The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.

Ig Nobel Achievements distilled into limerick form
by Martin Eiger, Improbable Research Limerick Laureate

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, then make them think. For details of all the Ig Nobel Prize–winning achievements, see each year’s special Ig Nobel issue of the magazine, and also see the winners lists.

1993 Ig Nobel Literature Prize
Eric Topol, R. Califf, F. Van de Werf, P. W. Armstrong, and their 972 co-authors, for publishing a medical research paper which has one hundred times as many authors as pages. [The study was published in The New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 329, no. 10, September 2, 1993, pp. 673–82. The authors are from the following countries: Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States.]

On top’s where the title should go.
Then list all the authors below.
Should the abstract and text
Of the paper come next?
If you’ve run out of room for them, no.

2008 Ig Nobel Literature Prize
David Sims of Cass Business School, London, U.K., for his lovingly written study “You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations.” [The full citation for the study: “You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations,” David Sims, Organization Studies, vol. 26, no. 11, 2005, pp. 1625–40.] (Image credit: Эдуард Тимченков)

The people I work with are crass.
My boss is a pain in the ass.
Now that bastard, that jerk,
Is bringing to work
Some dumb anger management class.

1994 Ig Nobel Biology Prize

W. Brian Sweeney, Brian Krafte-Jacobs, Jeffrey W. Britton, and Wayne Hansen, for their breakthrough study, “The Constipated Serviceman: Prevalence Among Deployed US Troops,” and especially for their numerical analysis of bowel movement frequency. [Published in Military Medicine, vol. 158, August, 1993, pp. 346-348.]

We thank them for serving the nation.
We owe them some quantification.
They may want to know
How often they go,
And conversely, how much constipation.

_____________________

The article above is from the July-August 2014 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

(vimeo link)

A middle school student is addicted to watching movies on his handheld device, but the forces around him (his mother, the school) keep interfering with his obsession. While striking back, his life is overtaken by flashes of movies he has seen. You’ve seen them, too, but don’t try to identify them all the first time you watch this, because it goes crazy fast. Watch it first for the boy’s story. You can watch it a second time to identify the movie clips, or just admire the editing in this short film by Ornana Films. -via Digg

France has been at the forefront of fashion for quite some time. In the 18th century, fashion magazines were published every ten days, and could barely keep up with the changes in styles. As we look back from the 21st century, the fast-moving fashion accessory of the time that sticks out most to us is the pouf, which became symbolic of the era.   

A pouf was halfway between a hat and a hairstyle. It was a thematic headdress made up of flowers, feathers, ribbons, gauze, and various props, reflecting events of personal or pop-cultural significance, including hit plays or scientific breakthroughs or political scandals. The illustrations of ship-shaped poufs are absolutely surreal. I started off thinking, oh, that’s just a silly caricature, but many of them were real hats. And they were not silly aristocrats being ridiculous; they were political statements referencing the American Revolution.

In 18th-century France, of course, everything was a political statement. Those fashions might be hard to decipher today, but at the time, wearing the wrong thing could get you killed, particularly as the French Revolution neared in 1789. Marie Antoinette’s dedication to the latest fashions reverberated through the fashion industry and the general populace as well. You can read the story of French fashion and the revolution at Collectors Weekly.

(Image credit: The Musée Franco-Américain)  

(YouTube link)

Monsieur Caron (previously at Neatorama) brings us a LEGO video starring Daryl Dixon of The Walking Dead. In fact, he named this video “Daryl Dixon // Smoke,” so we may see more Walking Dead brickfilms in the future. Here, he fights his way through a group of zombies to rescue a man so he and his family can make their escape in a heavily-modified RV. -Thanks, Yan!

When you indulge in your fantasies, it might be prudent to remember who is asking about them, and why. But don’t let that get in the way of your fun!  

This interlude is from the highly-recommended Pie Comic by John McNamee.

The American Library Association listed privacy as one of its core values starting in 1939. Occasionally, that value gets tested, as in the case of a librarian who went to jail in 1972 rather than testify against anti-Vietnam War activists. But the war between government sleuths and privacy advocates at your library has ramped up exponentially in the 21st century.

Under the Patriot Act, the government can demand library records via a secret court order and without probable cause that the information is related to a suspected terrorist plot. It can also block the librarian from revealing that request to anyone. Nor does the term “records” cover only the books you check out; it also includes search histories and hard drives from library computers. The Muslim-American who uses a library computer to correspond with family abroad, or the activist planning a demonstration against police brutality—those digital trails are vulnerable to surveillance, along with everyone else’s.

That part about not revealing the request tells us that more has been going on in the privacy wars than we know, but there have been several high-profile cases in which librarians refused to comply with orders. And librarians are at the forefront of implementing privacy technology on behalf of all their patrons. Read about the struggle between government surveillance and the privacy of your use of the public library at The Nation. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Jessamyn West - CC)

(YouTube link)

Cindy Kruller took her kids fishing. Her son caught a small perch, which dislodged itself from the hook. A garter snake immediately snatched the fish up and ran with it! They chased the snake and scared it just enough to cause it to drop the fish, and they got the perch back into the water. The fish swam away in a flash, no doubt in a hurry to tell his school about his big adventure. Commenters at YouTube are quick to blame the family for depriving the poor snake of its meal. -via Tastefully Offensive

(YouTube link)

This “hi-tech” vending machine tries to snag ice cream treats for you by lowering a wand with a vacuum pump to grab the packages. However, it appears to work more like a claw machine, in that it’s weak, clumsy, and you take your chances on whether you actually receive anything for your money. The laughs here could easily be worth $3, but I think he got his money back eventually. -via Digg

The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Perpetually Pleasing Bathroom Reader.

