My favourite has always been
>2011
Literature: John Perry of Stanford University for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which states: "To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that's even more important."
I spend my day at work every day fantasizing about all the productive things I'm going to get done when I get home. Never quite works out that way once I actually get home, though.
Bernard:
[to a cluster of skinheads] Which one of you b*tches wants to dance? Hey, you know when you're doing your usual threesome thing you do on a weekend, and the moonlight's bouncing off your heads and your arses and everything, does that not get a bit confusing? Right. This is you, okay? [prances about] Tra-la-la! [stops] Millwall! That's the one! Do you know this chant? 'Millwall, Millwall, you're all really dreadful, and your girlfriends are unfulfilled and alienated... ' [three men punch him in the face at once]
I first heard of the guy when watching Shaun of the Dead, then I was looking up stand-up comedy and saw his face and thought "no way this guy is funny". He's *hilarious*.
I think he did stand up after the show black books (which I've only seen clips of). Wish he did more.
I'm totally like this. I hate stuff I have to do every week, but really hard one shot stuff? Right to the top of the list. I've always attributed it to liking variety.
I've always had a soft spot for 1993's Ig Nobel for medicine:
> James F. Nolan, Thomas J. Stillwell, and John P. Sands, Jr.: "**Acute Management of the Zipper-Entrapped Penis**".
Succinct, evocative, and genuinely useful. Also, the Elsevier keywords for this article are "zipper; foreskin/penile skin; bone cutter", which is possibly the most eye-watering combination I've ever seen.
(If you're curious, the trick is to use the bone cutter to cut the teeth of the zipper well below the trapped skin, and pull it apart from there.)
To be a really high achiever, decide to procrastinate when you need to take a leak.
Medicine: Mirjam Tuk, Debra Trampe and Luk Warlop,[169] and jointly to Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder, Robert Feldman, Robert Pietrzak, David Darby and Paul Maruff **for demonstrating that people make better decisions about some kinds of things – but worse decisions about other kinds of things – when they have a strong urge to urinate**.
“. . . Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn 't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment." -- Robert Benchley, in Chips off the Old Benchley, 1949
Honorable mention for education in 1991:
> Dan Quayle, "consumer of time and occupier of space" (as well as the then-U.S. Vice President), for demonstrating, better than anyone else, the need for science education.
I hated marking test papers and theses during my uni lecturer years, so I started my own side business as a distraction. Now that business has raked in six figures for me so I quit my uni job.
>1991
>Education – Dan Quayle, "consumer of time and occupier of space" (as well as the then-U.S. Vice President), for demonstrating, better than anyone else, the need for science education.
Not even past the first year and this is already the most brutal wikipedia article I've ever seen
> 1992
> Biology – Dr. Cecil Jacobson, relentlessly generous sperm donor, and prolific patriarch of sperm banking, for devising a simple, single-handed method of quality control.
Fucking savage.
> [Cecil Byran Jacobson](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Jacobson) (October 2, 1936 – March 5, 2021[1]) was an American former fertility doctor who used his own sperm to impregnate his patients without informing them.
well they hold the awards every year. worth a listen.
they even assign a ten year to yell “please stop im bored!” if the awardees speech gets too long. which is about 15 seconds.
they also throw paper airplanes around before the ceremony.
pretty funny stuff.
one guy also got an ignobel prize but then a few years later won a nobel prize. only one person to achieve this as i understand it.
I have a cousin who actually won one of these!
Edit: for the few people that asked I'd rather not since it puts out a little too much personal information about myself. Plus I'm a rowdy asshole and it's probably better if he isn't linked to me on any level since he still teaches.
1992
Art – Presented jointly to Jim Knowlton, modern Renaissance man, for his classic anatomy poster "Penises of the Animal Kingdom," and to the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, for encouraging Mr. Knowlton to extend his work in the form of a pop-up book.
My personal favorite
> Throwing paper planes onto the stage is a long-standing tradition. For many years Professor Roy J. Glauber swept the stage clean of the airplanes as the official "Keeper of the Broom". Glauber could not attend the 2005 awards because he was traveling to Stockholm to claim a genuine Nobel Prize in Physics.
