Posts Tagged ‘amusement parks’
“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)
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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.”
“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
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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.”
All for fun…
Forty years ago, self-starter Bruno (as he’s known to all, first-name friendly) opened a fledgling restaurant, or osteria, in the wooded region near Treviso, Italy. The way he tells it, the decision was improvisatory: After buying several pounds of sausage links and a few jugs of wine, he set up a grill in the shade of a tree and awaited his first customers. “I wanted to see if we would sell something or if people would come”…
Come they did– Bruno now presides over a 500-seat outdoor eatery… to which the now 76-year-old inventor has added the Ai Pioppi camping ground and amusement park: a collection of whimsical amusement park rides, all hand-built by Bruno, that are Ai Pioppi’s main draw.
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Read more about Bruno and Ai Pioppi in “An Amusement Park, Entirely Handmade In The Woods Of Italy.”
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As we brace for the thrill, we might recall that it was on this date in 1888 that Marvin C. Stone was awarded a patent for the first wax-coated drinking straw (paraffin-coated manila paper) and the spiral winding tube-making process used to make it. Stone, already a success with his paper cigarette holders, decided to try for a replacement for the rye grass shoots that, until his invention, were the drinking straws of choice– while they worked, they imparted an undesirably grassy flavor to beverages. Stone’s invention so succeeded that within two years his straws were outselling his cigarette holders; in 1906, he patented a winding machine to automate the process and keep up with demand.
Re-extinction…
East Berlin’s Kulturpark Plänterwald had been the only amusement park in the German Democratic Republic (GDR)– a kind of Coney Island for socialists. There was no real coordination nor theme – it was a mix of attractions and rides. But when the GDR collapsed in 1989, Kulturpark Plänterwald– suddenly exposed to market forces– quickly followed. It had a brief renaissance (as “Spreepark”) in the early 90s– but promptly fell victim to a lack of available parking.
Since then, the park has been closed… and the dinosaurs that “roamed” its expanse have fallen victim to the German version of “cow tipping.”
See more derelict dinosaurs at Kuriositas. [TotH to Dangerous Minds]
As we keep watch for falling comets and asteroids, we might recall that it was on this date in 1916 that Robert Stroud stabbed and killed a prison guard at Leavenworth Penitentiary– resulting his being moved to “segregated” confinement for the balance of his sentence. While serving his solitary tme, Stroud– who’d been assessed by prison psychologists as “a psychopath with an IQ of 134”– began to work with birds (largely canaries). Ultimately his research, conducted entirely in his cell, resulted in two books, Diseases of Canaries, and a later edition, Stroud’s Digest on the Diseases of Birds, with updated specific information. He made several important contributions to avian pathology, most notably a cure for hemorrhagic septicemia.
In 1942, Stroud was transferred to Alcatraz, where policies against animals in cells meant an end to his research. Still, he is remembered as “The Birdman of Alcatraz.”
What a way to go…
Euthanasia Coaster
“Euthanasia Coaster” is a hypothetic euthanasia machine in the form of a roller coaster, engineered to humanely – with elegance and euphoria – take the life of a human being. Riding the coaster’s track, the rider is subjected to a series of intensive motion elements that induce various unique experiences: from euphoria to thrill, and from tunnel vision to loss of consciousness, and, eventually, death. Thanks to the marriage of the advanced cross-disciplinary research in space medicine, mechanical engineering, material technologies and, of course, gravity, the fatal journey is made pleasing, elegant and meaningful…
Julijonas Urbonas is a designer, artist, writer, engineer and PhD student in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art.
Since childhood, I have worked in amusement park development. In 2004, I became a managing director of an amusement park in Klaipeda, Lithuania, and ran it for three years. Having worked in this field – as an architect and engineer but also in ways that are artistic and philosophical – I became fascinated by what in my research I am calling the bodily-perceived aesthetics of “gravitational theatre”…
More on the Euthanasia Coaster here. Background on gravitational theatre and Gravitational Aesthetics here (and even more here).
As we buckle our seat belts, we might spare a memorial thought for Fifth-Century resister of the Roman Empire (and Caesaropapism) and reformer of the Catholic liturgy, Pope Hilarius; he died on this date in 468… presumably laughing.
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