What was frowned upon in Victorian-era England? Pretty much everything.

SIMPLY NOT DONE

During the 1837– 1901 reign of Queen Victoria, Britain’s upper classes prospered, the nation’s population doubled, and a sense of romance and dignity prevailed. It was also a period marked by widespread child-labor abuse, unbridled poverty, horrifying poor-houses, overcrowded and unsanitary cities, and rampant prostitution. It was an era of great innovation in art and industry but also an era of strict moral values and adherence to propriety.

The rigid morality modeled by Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert, may well have been a reaction to the previous monarch of Great Britain, Victoria’s uncle, King William IV. While the king never managed to produce any legitimate heirs with his wife, Queen Adelaide, he did father ten illegitimate children with actress and courtesan Dorothea Jordan, who was his mistress for 20 years.

Here are a few of the things that displeased proper Victorians:

• The word “leg.” It was considered too sexy and, thus, too vulgar. At the time, the preferred term, if one absolutely had to refer to a lower extremity, was “limb.”

• Calling an aristocrat by his first name.

This picture looks like some tube-shaped creatures caressing a ball. They are caressing, alright, but they aren’t even living things!

An electron microscope photograph shows self-assembling hair-like polymers around a polystyrene sphere, about two micrometers in diameter. It won first place in the National Science Foundation's 2009 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge.

Self-assembling plastic is a pretty far out concept, but the detail and color in a microscopic image is amazing in itself. This is just one of a collection of fascianting scientific images, one for each year going back to 2005, covering a wide variety of disciplines, at HuffPo. Some you' ve seen here before, but are worth a sescond look.

(Image credit: Sung Hoon Kang, Joanna Aizenberg and Boaz Pokroy; Harvard University)

It was 146 years ago today, May 10, 1869, that the ceremonial spike (actually more than one) was driven into the meeting point of the Union Pacific Railroad and the Central Pacific Railroad. That’s when it became the transcontinental railroad, and traveling across the country no longer meant months in a wagon or on a ship sailing around South America. The transcontinental railroad was a great idea, but making it into a competition had some unintended consequences.  

Congress made the fool's mistake of assuming some motivating rationality on the part of the railroad companies, and not just base greed, so they didn't dictate just how, when, or where the rails must meet. When Central and Union crews ran into each other in northern Utah, instead of merging the lines right away, they set off building miles of parallel grading, with each company hoping to acquire more mileage and thus more of the reward money. With a kind of paternal exasperation, then, Congress had to set a junction point; and they chose Promontory, Utah—a little tent town of railroad workers and prostitutes just north of the Great Salt Lake.

The ceremonial joining of the railroads didn't go as smoothly as you might have heard. It was a publicity stunt, and it also meant the end of a job for those who built the railroad. Read about what really happened on that day at mental_floss.

We don’t know what year or grade this is, but in a class of 56 students, 18 guys wore the same Hawaiian pineapple shirt for picture day. It wasn’t a club with uniforms; it was one shirt passed from student to student before they had their photo taken. That’s not the kind of thing anyone would notice (outside of the photographer) until the yearbook came out months later.

My husband’s senior yearbook (class of 1973) was a little like this. Seniors were supposed to dress up, meaning a jacket and tie for the guys. But he and five of his friends all forgot, and ended up wearing the same borrowed shirt, jacket, and tie. No one thought anything of it at the time, because they looked good, but forty years later, anyone who sees the yearbook has to comment that every longhair in the class dressed alike.

-via reddit 

Lost Lake, near Bend, Oregon, is really only a part-time lake. In the summer, it’s a meadow! Lost Lake is connected to a lava tube that drains the lake annually, but not the same time every year, and not at the same rate. This year, the drainage happened in April and went pretty fast, as you can see in this video from The Bulletin.

(YouTube link)

The drainage stops when the lake is iced up, and the rest of the year, the state of the lake depends on the rate of inflow vs. the rate of drainage. You can read a more comprehensive explanation at mental_floss.

I made @KimKardashian's #MetGala2015 dress with a beige curtain and lots of paint #YasQueen

A photo posted by Mina Gerges (@keepingupwithmina) on May 7, 2015 at 3:37pm PDT

After seeing the dress that Kim Kardashian wore to the Met gala, Canadian actor Mina Gerges thought. “I can do that!” So he recreated the gown using an old technique we learned from Scarlet O’Hara (or better yet, Carol Burnett): he made it out of a curtain, paint, and feathers. The outcome was fabulous! See Gerges recreating other celebrity photographs (some NSFW) at his Instagram gallery. -via Time Newsfeed

Caroll Spinney, the puppeteer inside Big Bird, did a reddit AMA and was asked what was his most meaningful interaction with a child. Spinney’s reply was heartbreaking.

This is a very sad story, but it's real.

I got a letter from a fan who said his little boy, who was 5 years old, his name was Joey, he was dying of cancer.

And he was so ill, the little boy knew he was dying.

So the man, in his letter, asked if I would call the little boy. He said the only thing that cheered him at all in his fading state was to see Big Bird on television.

You’ll have to go to the link to read the whole account -I can’t bear to read it again. And take your hankie when you go. -via The Daily Dot