A Dead Duck of a Show

Last night was the first show of this year's annual Ig Nobel Prizes tour of Europe. It played to a packed lecture hall at Imperial College, London - a capacity audience of around 800 - and was gloriously funny from start to finish.

After an intro by Professor Sue Gibson, Ig Nobels creator, Marc Abrahams opened the show with a brief explanation of the prizes and a run-down of the most recent award winners. They included a team from Japan, China and the UK who got the award for 'assessing the effect of listening to opera, on heart transplant patients who are mice'. When the Ig Nobel Prizes ceremony was held at Harvard University last Autumn, several members of the team flew over from Japan to collect the award. Two were dressed as mice.

Another 2013 winner was a paper by a Dutch, British, Canadian collaboration which detailed two related discoveries: First, that the longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely that cow will soon stand up; and second, that once a cow stands up, you cannot easily predict how soon that cow will lie down again. however, was the Ig Nobel Prize for Public Health, awarded to a team from Thailand, for the medical techniques described in their report 'Surgical Management of an Epidemic of Penile Amputations in Siam'; techniques which they recommend except in cases where the amputated penis had been partially eaten by a duck.

The next part of the show involved the aforementioned Sue Gibson, me and several of my colleagues from QI doing 'dramatic readings' of papers submitted to the Ig Nobels. What this entailed was us selecting  a paper from a pile, scanning it for a few minutes and then going up on stage to read it out to the audience. After two minutes, a bell sounded for us to stop and we then had to take questions from the audience ... which were clever, funny and which we were completely unable to answer.

Here are the readers: Top  - Andrew Hunter Murray (with audience member who asked such a blinding question she was invited on stage), Anna Ptaszynsky, James Harkin. Middle - Dan Schreiber, Jack Burke, Molly Oldfield. Bottom - Sue Gibson, Anne Miller and me.

Then came a talk by former Ig Nobel Prize winner Dr Mason Porter on the mathematical modelling of bipolar disorder which, I have to say, may as well have been in Swahili. But it was hugely entertaining and the questions from maths experts in the audience were just as deliciously incomprehensible.

 As is traditional, the penultimate part of the Ig Nobels show is a reading from the works of William Topaz McGonagall, considered the worst poet of all time. And once again we were treated to a reading by Professor Andrew George, ex of Imperial College, and now Vice Principal of Brunel University.

The grand finale of this year's show was a mini opera, brand new and specially written for the Ig Nobels by composer Daniel Gillingwater. It was performed by soprano Sarah Redmond, with the cast of Andrew Walker, Dylan Suddaby, Katie Parsons and Marika Vissor, and music by the Edge Quartet with Shaun Thompson on clarinet. And Dutch biologist Dr Kees Moeliker on duck call. The piece was called ... The Homosexual Necrophiliac Duck Opera.

No, really.

It was introduced by Kees himself who told the story of how a dead duck and the award of an Ig Nobel changed his life. What he did, in effect, was give us a repeat of his brilliant TED talk, which you can watch here:



The opera was wonderfully funny and, thanks to the wonders of YouTube, you can watch it here on this blog. We did make better, closer recordings and we're going to try to edit them all together to make a definitive version. When that happens, I'll post it here. But here's a pretty good version to be going along with. Oh, and before you watch the opera, do download a copy of Kees' original paper. It's the libretto for the whole 15 minute piece and if you read it in conjunction, the whole thing will make a lot more sense! You can get it here.



When the idea of the opera was first mooted, Kees asked the composer about the creation and scope of his work. Daniel replied: 'I have set it for solo high voice, in this premiere performed by Sarah Redmond (playing your role, as witness and first [and only author]). The gender difference need not be an issue as you are an elegant and willowy specimen, much like Sarah. The scoring also includes clarinet quintet, and a vocal chorus of four – soprano, alto, tenor and bass punctuating the section beginning ‘Rather startled, I watched …’ which is the final vivace section of a pseudo Mozartian aria. The two male singers will also be portraying the mallard ducks in question, through the medium of contemporary dance. A tasteful re-enactment of the duck display, mixing flowing, poetic body movements and extreme sexual violence.' It was at that moment that Kees decided that he wanted to be a part of this great work and therefore offered himself as duck call performer, despite a complete lack of formal training.

The first night of the Ig Nobels was tremendous fun as always, helped along by a spirited audience who enjoyed it immensely. Roll on next year.