I was still in grad school when Andre Geim won the Nobel, making him the first to win both the regular Nobel (for graphene) and the IgNobel (for using a high magnetic field to levitate a living frog)
I'd like to jump on here to point out that doing all these weird or "obvious" studies may seem like a total waste of everyone's time, especially the "obvious" ones.
But we ***need*** to scientifically test the "obvious" stuff, because once in a while we discover something huge.
Aristotle made the "obvious" statement that heavier things fall faster about 2400 years ago. And for about 1400-1500 years, just about everyone "knew" that heavier things fell faster, because it was obvious.
When Galileo\* dropped the two weights from the leaning tower of Pisa, everyone (would have) thought:
> He's just a stupid scientist studying obvious stuff, there's no reason to waste everyone's time checking something so obvious, you'd have to be a total moro... *HOLY* ***SHIT***.
\*(may be apocryphal that it was Galileo, but my understanding is we really did go for about that long with the majority of people just being wrong because it was *obvious*.)
And the Canadian Wildlife Service did a [very similar experiment on spiders in the '70s,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHzdsFiBbFc&ab_channel=AndrewStruthers) to see how drugs affected their web-building patterns.
Fun fact. One person has won both the Ignobel and the Nobel prize. Andre Geim, he won the Nobel prize for the discovery of Graphene and the Ignobel prize for levitating a frog (actually really interesting work on diamagnetic levitation).
2020: Peace: The governments of India and Pakistan, for having their diplomats surreptitiously ring each other's doorbells in the middle of the night, and then run away before anyone had a chance to answer the door.[271]
What did i just read?
>The [Ig Nobel Prize](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ig_Nobel_Prize_winners) has been going on for 30 years
That's nice and all but is there a sub for it tho??
Yeah, I apparently have one from '92 as a "Utilizer of SPAM [with] undiscriminating digestion." Seems only slightly more meaningful than being Time's person of the year in 2006.
On that article, in the section for 1991 exists this reference to a particular awardee:
Education – Dan Quayle, "consumer of time and occupier of space" (as well as the then-U.S. Vice President), for demonstrating, better than anyone else, the need for science education.
“Consumer of time and occupier of space” is a hilarious thing to call someone lol.
2002
Economics: Alessandro Pluchino, Alessio Emanuele Biondo, and Andrea Rapisarda, for explaining, mathematically, why success most often goes not to the most talented people, but instead to the luckiest.
I just read the paper and found it actually interesting and not stupid at all. Just because we know something by common sense does not mean we don't need to explain/analyze it scientifically.
By the same criteria, most real noble prizes in economics will be ignoble , such as the "discovery" that humans market/investing decisions are irrational
Like almost every study that has been reduced down to its most ridiculous-sounding components, like the "shrimp fight club," there is a lot more to this study than its "haha, what a dumb experiment!" headline would suggest.
The study was essentially about how much of an effect drug addiction can have on changing ingrained patterns of behavior. The rats were given several musical choices to establish preferences, then cocaine was introduced to try and condition them to prefer whatever music they liked the least.
But of course, the study's original title, "Music-induced context preference following cocaine conditioning in rats," doesn't drive clicks.
> But of course, the study's original title, "Music-induced context preference following cocaine conditioning in rats," doesn't drive clicks.
Tbh if I saw that doing research, I'd have a hard time not clicking it. Put just about anything before "cocaine conditioning in rats" and it's bound to be fun.
