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

An Ig Nobel but Wellcome Week

I've spent this week in the company of some truly extraordinary people.

It began on Tuesday when I visited the Wellcome Collection in Euston, London. This, if you don't know, is a free permanent exhibition of art, curios and historical objects that includes such things as the entire human genome printed out in book form, Napoleon's toothbrush, trepanned skulls and Florence Nightingale's moccasins. The overall theme is the development of medicine throughout history and it's a fascinating place to wander around.

But of far more interest to me was the Wellcome's library - the largest medical library in the world - and myself and several friends (who you'll meet shortly) were given an informative and fun tour by librarian Ross McFarlane. Medicine and well-being is a very broad area of study and I was surprised and delighted to see that the library has books on almost any related subject including nutrition, sexuality, various 'snake oil cures', voodoo and other forms of witch doctor magic. The books range from a beautifully preserved first edition of Mrs Beeton's cookbook to B R Burg's splendidly titled Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition.

The library is also the home of many important documents and we were privileged to be shown a few. One of these was the original handwritten diary of Robert McCormick (1800-1890), the official naturalist and surgeon aboard the Beagle during Charles Darwin's fateful visit to the Galapagos Islands (Darwin was there as a naturalist in an unofficial capacity). But the star item was this small, seemingly insignificant pencil sketch by Francis Crick (1916-2004):

 

Yes, it's the very first sketch of what Crick believed the DNA molecule to look like and, therefore, maybe one of the most important drawings in human history. It was quite something to see it there on a table in front of me and to feel that connection to history.

The other reason for me visiting the Wellcome Collection and Library was to meet several friends for lunch. These included James Harkin, head of research for the BBC TV show QI and Dan Schreiber, co-producer of QI's sister show The Museum of Curiosity, which goes out on Radio 4. We were joined by Sid Rodrigues, organiser of the international Skeptics in the Pub movement, science writer and Guardian columnist Mo Costandi and Jonathan Webb from the Science Media Centre. We were there to meet Marc Abrahams to discuss the Ig Nobel Prizes UK Tour for which some of us would be speakers at the London events. Marc had just flown in from the USA that morning but was surprisingly chipper and the enthusiasm he has for his creation was infectious.

The Igs, as they are affectionately known, began in 1991 and grew out of a magazine called The Annals of Improbable Research of which Marc is the editor. The magazine, and the annual prizes, celebrate research that 'makes you laugh and then think'. Ten Ig Nobel prizes are awarded annually at a ceremony at Harvard University in Massachusetts, USA, and are presented to the lucky winners by actual Nobel laureates. Previous winners have included research papers with titles such as: 'No Evidence Of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise (Geochelone carbonaria)', 'The Role of Auditory Cues in Modulating the Perceived Crispness and Staleness of Potato Chips', 'Locust brain activity while watching Star Wars' and the knowingly-titled 'Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly.' You can watch previous awards shows on YouTube - here's the 2011 event.

The UK tour this year included two London-based events, the first at Imperial College in Kensington and the second at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington. The Imperial College event took place in the 800-seater Great Hall of the Sherfield Building and was completely sold out. The speakers included Oxford University mathematician 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.

The second event was the Ig Nobels After Dark on Saturday. This was held at the NPL and a few of us were lucky enough to have a tour of some of the laboratories beforehand. The NPL's name is a little confusing and it was explained to us by our host, Andrew Hanson, that it would probably have been more appropriately named the National Measurement Laboratory as that's what they do; they measure things.

For example, in their sound labs they have a Reverberation Chamber and a Hemi-Anechoic Chamber; the first is an asymmetrical five-sided room in which echoes are massively prolonged (up to 30 seconds for a normal range of hearing) and the other is a slightly disturbing room in which all sound-reflective surfaces are removed meaning that it is eerily dead and silent. By having perfect acoustics, they can measure the sound absorbing or reflecting qualities of various objects and coverings. You can hear Stephen Fry' audioboo from inside each room here or watch the videobelow.

The NPL was where Barnes Wallis and colleagues worked out the angles and speeds needed to make the 'Dambuster' bouncing bombs work. And Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, worked here. His work card is on display in the foyer along with a beautiful 'Electron Tree' (actually a Lichtenberg fractal pattern) made by smashing subatomic particles into a sheet of perspex:

Then it was on to the evening event where an eclectic mix of readers entertained the audience with extracts from a selection of obscure and unintentionally hilarious research papers. The readers were myself, James Harkin (QI writer), Dan Schreiber (Producer Museum of Curiosity), Ross McFarlane (Wellcome Institute Library), Helen Keen (Comedy writer and performer), Stuart Clark (Astrophysicist and author), Chloe Kembery (Head of media relations Natural History Museum), Laurie Winkless (Higher research scientist National Physical Laboratory), Alasdair Kergon (Consulting Software Engineer, Red Hat Ltd), Alom Shaha (Science teacher and author), Helen Arney (Comedian and musician), Alok Jha (Author and Science Correspondent for The Guardian) and Ruchir Shah (Public Library of Science).

The subjects covered included fellatio in fruit bats, collapsing Glasgow toilets, why ovulating lap dancers get more tips, beetles that have sex with beer bottles, termination of intractable hiccups by digital rectal massage, decision making when you need a wee, rectal foreign bodies, scrotal asymmetry in ancient sculpture, penguin pooping pressures, homosexual necrophilia in ducks, why mosquitos like Limburger cheese, and an eye-watering dissertation on how to free a trapped penis from a zipper - accompanied by mime. My own reading was from a paper entitled 'Spermicidal potency of Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola' and is a perfect example of the kind of paper that attracts an Ig Nobel Prize. The paper, at first, seems rather silly; a bunch of scientists putting human sperm into different kinds of Cola to assess whether it affects the sperms' motility and/or potency. However, there is a serious reason behind this; vaginal douching with Cola is often used, particularly in developing countries, in the belief that it is an effective post-coital contraceptive. It's been going on since the 1950s but has only ever been supported as an effective measure by dubious anecdotes and 'Old Wives' Tales'. What the scientists wanted to know is whether it actually is effective so that doctors, missionaries and health workers can best advise women about its efficacy. If you're interested, Diet versions of the drinks are the most effective. However, it is not a good contraceptive as some sperm will be in the oviducts within seconds of ejaculation, plus the act of douching and the gas in the Cola can actually push the sperm closer to the cervix. But it's a wonderful example of what The Annals of Improbable Research and the Ig Nobels are all about - Research that makes people laugh and then think.

Oh, and thanks to Mo McFarland and Quentin Cooper who informed me that the Fugs did a song called Coca-Cola Douche back in the 1960s. Here it is. NSFW!



My huge thanks to Ross McFarlane for the visit to the Wellcome and to Marc for asking me to be part of the Igs this year, and to everyone I met (including the splendid Tom Scott who was in the audience - I've known him for years but we'd never actually met before). I consider myself privileged and very lucky to have worked with such a warm, friendly, smart and extraordinary bunch of people.

Photo credits: Masks and DNA sketch - Wellcome Collection. All other photos are mine with the exception of the first three Imperial college Ig Nobel Prizes pics by Kate Gowers.