I leave you with a pseudo-'selfie' of Kees, Marc, Daniel, Sarah and about half the cast at the aftershow party. We may not get a million tweets on Twitter but I couldn't resist the photo opportunity.

Maybe the show is coming your way? The full schedule of the European tour is here.

All photos: Stevyn Colgan

101 People to Meet before You (or They) Die - Live Pilot

Around this time last year, Dan Schreiber and I wrote and broadcast a pilot for a show called 101 People to Meet before You (or They) Die on London's Resonance FM. The idea behind the show is to make a kind of 'anti-chat show' because most chat shows, while entertaining, are almost always about well-known celebrities who usually have a book/film/event to plug. Meanwhile, we are surrounded by truly amazing people who have done extraordinary things ... and we'd never know it. So, wouldn't it be great to put some of them under the spotlight?

For the radio show, Dan interviewed Charles Brewer- Carias (above), a Venezuelan 'discoverer' who has identified hundreds of new species - including possibly the oldest living organisms on the planet. He also found the world's largest quartzite cave and has maybe located the semi-legendary lost 'City of Gold' - El Dorado. Incidentally, he was also the 'model' for the baddie, Charles Muntz, in Pixar's film Up. The show was fun to do but there were problems with it. Firstly, timing - it was way too long. The problem is that these people are so damned interesting! Secondly, the show needed visuals because you just didn't get a sense of how amazing his adventures were without seeing the landscapes and the creatures he spoke about (you can hear the show here with a slide show of appropriate images to accompany it - It's so much better with pictures). Thirdly, it really needed an audience.

So, last night, we ran a live pilot with an audience of around 130 people at the Conway Hall in Holborn, London. Our guests this time were Marc Abrahams, the man behind the Ig Nobel Prizes, and Dr Jan Bondeson, consultant rheumatologist by day, Fortean researcher and author by night. The show was curated by Dan and began with a talk by Marc on the history of the Ig Nobels (and a demonstration of the physics involved in walking and carrying a cup of coffee), followed by a talk by Jan on the history of 'amazing talking dogs'. Both were very funny and hugely informative.

 

 

The second half of the show - after a beer and comfort break - started with unfeasibly tall magician Pete Heat entertaining the crowds with tricks involving a loaf of bread, a flip chart and some ghastly pink Y Fronts. You can watch a nice little interview with him here on Youtube.

Then we kicked off into the 'anti-chat show' part of the evening with Dan, Marc and Jan discussing such unlikely subjects as a bra that can turn into a pair of breathing masks (ably demonstrated by a member of the audience), safety coffins to avoid premature burial, patents for machines that use centrifugal force to 'help' deliver babies, bosom serpents, giving Viagra to hamsters to cure jet lag, and 'The London Monster', a madman who frequented the capital a century before Jack the Ripper and whose modus operandi involved stabbing women in the buttocks.

The show was great fun, the audience laughed in all the right places and it was a pretty good live pilot. It had some issues, most notably some horrible timing problems that made the show significantly longer than we'd intended. But that's the point of a pilot - to find out what works and what doesn't work before unleashing it upon the wider public. I look forward to helping iron out the kinks before the next one.

One extra bonus for me was meeting Maria Boyle, a long-time friend on Twitter (@twistedlilkitty) from Ireland who I hadn't met before in 'meatspace'. She's a microbiologist by day and a stand-up comedian by night but she's also an amazingly funny cartoonist (you can see her range of cards here or follow her as @twisteddoodles on Twitter). I couldn't resist challenging her to create something  on the spot and she came up trumps, firstly with a great gag about Rolf, Germany's most famous talking dog, and then about Dr Elena Bodnar's 'emergency bra' gas mask design.

Aren't they great?

You can also read Live Skeptic's Storify account of the evening here.

A Dead Bloke and some Living Blokes you should meet

After today's QI production meeting I walked to University College London to meet up with Dan Schreiber - producer of The Museum of Curiosity, Marc Abrahams from the Ig Nobel Prizes and several scientist chums. We're starting to scout for potential guests for the new series and, unlike QI where the audience expectation is comedians, we can have anyone we like on Museum, as long as they're entertaining and interesting. As the result we've had panellists as diverse as Leigh Francis (Keith Lemon), Buzz Aldrin, Neil Gaiman, Suggs, Dr Erica McAlister (curator of flies, Natural History Museum), Baron West of Spithead (ex-head of the Royal Navy), Suggs, Sir Terry Pratchett, Dr Alice Roberts, Brian Eno and many other brilliant people ... plus comedians.