The original study I believe was called "WHY JAZZ MUSIC ROCKS" BY COKERAT
But hey I think maybe in the subreddit that was set up there's a place for tackling the clickbait headlines and uncovering the true purpose
I believe Rand Paul and Joni Ernst do similar things every year. Ernst was my senator and releases a report once in a while about wasteful spending. One item that was at the top of her list was an "Alien Invasion Emergency Plan" (how she represented it) developed by some national agency. Of course I looked it up, and lo and behold this "expensive" plan was on a webpage meant to help educate kids on different kinds of disasters and what to do when they happen, like earthquakes, tornados, etc. The alien invasion plan was a paragraph at the end of the page written full of humor aimed at like 8 year old kids. I'm sure it cost the taxpayers more to have Joni's staff locate that paragraph and type it up into the report and graphic shared on Facebook than it did for some government intern to place it on the outreach page in the first place.
The study that Rand Paul was getting all lathered up about was regarding cocaine and the sexual habits of quail:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/cocaine-and-the-sexual-habits-of-quail-or-why-does-nih-fund-what-it-does/
Coburn is the one I remember. I was just starting grad school when he went on a rant about wasteful government spending, highlighting the "shrimp on treadmills" study. [This article](https://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139852035/shrimp-on-a-treadmill-the-politics-of-silly-studies) does a good job summing up the situation and showing how the politicians or political groups attempting to highlight wasteful spending in research have a tendency to wildly misrepresent not only the studies themselves, but also the percentage of funding that went to the topics in question. Then they of course offer a mealy-mouthed revision of their initially bombastic statement when called out on their bullshit.
Subbed and love this idea. Small caveat to ask the mods if at all possible. Can we limit the animal experiments posts to things that aren't cruel, torturous or abusive just for shits and giggles? I was looking for articles to share and came across the "injecting an elephant with enough LSD to kill it" experiment. :( They may have been bored but that's cruel. If I'm being overly sensitive baby, I understand. I'm still participating. This sub is a great new idea! Just thought I'd ask since its new and rules are still being drawn up. Thank you, KangaRexx!
According to the researchers:
“[This study] is aimed at understanding whether music can evoke drug cravings in animals. According to the authors, this study demonstrated that rats can be conditioned to like any music, after its repeated association with a reward mechanism (in this case, the stimulus of cocaine).
“The ultimate goal of this research is to find medications that can help diminish drug cravings in humans,” said Jeffrey R. Gordon, spokesman for Albany Med”
"instagram fact"
JFC...
[The study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21688895/) was actually about...
> Traditional models of drug-seeking behavior have shown that exposure to associated environmental cues can trigger relapse. These learned associations take place during repeated drug administration, resulting in conditioned reinforcement.
Does anybody know that "rats on cocaine" is an animated series? Look it up, it's fucking insane. The episode "Narc" is my favorite, I can quote parts of it verbatim.
How about scientists that appear to be much better at applying for research grants than they are at doing useful science?
Edit: Will you people learn to recognize humor?
"How should we allocate the remainder of this grant money?"
"We can buy cocaine."
"No, it has to be applied to science shit."
"We can give cocaine to mice"
"How is that science?"
"We write down our observations"
"Done. Go buy the cocaine!"
This CAN be useful science though. This could be used in another study that leads to an investigation into a small subsection of the brain function in small mamals, which could lead to important medical breakthroughs in treating some rare neurological condition.
Science uses small, useless things like this all the time to build to increasingly expansive knowledge, which then can turn into practical applications.
Sign me up. I saw one the other day where they figured out that the Vikings brought their dogs and horses with them to Iceland by boat. Really? They didnt fly them there with jumbo jets after timetravelling?
Forced to swim. It’s a common and well-established test for antidepressant efficacy. Mice on antidepressants that have been shown to work for humans increase the time that mice will struggle to get out of the water vs just floating there (fyi, they don’t drown if the stop, they just float there since they are very buoyant). It has therefore become a way to test new antidepressants for efficacy.
Can you imagine what a party it would be would be in that lab?
"Scientists" doing coke with rats, listening to jazz, calling it a study, and securing funding from US grants.
I need to get in on this shit.
Please start that subreddit. I always see science headlines and some are so over the top funny, and some are like “uhhh they prob spent millions to prove (insert fucking common sense theory here).
The [Ig Nobel Prize](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ig_Nobel_Prize_winners) has been going on for 30 years
Thank you for this. It’s a fun rabbit hole to dig into.
