The Ig Nobel prizes are out! The ones that stand out to me are

Peace prize: "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."

Management prize: to "five professional hitmen in Guangxi, China, who managed a contract for a hit job (a murder performed for money) in the following way: After accepting payment to perform the murder, Xi Guang-An then instead subcontracted the task to Mo Tian-Xiang, who then instead subcontracted the task to Yang Kang-Sheng, who then instead subcontracted the task to Yang Guang-Sheng, who then instead subcontracted the task to Ling Xian-Si, with each subsequently enlisted hitman receiving a smaller percentage of the fee, and nobody actually performing a murder."

Entomology prize: "Richard Vetter, for collecting evidence that many entomologists (scientists who study insects) are afraid of spiders, which are not insects."

Medical education prizes: "Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom, Narendra Modi of India, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, Donald Trump of the USA, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow of Turkmenistan, for using the Covid-19 viral pandemic to teach the world that politicians can have a more immediate effect on life and death than scientists and doctors can."

NOTE: This is the second Ig Nobel Prize awarded to Alexander Lukashenko. In the year 2013, the Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Alexander Lukashenko, for making it illegal to applaud in public, AND to the Belarus State Police, for arresting a one-armed man for applauding.

Materials science prize: "for showing that knives manufactured from frozen human feces do not work well."

Big news this week. You may have seen the image. It looks like a hole. But it is 2.6 times larger than the actual object, and there is much more information contained in the image than a quick glance without much thinking reveals.

It is wonderfully explained here.

And the same channel produced a follow up video on the day of the announcement.

You might also be interested in the TED talk of the scientist who developed the algorithm that generated the image.

You probably know someone using a fitness tracker. Recent models track daily heart rate and sleep. With just a few years of such models in the market, the companies collecting these data anonymously can provide insights that we simply did not have the data for just 5 years ago.

Here is such a summary from fitbit data.

Among the highlights are that 7 and a bit hours of sleep seem optimal for having a low standing heart rate, that Italians have a very low resting heart rate after controlling for daily activity while Indians have a very high, and life events (like surgeries or family gatherings) can be identified by looking at resting heart rate variation throughout the year.

Here](https://youtu.be/nkvVR-sKJT8) is an essential video that distils a lot about geometry, that anyone finishing school should know.

A bit of history, a bit of philoophy, a bit of math, from ancient Greece all the way to our modern understanding of spacetime and the universe.

Well worth the time of watching the whole series.

I was reminded in the Natural History Museum in New York that the Mediterranean sea was dry at some point.

If the connection to the Atlantic Occean was cut off, it would dry again. That is why it is so salty, especially in the East, it evaporates more than it can be replenished from rivers.

It did not take too long to go from there, to this video with graphics and some speculation about the consequences of no water in the Mediterranean.

How much of Europe would be a desert, how much deeper than the Grand Kanyon would it be, and how much higher the rest of sea level would be?

Here is a short video explaining the first mass extinction on Earth.

It was caused by oxygen.