Previous winners include doctors James Nolan, Thomas Stillwell and John Sands who shared the 1993 Ig for Medicine for their painstakingly researched study: "Acute Management of the Zipper Entrapped Penis."

"Is that the frank or the beans?"

Ig Nobels to honour strange science

MIAMI - Alligators have clashed with nonnative pythons before in Everglades National Park. But when a 6-foot gator tangled with a 13-foot python recently, the result wasn't pretty.

The snake apparently tried to swallow the gator whole — and then exploded. Scientists stumbled upon the gory remains last week.

Python Explodes After Eating Alligator - Yahoo! News

These pages demonstrate visual phenomena, called »optical illusions« or »visual illusions«. The latter is more appropriate, because most effects have their basis in the visual pathway, not in the optics of the eye. I selected these based on relative novelty and interactivity. I will expand the explanations when I find the time, to the degree that these phenomena are really understood. Any nice and thoughtful comment welcome.

Optical Illusions and Visual Phenomena

A few years ago, my family doctor closed his practice because his malpractice insurance premiums were going up again. Why were his premiums going up? He hadn't been involved in a malpractice lawsuit, but an increase in frivolous malpractice lawsuits was costing the insurance companies and that cost was being passed on to the doctors. Something needs to be done to limit frivolous lawsuits.

Sick of Lawsuits? You Should Be!

Now this is a truly new application of a keyboard, which I am sure will be rather hellishly expensive, but will probably not have any problem finding people to buy it judging from how much some fools are willing to pay for the reduced-size "Happy Hacker" keyboard--particularly since they willingly pay even more for the version where no one bothered to silkscreen labels onto the keys.

I give it a whole three months of this thing on the market before someone codes up a Drempels-style hack to make the keys change color and so on while the keyboard is being used. The possibilities are damn near endless.

Pimp.

This man deserves a patent with a large sack of money pinned to it.

The rest of the Beethoven symphonies will be broadcast and posted this week. Listen while you read the Grokster decision.

Symphony 6 will be broadcast on Monday 27th June, and available to download from Tuesday 28th June to Monday 4th July.

Symphony 7 will be broadcast on Tuesday 28th June, and available to download from Wednesday 29th June to Tuesday 5th July.

Symphony 8 will be broadcast on Wednesday 29th June, and available to download from Thursday 30th June to Wednesday 6th July.

Symphony 9 will be broadcast on Thursday 30th June, and available to download from Friday 1st July to Thursday 7th July.

BBC - Radio 3 - Beethoven Experience - downloads

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page
{sergey, page}@cs.stanford.edu
Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
Abstract

In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext.

Brin and Page's original paper about Google while grad students at Stanford. Good reference for understanding how spiders/crawlers index, how you can search massive amounts of data efficently, etc.

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

] Guitar, Bass, Drums, Keys. The foundation of rock music.
] Occasionally strings are used to give a lush, orchestral
] feel. But we all know when a song needs that extra oomph,
] that extra push over the top, there's only one thing that
] will satisfy: The Cowbell.

The Cowbell Project

On Friday, Davenport said the judge had already paid the $10 fine. The offense wasn't serious enough to impact Coats' judgeship beyond the fine, Davenport said.

Judge fines himself for letting cell phone ring

] But Dickinson, who makes his living in the cattle
] business, has an environmental problem on his hands that
] is vexing state officials: a 2,000-ton pile of burning
] cow manure.

Buring shit.

Massive cow manure mound burns for third month