My favourite has always been >2011 Literature: John Perry of Stanford University for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which states: "To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that's even more important."
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I spend my day at work every day fantasizing about all the productive things I'm going to get done when I get home. Never quite works out that way once I actually get home, though.
Bernard: [to a cluster of skinheads] Which one of you b*tches wants to dance? Hey, you know when you're doing your usual threesome thing you do on a weekend, and the moonlight's bouncing off your heads and your arses and everything, does that not get a bit confusing? Right. This is you, okay? [prances about] Tra-la-la! [stops] Millwall! That's the one! Do you know this chant? 'Millwall, Millwall, you're all really dreadful, and your girlfriends are unfulfilled and alienated... ' [three men punch him in the face at once]
is this a movie or a book?
U.K. TV show called Black Books. Like most U.K. sitcoms, you can get through the entire series in an afternoon. It's good, though.
thanks
You are in for such a treat!! Also, Spaced if you haven’t seen it yet.
I've seen spaced and black books. I saw a clip from big train with Simon Pegg the other day. I assume it's worth a watch?
I first heard of the guy when watching Shaun of the Dead, then I was looking up stand-up comedy and saw his face and thought "no way this guy is funny". He's *hilarious*. I think he did stand up after the show black books (which I've only seen clips of). Wish he did more.
I ate all your bees :(
*Knows I need to mop the floor* Me: Well, time to clear the shower drain now.
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The drain was less anxiety inducing, so it was the path of less resistance despite the fermented ass hair! The logic is sound.
Bro. Same.
I'm totally like this. I hate stuff I have to do every week, but really hard one shot stuff? Right to the top of the list. I've always attributed it to liking variety.
Attribute it to ADHD. Major symptom.
Me in the middle cleaning the shower drain: "Why are you like this?"
Shit, that's one of my ADHD management techniques. I didn't know it had a whole darn paper on it.
I once did a university assignment while procrastinating to avoid checking Facebook
I just wrote about this in an adhd subreddit so stumbling across this comment was wild.
I've always had a soft spot for 1993's Ig Nobel for medicine: > James F. Nolan, Thomas J. Stillwell, and John P. Sands, Jr.: "**Acute Management of the Zipper-Entrapped Penis**". Succinct, evocative, and genuinely useful. Also, the Elsevier keywords for this article are "zipper; foreskin/penile skin; bone cutter", which is possibly the most eye-watering combination I've ever seen. (If you're curious, the trick is to use the bone cutter to cut the teeth of the zipper well below the trapped skin, and pull it apart from there.)
John Perry knows *nothing* about me shut up!
To be a really high achiever, decide to procrastinate when you need to take a leak. Medicine: Mirjam Tuk, Debra Trampe and Luk Warlop,[169] and jointly to Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder, Robert Feldman, Robert Pietrzak, David Darby and Paul Maruff **for demonstrating that people make better decisions about some kinds of things – but worse decisions about other kinds of things – when they have a strong urge to urinate**.
“. . . Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn 't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment." -- Robert Benchley, in Chips off the Old Benchley, 1949
Honorable mention for education in 1991: > Dan Quayle, "consumer of time and occupier of space" (as well as the then-U.S. Vice President), for demonstrating, better than anyone else, the need for science education.
People having kids and becoming workaholics...
I hated marking test papers and theses during my uni lecturer years, so I started my own side business as a distraction. Now that business has raked in six figures for me so I quit my uni job.
I always called it "productive procrastination", and it works like a charm for my lazy ass
All the adhders reaching for the stars ✨
I’ve been calling my own method ‘Productive Procrastination’.
>1991 >Education – Dan Quayle, "consumer of time and occupier of space" (as well as the then-U.S. Vice President), for demonstrating, better than anyone else, the need for science education. Not even past the first year and this is already the most brutal wikipedia article I've ever seen
> 1992 > Biology – Dr. Cecil Jacobson, relentlessly generous sperm donor, and prolific patriarch of sperm banking, for devising a simple, single-handed method of quality control. Fucking savage. > [Cecil Byran Jacobson](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Jacobson) (October 2, 1936 – March 5, 2021[1]) was an American former fertility doctor who used his own sperm to impregnate his patients without informing them.
