobiography? Um? And here's the thing, they're certainly
not being read by hoverfly enthusiasts. Uh, he himself. Well,
I mean they are, but it's not just them that
are buying it. So like Schoberg, he estimates that in

(50:55):
all of Sweden there's like twenty five people who collect
these flies, so they're not the only people that are
buying this book. It's like it's it's a popular culture
phenomenon in Sweden. So it's not just the familiars of vampires. Yeah, exactly.
Well maybe he's a vampire and he's making all his
familures real. Who knows what he's learned from these flies,

(51:17):
but he says this. He was very excited about the
the award. He said, the Ignoble Prize beats everything. At last.
I hope to become a rock star leather pants, dark sunglasses, groupies,
all that fun funniest thing from the Ignobles. I think
this guy. Uh. The Guardian described his book as being

(51:37):
quote a bit like Dinner with a witty European intellectual ride,
digressive and packed with fantastically clipped observations. Uh. Everything I've
read about these these books makes them sound really interesting.
And so I think about this one. Uh in contrast
to the goat Man, Like, this guy goes out and

(51:57):
he's kind of become one with me. Sure, he's really
obsessed with this one, very niche thing, but he's there's
something to it, right, He's bringing something to people that's
beyond I wonder if you're responding to the fact that
this guy sort of in a way has made this
a life's work. The man took a you know, six

(52:19):
day holiday exactly. Yeah, goatman took a six day holiday
and dressed up in a costume and was like, look
at me, look at me, look at me. And so
I see this guy and he's like, he's made it
his life's work to collect these fly There's something noble
about that he ever thought to try and become a fly? Well,
you know what, he doesn't say anything about that, but
I mean the fact that his family went without running

(52:41):
water for ten years, it sounds like he got pretty close.
According to the New York Times book review, this the
series of books are a quirky meditation on the pleasures
of collecting and an obsession with the natural world. And oh,
this is the other thing I wanted to mention. It
has two themes, the collecting theme, but then he also
wants to use them as an opportunity to recover the

(53:04):
forgotten outsider. So each book has a forgotten outsider that
it focuses on. The first one maybe it's not the
first one, but these are the three Swedish painter Gunnar
Wood Frosts, earthworm specialists, Gustaf Eisen, and the inventor of
the gigantic fly trap, which many know as the Mega

(53:25):
Malaise Renee Malaise. Apparently Malaises trap is like very well
known to the entomologic community, but he is not so
u Schuberg used this these books as an opportunity to
talk about Malaise and his work as it relates to
his modern obsession with collecting flies. Uh. Other people have

(53:49):
described it as a philosophical pleasure in the slowness of
quote self consciously useless activity of chasing flies and then
fixing them with any pins. I'm thinking of Buffalo Bill now,
like his little pins and his moths and everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
like the idea of of collecting insects, Like there's something

(54:13):
like inherently, I don't know the ritual of it, right,
like the slowness and the deliberate nature of the ritual.
There's something too that apparently people are getting that out
of these books. Goodbye horses, Yeah, exactly. Maybe maybe on
top of pretending to be a fly, he's also sung
goodbye horses while he's out there catching them. Uh. He

(54:33):
wants to make it clear though, he's not really a
missionary for naturalism, though his books include defenses of nature's
gardens and meadows. But he's, according to The New York Times,
at least, pretty unpretentious about how he celebrates them. Now,
the Guardian, they actually sent somebody out to go hang
out with him on his island and catch flies. Cool,

(54:54):
and they said that he demonstrated all his weird ways
to catch flies, including uh, he has a device called
a pewter, which sounds kind of like a straw that
he sucks on and it like sucks up one of
these hover flies into it, and uh. And then the
other thing he uses and this one was crazy cyanide.
He's a signide to catch these flies and person from

(55:16):
the Guardian was like, are you supposed to have that?
And he's like, I don't know, it might be illegal. Um.
By catch, you mean he uses this to two poison flies. Yeah,
I mean it's not like he's keeping these flies alive.
He's like, he's spearing them through the body with these needles.
This sounds like a harrogant and subtry kind of um.
The person from the Guardian also described the book's themes

(55:37):
as being natural literacy and again an appeal to slowness.
He sees his collecting as a relief from modern times.
By limiting himself to this pursuit, it provides him with
calmness by kind of getting away from the world at large,
just going out there, hanging out with the flies, sucking

(55:58):
him into a pooter, putting him in some cyanide, bringing
them back and very slowly affixing them to a board. So, yeah,
that was the Literary Prize. And he showed up. I
saw him on the thing. He seemed he seemed like
a cool guy. Uh, made some jokes and generally seemed
like enthusiastic about being there. So the theme, the overarching

(56:19):
theme for all of these awards was time. Okay, so
we had do we see how that connects to all
of them? I mean, I see it here right slowness.
I guess it's it's kind of like, say, an episode
of This American Life that they have a theme. The
first two episodes of the first two segments are going
to hit that theme pretty hard, but then there's a

(56:40):
tremendous amount of falloff. Man Robert Lamb going after the
number one podcast in America right now, I love This
American Life. But that's the thing. Try to try to
pick a theme and sustain it over four segments. They're
trying to do it over ten. So it makes sense
that time fits some of these um more easy lead

(57:00):
than others. Yeah, I don't see how it fits into
the one where those uh Japanese scientists were looking between
their legs, yeah, or the the horse one not really
getting time off of that time, but they getting time certainly.
I mean I can tell you from watching the ceremony,
they certainly made use of the time metaphor. I mean,
like I told you, there were three musical numbers about

(57:22):
time and clocks and tick talking, and then there was
there were the people who stood on the side wearing
clock costumes that if you went over your limit, they
would grab you and pull you away. Oh, they always did.
They have the little girl. This time I didn't see.
I can't remember what her name was, but yeah, I
complained about her last year because there's always one and

(57:44):
then they grow up. And last year they brought them
all back. What were they called? Does anybody remember? I'm
sure if we went back and listened to last year's episodes,
they'd be on there. But yeah, there's always a little
girl who's like the one who what does she paces?
I'm board stop talking right? Uh? And they please stop?
I'm bored. They didn't have her this year. Maybe they

(58:05):
finally realized how obnoxious it was. They listened to that.
You know what they did. They listened to stuff to
blow your minds episodes on this last year, and they went, oh,
maybe we need to rethink that. Why don't we just
dress somebody up in a clock instead? Christian, you are
single handedly changing the world just by complaining about everything.
Finally find me some justification. All right, Well, there you

(58:28):
have it. The Ignoble Prizes covered winner by winner across
two episodes. If if you want to check out both
episodes of this uh, this series. We want to check
out last year's Ignobel Yeah episodes, then head on over
to stuff to blow your Mind dot com. That's where
we'll find all the podcasts. We'll find videos, blog posts,
and links out to our various social media accounts. That's right.

(58:50):
We are on the Facebook, we're on Twitter, we're on Tumbler,
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if you want to ask us a question. Maybe you
want to find out more about the white horses, or Volkswagen,

(59:11):
or or how good we are at lying? Uh, Joe?
Where can they ask us those questions the old fashioned way?
At blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com

(59:32):
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
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