Posts Tagged ‘amusement park’
“The difference between screwing around and science is writing it down”*…
It’s that time of year again: the 2025 IgNobel Awards have been awarded. Jennifer Ouellette reports…
Does alcohol enhance one’s foreign language fluency? Do West African lizards have a preferred pizza topping? And can painting cows with zebra stripes help repel biting flies? These and other unusual research questions were honored tonight in a virtual ceremony to announce the 2025 recipients of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes… when the serious and the silly converge—for science.
Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes; they honor “achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.” The unapologetically campy awards ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures whereby experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds and the second in just seven words.
Acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds. And as the motto implies, the research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn’t mean it’s devoid of scientific merit. In the weeks following the ceremony, the winners will also give free public talks, which will be posted on the Improbable Research website…
Read on for accounts (each both amusing and fascinating) of this year’s winners: “Meet the 2025 Ig Nobel Prize winners,” @jenlucpiquant.bsky.social in @arstechnica.com.
More at the web site of Improbable Research— “research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK”– the organization behind the IgNobels.
* Adam Savage (@asavage.bsky.social)
###
As we have some serious fun, we might we might spare a thought for a man who embodied the marriage of science and glee: Ron Toomer; he died on this date in 2011. Toomer began his career as an aeronautical engineer who contributed to the heat shields on NASA’s Apollo spacecraft. But in 1965, he joined Arrow Development, an amusement park ride design company, where he became a legendary creator of steel roller coasters. His first assignment was “The Run-Away Mine Train” (at Six Flags Over Texas), the first “mine train” ride, and the second steel roller coaster (after Arrow’s Matterhorn Ride at Disneyland). Toomer went on to design 93 coasters worldwide, and was especially known for his creation of the first “inversion” coasters (he built the first coasters with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, loops). In 2000, he was inducted in the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions (IAAPA) Hall of Fame as a “Living Legend.”
“Round and round she goes”*…
Long-time readers will know of your correspondent’s affection for roller coasters (e.g., here, and here) and those who design them (e.g., here). Today, a(nother) example from Coney Island…
… in 1917 [Coney Island] added an unusual attraction called the Scenic Spiral Wheel, better known as The Top. It was a 45 ton, 70 foot diameter steel wheel that was tipped towards its heavier side where it rested on its bottom edge. Roller coaster track spiraled around its outer rim from its top to its bottom. As the four-car train circled the rim of the wheel, its weight changed the wheel’s tilt so that the entire rig gyrated around like a top running low on spin. The train slowly spiraled down and covered 3200 feet of track in two and one half minutes. A second train with a separate admission climbed up to the top of the wheel, then descended through a long tunnel. The wheel was more interesting to watch than to ride, and consequently only lasted through the 1921 season…
And it is interesting to watch:
History via Pounce-Matics Amuse-Matics; video via Boing Boing.
* from Major Bowes Original Amateur Hour (the radio show that transferred to television as Ted Mack and the Original Amateur Hour)
###
As we strap in, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972 that a very different sort of ride– “If You Had Wings”– opened at Walt Disney World In Florida. A two-person Omnimover dark ride in Tomorrowland in the Magic Kingdom, it was sponsored by Eastern Air Lines and featured travel destinations (mainly in the Caribbean), all of which were served by Eastern.
… Guests passed through a series of colorful theater-like sets with rear-projected short scenes of straw-hat markets, fishermen, limbo dancers, and steel drum bands. Locations featured various Eastern destinations, like Mexico, Bermuda, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Trinidad, and New Orleans.
Then, the vehicles reclined into a room with projected snippets of flights taking off on an ovoid-shaped surface. Next, film of snow-covered mountains reflected on floor-to-ceiling mirrors.
As guests disembarked to an area containing an Eastern Air Lines reservation desk, an agent stood ready to assist riders with travel arrangements…
In 1987, Eastern withdrew its sponsorship) not too long before they went defunct. Soon after, Delta became the sponsor and focus; they withdrew in 1997. The space was then refurbished and turned into Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin, which opened in 1998… The Buzz experience is skeletally similar to “If You Had Wings”– but riders can control the rotation of their vehicle via joysticks, and are armed with laser cannons to shoot at targets stationed throughout the attraction.
“If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research”*…
It’s that time of year again– a collection of researchers have received the 2022 Ig Nobel Prizes for work that (as the awarding body, Improbable Research, puts it) “first makes us laugh, then makes us think.” Hannah Devlin reports…
It is one of life’s overlooked arts: the optimal way to turn a knob. Now an investigation into this neglected question has been recognised with one of science’s most coveted accolades: an Ig Nobel prize.
After a series of lab-based trials, a team of Japanese industrial designers arrived at the central conclusion that the bigger the knob, the more fingers required to turn it.
The team is one of 10 to be recognised at this year’s Ig Nobel awards for research that “first makes you laugh, then makes you think” – not to be confused with the more heavyweight Nobel prize awards, coming up in Scandinavia next month.