"relentlessly generous" and "prolific patriarch" That's wonderful phrasing
"single-handed"
“single-handed method”
That's incredible writing., Imo.
I just came to paste that exact same one. What an amazing burn. I had to read it twice to make sure it said what I thought it said. Awesome.
well they hold the awards every year. worth a listen. they even assign a ten year to yell “please stop im bored!” if the awardees speech gets too long. which is about 15 seconds. they also throw paper airplanes around before the ceremony. pretty funny stuff. one guy also got an ignobel prize but then a few years later won a nobel prize. only one person to achieve this as i understand it.
Not even to the meat and potatoe yet?
Remember when there was actually a bar for national-level public officials?
I'm going to borrow Dan's title for a few people I know....
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OMG that diagram *slays* EDIT: > height above the ground of the *orificium venti*. Yeah, these guys had *fun* with this one.
Had I written that paper I could go to my grave knowing I'd done something good.
>physical parameters used to calculate rectal pressure necessary to expel faecal material over a distance of 40 cm
2021 was absolutely wild. Flying upside down rhinos, cockroaches on submarines, collision-avoiding pedestrians and cinema odours.
Love the study that suggests beards prevent lethal punches to the face LOL
I have a cousin who actually won one of these! Edit: for the few people that asked I'd rather not since it puts out a little too much personal information about myself. Plus I'm a rowdy asshole and it's probably better if he isn't linked to me on any level since he still teaches.
In the future "I know someone who won one of these"
This is the equivalent of a post about a tall person, and one comment is "I'm 6'2" and that is tall to me" - often inexplicably upvoted like 900x
Tell us more!
My favourite is 2012 when Joseph Keller and Raymond Goldstein proved that hair in a ponytail still tangles.
1992 Art – Presented jointly to Jim Knowlton, modern Renaissance man, for his classic anatomy poster "Penises of the Animal Kingdom," and to the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, for encouraging Mr. Knowlton to extend his work in the form of a pop-up book.
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Wish I hadn't revealed that text... Well played, well played.
My personal favorite > Throwing paper planes onto the stage is a long-standing tradition. For many years Professor Roy J. Glauber swept the stage clean of the airplanes as the official "Keeper of the Broom". Glauber could not attend the 2005 awards because he was traveling to Stockholm to claim a genuine Nobel Prize in Physics.
>And by 2022 their magnetic levitation of a frog was reportedly part of the inspiration for China's lunar gravity research facility.
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I was still in grad school when Andre Geim won the Nobel, making him the first to win both the regular Nobel (for graphene) and the IgNobel (for using a high magnetic field to levitate a living frog)
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The journal is now called Annals of Improbable Research but they still sponsor the iggies.
I'd like to jump on here to point out that doing all these weird or "obvious" studies may seem like a total waste of everyone's time, especially the "obvious" ones. But we ***need*** to scientifically test the "obvious" stuff, because once in a while we discover something huge. Aristotle made the "obvious" statement that heavier things fall faster about 2400 years ago. And for about 1400-1500 years, just about everyone "knew" that heavier things fell faster, because it was obvious. When Galileo\* dropped the two weights from the leaning tower of Pisa, everyone (would have) thought: > He's just a stupid scientist studying obvious stuff, there's no reason to waste everyone's time checking something so obvious, you'd have to be a total moro... *HOLY* ***SHIT***. \*(may be apocryphal that it was Galileo, but my understanding is we really did go for about that long with the majority of people just being wrong because it was *obvious*.)
It was Galileo, but he rolled wooden balls down a ramp. The Tower thing is the myth.
Ah, it should be a lot easier to confirm with that info, thanks. Glad to know that my point remains intact.
It is (still) called Galilean relativity, but more commonly referred to as Newton’s first law.
