Archive for October, 2007

Isn’t it sweeet ?

From here:

MEDICINE: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan
Meyer of Antioch,
Tennessee, USA, for their penetrating medical report “Sword
Swallowing and Its Side Effects.”

PHYSICS: L.
Mahadevan of Harvard University, USA, and Enrique
Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled.

BIOLOGY: Prof.
Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University
of Technology, The Netherlands, for doing a census of all the mites, insects,
spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi
with whom we share our beds each night.

CHEMISTRY: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan,
for developing a way to extract vanillin — vanilla fragrance and flavoring
— from cow dung.

LINGUISTICS: Juan
Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés,
of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell
the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person
speaking Dutch backwards.

LITERATURE: Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, for
her study of the word “the” — and of the many ways it causes
problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order.

PEACE: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating
research & development on a chemical weapon — the so-called “gay
bomb” — that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible
to each other.

NUTRITION: Brian
Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly
boundless appetites of human beings, by feeding them with a self-refilling,
bottomless bowl of soup.

ECONOMICS: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a device,
in the year 2001, that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them.

AVIATION: Patricia
V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek of Universidad Nacional
de Quilmes, Argentina, for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery
in hamsters.

Many of the things written are common sense now, but that is explainable as it’s kind of old. Studies traditional product development (that is, shrink-wrapped products that are sold in boxes) and services that at that time were mainly consulting and custom software development. While can be boring at some times or too verbose, it is still an interesting read for beginners .