Neurophilosophy

“Gay bomb” wins Ig Nobel Prize

Posted by Mo on October 5, 2007
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The U.S. military has been awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for its alleged plans to develop the “gay bomb”.

The device was proposed in 1994 by researchers from the U.S. Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio. The plans for its development are contained in a 1994 document entitled Harassing, Annoying, and “Bad Guy” Identifying Chemicals, which was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act about 3 years ago:

Chemicals that can affect human behavior so that discipline and moral in enemy units is adversely affected. One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior.

Other Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded to the authors of a British Medical Journal study which concluded that sword-swallowing causes throat abrasions, perforated oesophai and punctured blood vessels; a team of Spanish scientists who found that rats can’t distinguish between Japanese and Dutch when the two languages are spoken backwards; and an Australian woman who studied the indexing problems caused by the word “the”. Members of the Wright Laboratory were not among the 7 out of 10 winners who attended yesterday’s ceremony to collect their prizes.

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Comments

  1. #1 Homie Bear
    October 5, 2007

    That rat study . . . that boggles the mind. I wonder if they were trying to deliberately propose the most ridiculous thing they could think of and see if they could get funding??

  2. #2 Brachychiton
    October 5, 2007

    Well, now, they need to test out that ‘gay bomb’ on Iran.

  3. #3 DuWayne
    October 6, 2007

    Homie Bear -

    I think that would actually go to a guy I met, when I was interested in grants. I can’t find mention of it online, but he got a hundred-fifty thousand dollar grant, to do a study of which fast food chain’s french fries would fly the furthest, if launched under identical conditions. He managed to write some truly absurd grants. Including – a grant to see how absurd grant apps could get, before getting refused. At that point (about eight years ago) he had yet to write one that he couldn’t find funding for somewhere. He is, as you can guess, very popular in the field of writing grant apps.

    It wouldn’t surprise me in the least, if he was the one who wrote the rat grant, sounds like the sort of thing he would do.