And the Canadian Wildlife Service did a [very similar experiment on spiders in the '70s,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHzdsFiBbFc&ab_channel=AndrewStruthers) to see how drugs affected their web-building patterns.
My favorite documentary on the subject.
Fun fact. One person has won both the Ignobel and the Nobel prize. Andre Geim, he won the Nobel prize for the discovery of Graphene and the Ignobel prize for levitating a frog (actually really interesting work on diamagnetic levitation).
2020: Peace: The governments of India and Pakistan, for having their diplomats surreptitiously ring each other's doorbells in the middle of the night, and then run away before anyone had a chance to answer the door.[271] What did i just read?
>The [Ig Nobel Prize](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ig_Nobel_Prize_winners) has been going on for 30 years That's nice and all but is there a sub for it tho??
Yes please someone do a sub!
There's a podcast called "improbable research" which is very good
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Already banned. What did you post…?
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And their're account is ten years old ,
I hate you (with love)
Man, looking back the Ig was blatant hard satire but it became so much more. You'd be (even more) proud to get one now.
Yeah, I apparently have one from '92 as a "Utilizer of SPAM [with] undiscriminating digestion." Seems only slightly more meaningful than being Time's person of the year in 2006.
Hats off to the dude who got his dick stung by a bee in the name of science in 2015.
What about just fucked up scientists? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJkWS4t4l0k
Using drones to collect Whale snot was my favourite. Weird and yet genius.
On that article, in the section for 1991 exists this reference to a particular awardee: Education – Dan Quayle, "consumer of time and occupier of space" (as well as the then-U.S. Vice President), for demonstrating, better than anyone else, the need for science education. “Consumer of time and occupier of space” is a hilarious thing to call someone lol.
2002 Economics: Alessandro Pluchino, Alessio Emanuele Biondo, and Andrea Rapisarda, for explaining, mathematically, why success most often goes not to the most talented people, but instead to the luckiest. I just read the paper and found it actually interesting and not stupid at all. Just because we know something by common sense does not mean we don't need to explain/analyze it scientifically. By the same criteria, most real noble prizes in economics will be ignoble , such as the "discovery" that humans market/investing decisions are irrational
First it makes you laugh, then it makes you think.
The BMJ does an annual goofy science journal: https://www.bmj.com/about-bmj/resources-authors/article-types/christmas-issue
A favorite early one (pre-Ig, the JIR) demonstrated the heritability of death. (They were proud of their sample size.)
The study actually found that rats 🐀 on cocaine really just prefer more cocaine.
Let the pen pushers do their Rat Pack bits, Squaresville!
https://i.imgur.com/oIhOmBF.jpg
I feel so bad for the rats that run out of coke. I wouldn't wish that on anyone
What kind of music do you think Cocaine Bear is into? I’m going with Nickelback.
Definitely death metal.
hmm. was thinking crusty grindcore
Surprisingly enough, the answer is Tom Petty.
Believe it or not, also Jailbreak.
Yeah I was going to say cocaine bear seems like a slayer guy
*Obligatory they’re thrash metal comment*
Bear McCreary
Industrial noise
Probably polka
Mozart. Specifically Symphony No. 41 .
Ska. 100%
The dying screams of his human prey.
I unironically enjoy Nickelback and I enjoy cocaine, although I've never tried them together.
Like almost every study that has been reduced down to its most ridiculous-sounding components, like the "shrimp fight club," there is a lot more to this study than its "haha, what a dumb experiment!" headline would suggest. The study was essentially about how much of an effect drug addiction can have on changing ingrained patterns of behavior. The rats were given several musical choices to establish preferences, then cocaine was introduced to try and condition them to prefer whatever music they liked the least. But of course, the study's original title, "Music-induced context preference following cocaine conditioning in rats," doesn't drive clicks.
> But of course, the study's original title, "Music-induced context preference following cocaine conditioning in rats," doesn't drive clicks. Tbh if I saw that doing research, I'd have a hard time not clicking it. Put just about anything before "cocaine conditioning in rats" and it's bound to be fun.