Other awards at the virtual ceremony on Thursday evening include the physics prize for showing why ducklings swim in a line formation, and the economics prize for explaining, mathematically, why success most often goes not to the most talented people, but instead to the luckiest. An international collaboration won the peace prize for devising an algorithm to help gossipers decide when to tell the truth and when to lie.
The winners were presented with a three-dimensional paper gear featuring images of human teeth and a 10tn dollar bill from Zimbabwe, with eight bona fide Nobel laureates, including the British biochemist Sir Richard Roberts, on hand to distribute the prizes…
Great fun with great purpose: “Japanese professor wins Ig Nobel prize for study on knob turning,” from @hannahdev in @guardian. The full list of winners, with accounts of the their award-worthy efforts, is here.
* Albert Einstein
###
As we chuckle… then cogitate, we might spare a thought for Ron Toomer; he died on this date in 2011. Toomer began his career as an aeronautical engineer who contributed to the heat shields on NASA’s Apollo spacecraft. But in 1965, he joined Arrow Development, an amusement park ride design company, where he became a legendary creator of steel roller coasters. His first assignment was “The Run-Away Mine Train” (at Six Flags Over Texas), the first “mine train” ride, and the second steel roller coaster (after Arrow’s Matterhorn Ride at Disneyland). Toomer went on to design 93 coasters worldwide, and was especially known for his creation of the first “inversion” coasters (he built the first coasters with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, loops). In 2000, he was inducted in the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions (IAAPA) Hall of Fame as a “Living Legend.”
“To an artist a metaphor is as real as a dollar”*…
Before a certain mouse took over Orlando, Florida was already home to a slew of delightfully bizarre tourist attractions. You could meet menacing pirates and hoop skirt-clad Southern Belles. Or visit the circus every day. Or watch an 80-year-old man break a world record as he waterskied barefoot in a banana-yellow jumpsuit…
How did the Sunshine State use to attract tourists? Circus animals, water ski shows and a half-mile replica of the Great Wall of China: “Let’s revisit Florida’s bizarre lost theme parks from before the Disney era.”
* Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction
###
As we pull over to investigate, we might recall that it was on this date in 1513 that Juan Ponce de León, the Spanish explorer who had become the Governor of Puerto Rico and Hispanola, but who believed there to be land further west, first set eyes on what he first believed was another island, which he claimed for Spain and named “Florida”… the name by which we know it still. Legend has it that Ponce de León was searching for the Fountain of Youth; while there is no contemporary evidence that that’s true, it does seem resonant with Florida’s history thereafter…
“Rock and roll is here to stay”*…
Hard Rock Park, a 50-acre rock music-themed amusement park just outside Myrtle Beach in South Carolina… billed as the world’s first rock and roll theme park, opened its gates to the public in the spring of 2008. One of the first things visitors saw when they walked through the gates was a giant electric guitar—rising 90 feet over the park’s central lagoon, the statue loomed into view as park-goers strolled past the bell towers of the entry plaza, modeled after the buildings in the cover art of Hotel California. If they looked down as they approached the water, they would realize they were standing on the frets of another guitar, set into the pavement.
The Gibson statue was iconic, but it wasn’t the park’s largest structure. That was Led Zeppelin The Ride: a roughly 150-foot tall rollercoaster designed in partnership with the band and synced to its 1969 hit, “Whole Lotta Love.” Riders boarded inside a life-sized airship, and speakers blasted the song’s breakdown as they were cranked up the lift hill; the iconic guitar riff kicked in as the train hurtled out of the first loop.
Across the water, a huge mural beckoned visitors into a Moody Blues-themed dark ride called Nights in White Satin: The Trip, designed to evoke a multisensory psychedelic experience. The adjacent concert arenas hosted artists like the Eagles, Kid Rock, and Charlie Daniels; after sunset, the lagoon erupted into a nightly fountain and firework extravaganza choreographed to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Lasers shot from the head of the guitar statue during Brian May’s solo, before a sparkler-covered kite was towed around the water during the song’s final bars…
Hard Rock Park closed after just five months, amid the 2008 financial crisis. Learn its (fascinating) story and take a stroll through what remains at “The Spectacular Failure of the World’s Only Hard Rock Theme Park.”
* Neil Young
###
As we wave our lighters, we might recall that it was on this date in 2010 that Gordon Lightfoot (one of the fathers of folk-pop and “Canada’s greatest songwriter”), driving himself home from a visit to his dentist, heard on the radio that he had died. “It seems like a bit of a hoax or something,” the then-71-year-old singer said at the time. “I was quite surprised to hear it myself.”
(As it happened, then-CTV journalist David Akin had posted on Twitter and Facebook a rumor that he’d heard that Lightfoot had died… without qualifying that it was a rumor.)
You must be logged in to post a comment.