Among those around the table was Dr Chris McManus (left) whose scientific paper 'Scrotal asymmetry in man and in ancient sculpture' is a classic. It garnered him an Ig Nobel (science that makes you laugh, then think) and an appearance on QI after a discussion of his paper. Puerile tittering aside, there is some serious science here about asymmetry and handedness.

The UCL is notable for having an 'auto-icon' displayed in a hallway. It's Jeremy Bentham, the great reformer and philosopher, who asked that, after his death, he be put on show. What you see is Bentham's skeleton, padded out and dressed in his clothes and sat on a chair. He had asked that the piece incorporate his actual head, mummified to resemble its appearance in life. However, Dr Southwood Smith's experimental efforts at mummification were, at best ... not good. He based his process on the practices of the indigenous people of New Zealand. This involved placing the head under an air pump over sulphuric acid and drawing off the fluids. Although technically successful, it did leave Bentham's head looking 'distastefully macabre, with dried and darkened skin stretched taut over the skull'. The Auto-icon was therefore given a wax head and fitted with some of Bentham's own hair. The real head was displayed in the same case for many years on the floor between his feet ... but it became the target of repeated student pranks. It is now locked away securely.

After the meeting, Dan and I repaired to a pub to discuss another possible TV/radio project that we're hoping to pitch later in the year. We also talked about the first live show of Dan's 101 People to Meet before You (or They) Die show. It's an idea that we've kicked about for some time - you may recall that we tried a radio version back in May last year (you can listen to it here). With what we learned from this pilot, Dan has revamped the format and is now launching it as a regular series of live interviews with extraordinary folks.

The first one takes place on Saturday April 6th at the Conway Hall, in Holborn, London, and will feature Dr Jan Bondeson - an expert in such bizarre subjects as talking dogs, a bottom-stabbing 18th century villain and medical 'freaks'. Also on the bill is the aforementioned Marc Abrahams, founder of the Ig Nobels.

Do come along if you can. Details/tickets here.

Improbable Oxford

I took part in another Ig Nobel Improbable Event on Friday at the University of Oxford's Collaborative Applied Mathematical Institute. Great speakers, lovely audience and some of the funniest questions I've ever been asked.

The way these events work is that, after an intro, Marc Abrahams - creator and emcee of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes - selects a time keeper and someone to make a noise every 30 seconds. The participants then get up on stage, one by one, and read a two minute extract from a real scientific paper ... that they've only just seen for the first time.

The timekeepers alert you when 30 seconds, 1 minute and 1 minute 30 seconds have passed before gonging you off stage at 2 minutes. What then follows is a question and answer session where the audience can ask the reader questions about the subject of the paper. What makes it funny is that (a) the papers are inherently odd and hilarious anyway and (b) the reader knows only marginally more about the paper than the audience does. It's great fun.

The readers at this event were ... mathematician Dr Mason Porter, science writers and broadcasters Rita Carter and Brian Clegg, Professor Alain Goriely (director of CAMI), Dr Thomas Woolley (one of the bods behind Dara O'Briain's School of Hard Sums)   ...

 

 

... some fat old ex-cop and writer, Mark Lynas (author of Six Degrees), a lady whose name I don't have, I'm afraid, as she wasn't on my original list of speakers (But I think was called Xena (?) and works for a charity to do with palm oil), and a REAL rocket scientist and turbomachine engineer, Dr Thomas Povey ...

 

 

... and then came a spirited demonstration of a centrifugal force-assisted birthing device by ferociously bearded biochemist Faraz Alam ...

 

 

 ... and ended with a hilarious slideshow from comedian and writer Helen Keen and the inevitable bad poetry reading with Marc.

 

Another great fun event. I look forward to the next.