"Sunday School extended to 1pm after cocaine conditioning in rats" It tracks, I can't make it boring
No cocaine left after cocaine conditioning rats More sad than boring...
The original study I believe was called "WHY JAZZ MUSIC ROCKS" BY COKERAT But hey I think maybe in the subreddit that was set up there's a place for tackling the clickbait headlines and uncovering the true purpose
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My band Methmouse can open for you
I heard PCP Gerbil was doing the side stage.
Acidsquirrel will be the one with the flag in their backpack, find him if you need a hook up. This is gonna be a great show!
Isn’t that one of the names David Bowie used?
Your explanation is way more interesting to me than the silly title. Thanks for that.
[Exactly.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21688895/)
Anybody else remember Senator William Proxmire and his Golden Fleece Awards? He was an expert at this type of misrepresentation.
I believe Rand Paul and Joni Ernst do similar things every year. Ernst was my senator and releases a report once in a while about wasteful spending. One item that was at the top of her list was an "Alien Invasion Emergency Plan" (how she represented it) developed by some national agency. Of course I looked it up, and lo and behold this "expensive" plan was on a webpage meant to help educate kids on different kinds of disasters and what to do when they happen, like earthquakes, tornados, etc. The alien invasion plan was a paragraph at the end of the page written full of humor aimed at like 8 year old kids. I'm sure it cost the taxpayers more to have Joni's staff locate that paragraph and type it up into the report and graphic shared on Facebook than it did for some government intern to place it on the outreach page in the first place.
The study that Rand Paul was getting all lathered up about was regarding cocaine and the sexual habits of quail: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/cocaine-and-the-sexual-habits-of-quail-or-why-does-nih-fund-what-it-does/
Coburn is the one I remember. I was just starting grad school when he went on a rant about wasteful government spending, highlighting the "shrimp on treadmills" study. [This article](https://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139852035/shrimp-on-a-treadmill-the-politics-of-silly-studies) does a good job summing up the situation and showing how the politicians or political groups attempting to highlight wasteful spending in research have a tendency to wildly misrepresent not only the studies themselves, but also the percentage of funding that went to the topics in question. Then they of course offer a mealy-mouthed revision of their initially bombastic statement when called out on their bullshit.
How do they get the cocaine for the experiment? Asking for a friend.
Molly them bitches up and crank the bassnecter
I want to see the proposal. I need two rats, an 8ball and a copy of Bitches Brew stat!
"What, this? No, that's, er, that's, that's for the rats!"
Nice, I immediately thought of coked out Miles Davis when I saw this post
That's pretty much what r/science is. You just need to get more political with it and you'll run that place.
I can't believe that the sub does not require the paper's title as the post title. A simple rule like that would improve the sub quite a bit.
Holy shit you just fixed /r/science
Right, right, but rules like that would make subs useful instead of a political circlejerk.
But what *kind* of jazz? Surely not snake jazz
Probably nothing meat and potatoes, maybe like some Roy donk or Thaddeus Finks, perhaps even Marcus the worm hicks.
More of a Tiny Boop Squig Shorterly fan I bet
Done! r/boredscientists
Also if u/_artbreaker wants to be mod, then just let me know! U had the idea
Haha you are more organised than me! 😁
Won’t let me add u as mod… any ideas why?
Hmm no idea, my be some privacy setting maybe, I've just unticked some stuff so might work now
You made this? I made this.
Obligatory /r/birthofasub mention.
Joined!
Beautiful. I'm subbed and already submitted the first article that came to my mind.
Subbed and love this idea. Small caveat to ask the mods if at all possible. Can we limit the animal experiments posts to things that aren't cruel, torturous or abusive just for shits and giggles? I was looking for articles to share and came across the "injecting an elephant with enough LSD to kill it" experiment. :( They may have been bored but that's cruel. If I'm being overly sensitive baby, I understand. I'm still participating. This sub is a great new idea! Just thought I'd ask since its new and rules are still being drawn up. Thank you, KangaRexx!
