Quotation of the Day

Is from NASA:

"As long as you stay away from the South Pole and don't fall into a volcano, Earth is a pretty comfortable world."

Quotation of the Day

"Hell! there ain’t no rules around here! We are tryin’ to accomplish somep’n!"

 - Purportedly said by Thomas Edison to Martin André Rosanoff circa 1903, first reported in the September 1932 issue of Harper's Magazine.

Good Interview with Dame Judith Hackitt on the IChemE Blog

Published last week, but I'm still catching up with my regular blogs after getting back from holiday on Sunday.

Some excerpts:

"[Interviewer:] Now you’re moving to become Chair of the EEF, what are your plans while [you're] there?  I took a sample size of 12 EEF customers and only one had a female CEO.  Is that on your agenda as Chair?

[JH:] I honestly don’t think that it’s front and centre of my mind.  What matters to me is not about gender equality, it’s about diversity.  And I think there is a real danger in playing on this ‘what we need is more women on boards’ debate.  It’s not.  What we need is boards to recognise how important it is to have diversity of thinking.  That is what will make them more robust, more resilient – and we need that more than ever in the challenging times we live in right now.  If you recognise that need for diversity of thinking, the rest will follow.  Women will become more numerous, along with other men who think and act differently from the stereotype that currently populates those boards."

"[Interviewer:] What else would you like to address in your new role at EEF?

[JH:] If you ask most people what manufacturing in the UK is about right now there is a perception that there used to be a manufacturing industry, and it’s now gone.  That’s so far from the truth it’s unbelievable.

The truth is we have some amazing new and exciting manufacturing industries out there.  The innovation that is going on is incredible.  I’m also on the board for the High Value Manufacturing Catapult and some of the things that come out of that is amazing in terms of new products and innovative processes."

The Ig Nobel Prizes 2010

The Ig Nobel prizes for 2010 were awarded last Thursday (30th September) at Harvard's Sanders Theatre.

For those who are unaware of them the Ig Nobels are a somewhat less serious version of the Nobel prizes, to quote Improbable Research (the people who award the prizes):

"The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology."

The winners were:

ENGINEERING PRIZE:

Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin of the Zoological Society of London, UK, and Diane Gendron of Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Baja California Sur, Mexico, for perfecting a method to collect whale snot, using a remote-control helicopter.

MEDICINE PRIZE:

Simon Rietveld of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Ilja van Beest of Tilburg University, The Netherlands, for discovering that symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller-coaster ride.

TRANSPORTATION PLANNING PRIZE:

Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Atsushi Tero, Seiji Takagi, Tetsu Saigusa, Kentaro Ito, Kenji Yumiki, Ryo Kobayashi of Japan, and Dan Bebber, Mark Fricker of the UK, for using slime mold to determine the optimal routes for railroad tracks.

PHYSICS PRIZE:

Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams, and Patricia Priest of the University of Otago, New Zealand, for demonstrating that, on icy footpaths in wintertime, people slip and fall less often if they wear socks on the outside of their shoes.

PEACE PRIZE:

Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston of Keele University, UK, for confirming the widely held belief that swearing relieves pain.

PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE:

Manuel Barbeito, Charles Mathews, and Larry Taylor of the Industrial Health and Safety Office, Fort Detrick, Maryland, USA, for determining by experiment that microbes cling to bearded scientists.

ECONOMICS PRIZE:

The executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Magnetar for creating and promoting new ways to invest money — ways that maximize financial gain and minimize financial risk for the world economy, or for a portion thereof.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE:

Eric Adams of MIT, Scott Socolofsky of Texas A&M University, Stephen Masutani of the University of Hawaii, and BP, for disproving the old belief that oil and water don't mix.

MANAGEMENT PRIZE:

Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy, for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.

BIOLOGY PRIZE:

Libiao Zhang, Min Tan, Guangjian Zhu, Jianping Ye, Tiyu Hong, Shanyi Zhou, and Shuyi Zhang of China, and Gareth Jones of the University of Bristol, UK, for scientifically documenting fellatio in fruit bats.

Full details can be found here.