The 2012 Ig Nobel Prizes UK Tour - London

As you may have read in this previous blogpost, on 9th March 2012 I took part in the Ig Nobel Prizes Uk Tour by speaking at Imperial College in the 800-seater Great Hall of the Sherfield Building. The event was completely sold out. The speakers included Oxford University mathematician Dr Mason Porter discussing his paper on synchronisation in cows, Ig Nobel winner Mirjam Tuk on her paper that explores improved decision-making when you have a full bladder, New Scientist magazine's John Hoyland with some extracts from its ever-excellent Feedback pages, and myself talking about how police officers once used a form of cryptic hide-and-seek during the 'dead' hours on night duty (between 3am and 5am) as a memory aid to learning the fastest routes to various locations. As a bonus we had Professor Andrew George from Imperial reading some terrible poetry by William Topaz McGonagall. A tremendously fun evening hosted brilliantly by Marc Abrahams, founder of the Ig Nobels and the Annals of Improbable Research. And now you can see it (I'm on at 48 minutes in).

Same event, different perspectives

Yesterday's Wasabi Fire Alarm demonstration has been reported by several people who were there. Here's how Tom Whipple of The Times reported it:

Fire alarm that sets your lungs burning as well

Tom Whipple at the receiving end of the fire alarm that uses Japanese wasabi

There are, I suppose, things to be grateful for. First, that I was testing a wasabi-based fire alarm, rather than a rotten eggs or smelly socks fire alarm. Both were tried as prototypes. Second, that inhaling a fine aerosol of Japanese horseradish is considerably better than being burnt alive.

But neither of those thoughts occurred as the fiery spray hit my nose, made its way down my windpipe and entered my lungs. Doubled up, coughing and crying a little, my main thought was: “This is a very silly way to save people from fire.”

On that, however, I was wrong. The wasabi fire alarm is the winner of this year’s Ig Nobel award, awarded for discoveries that “first make you laugh, then make you think”.

Makoto Imai, the Japanese co-inventor, has installed a working model in the Science Museum in London and is taking it on a nationwide tour to coincide with British Science Week. In doing so he is demonstrating a solution to a deadly serious problem: how do you wake deaf people in a fire? “By delivering a stinging sensation to your mucus,” answered Professor Imai.

The Ig Nobels were created by the American writer Marc Abrahams in 1991 as a way of rewarding scientific research that happens to be funny.

Special commendations this year went to a study investigating contagious yawning in tortoises and another testing how decision-making is affected by the need to urinate.

In past years, Britain has done particularly well in the awards. “Japan and the UK are the only countries I know of where, if you’re eccentric, people are proud of you,” Mr Abrahams said. “In other countries, they want you to go away."

The wasabi fire alarm will be demonstrated at the Ig Nobel roadshow, which is in Edinburgh tonight, and tomorrow visits the University of Dundee, where Ben Wilson, a Scottish marine biologist and Ig Nobel laureate, will give a talk on his studies into communication in herrings via the medium of farts.

And there's a great write-up by Faraz Mainul Alam on his always entertaining Memoirs of a Defective Brain blog. He also provided me with this video:

Wasabi ... but, thankfully, no waaaaffer thin mint

Another fascinating day today starting at the Science Museum in London where I met up with Marc Abrahams - the brains behind the Ig Nobel Prizes - microbiologist Faraz Mainul Alam and Roger Highfield, author, broadcaster and former editor of New Scientist magazine and now the museum's head of PR.

We were there to meet inventors (and Ig Nobel winners) Makoto Imai and Hideaki Goto who had travelled over from Japan to meet various people and to present an example of their Wasabi Fire Alarm to the museum. Their research into 'what smells will wake you up' led to the discovery that a potent aerosol made from the pungent Japanese horseradish will irritate the mucus membranes to such a degree that you have no choice but to wake up. The practical application of this is a fire alarm for the deaf.

Here we see Hideaki Goto and Makoto Imai with their alarm, and Roger Highfield and the museum's Content Developer Jessica Bradford. It was also great to get a tour of the museum with Roger and see some of the newest acquisitions including one of the capsules used to free the trapped Chilean miners in 2010. Stephenson's Rocket, Model T Fords and moon rock ... what's not to like?

From the museum we went on to a couple of photo ops at a Wasabi chain restaurant and at Knightsbridge Fire Station where Tom Whipple, science writer for The Times, foolishly asked for a demonstration of the wasabi spray's potency ...

Then it was on to the Paramount for lunch and a meeting with one of my all-time heroes, Monty Python's Terry Jones. The restaurant is on the 32nd floor of Centrepoint - that huge tower block at the junction of Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road - and, even in the muggy sunshine, the views were breathtaking. Rather like the wasabi spray in fact.

Myself with Terry and Marc. The wine had just started to flow.

Another good day. And some great content for a new book I'm working on.