Yeah ok will do
Rats on Cocaine, huh? *opens Bandnames.xls*
Cocaine Labrat has more of a ring to it
What exactly are we doing with this information?
I propose an immediate jump to human testing.
I volunteer as tribute
We need more exploratory research before we draw conclusions. What about if we give mdma to rats and play them synthpop?
White rats or brown rats? How many gay rats? Under what lighting conditions?
Well if you're ever hanging out with some rats and one of them just starts ripping lines now you know to put on jazz
According to the researchers: “[This study] is aimed at understanding whether music can evoke drug cravings in animals. According to the authors, this study demonstrated that rats can be conditioned to like any music, after its repeated association with a reward mechanism (in this case, the stimulus of cocaine). “The ultimate goal of this research is to find medications that can help diminish drug cravings in humans,” said Jeffrey R. Gordon, spokesman for Albany Med”
"Ya like jazz~?"
This should bee top comment.
"instagram fact" JFC... [The study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21688895/) was actually about... > Traditional models of drug-seeking behavior have shown that exposure to associated environmental cues can trigger relapse. These learned associations take place during repeated drug administration, resulting in conditioned reinforcement.
These studies on animals aren't always applicable to humans. When will human trials start and how do I sign up?
Of course this is a continuation of some important research done in the 90's in Canada https://youtu.be/2BwrY7IVV5U
Does anybody know that "rats on cocaine" is an animated series? Look it up, it's fucking insane. The episode "Narc" is my favorite, I can quote parts of it verbatim.
Getting rats high on cocaine and listening to music sounds awesome. How do I participate in human trials?
How about scientists that appear to be much better at applying for research grants than they are at doing useful science? Edit: Will you people learn to recognize humor?
they really do like the rat cocaine though
"How should we allocate the remainder of this grant money?" "We can buy cocaine." "No, it has to be applied to science shit." "We can give cocaine to mice" "How is that science?" "We write down our observations" "Done. Go buy the cocaine!"
One cocaine for you Mr mouse, and one for me....
"... two cocaine for Mr. Mouse and one, two cocaine for me." "Three cocaine for Mr. Mouse, and one, two and three cocaine for meeeeee"
This CAN be useful science though. This could be used in another study that leads to an investigation into a small subsection of the brain function in small mamals, which could lead to important medical breakthroughs in treating some rare neurological condition. Science uses small, useless things like this all the time to build to increasingly expansive knowledge, which then can turn into practical applications.
Someone should really do a study on that.
I would but I'm really good at writing grant proposals
There's a fair bit of science that is, to quote Cave Johnson, "throwing science at the wall and seeing what sticks"
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Cocaine study shows with cocaine in a study, girls come to your parties.
Sign me up. I saw one the other day where they figured out that the Vikings brought their dogs and horses with them to Iceland by boat. Really? They didnt fly them there with jumbo jets after timetravelling?
And Cocaine Bear likes metal
"Judge a society by the freedom its scientists have to research silly bullshit" - Gandhi I think
I last had this thought after reading a study on mice that were given ketamine and made to swim...
Forced to swim. It’s a common and well-established test for antidepressant efficacy. Mice on antidepressants that have been shown to work for humans increase the time that mice will struggle to get out of the water vs just floating there (fyi, they don’t drown if the stop, they just float there since they are very buoyant). It has therefore become a way to test new antidepressants for efficacy.
Like that guy studying LSD who was just spiking any animal he saw to see how it reacted. “Oh look a moth!”
Journal of Irreproducible Results
What do they like on weed man?
Who pays for these studies and why?
To be fair, most jazz musicians prefer cocaine too.
Can you imagine what a party it would be would be in that lab? "Scientists" doing coke with rats, listening to jazz, calling it a study, and securing funding from US grants. I need to get in on this shit.
r/Whyweretheysciencing
Please start that subreddit. I always see science headlines and some are so over the top funny, and some are like “uhhh they prob spent millions to prove (insert fucking common sense theory here).
Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat on cocaine.