73 Blah Blah. Never has so much weight been given to something of such trivial importance. I’m impressed with the cash they hand out – a cool million is nothing to sneeze at but, that being said, my group blows through a million every four years. My only question is… do they give that million out as a huge novelty check? I emailed Karl Barry S. and asked him, but I got no reply. It would be awesome if they did. Anyway, here are my predictions:
Peace: Al Gore, for his relentless use of Powerpoint.
Literature: Someone French, since the people that hand out the lit prize don’t read anything else English writer Doris Lessing
Physics: A physicist Albert Fert of France and Peter Gruenberg of Germany
Medicine: A physician Martin Evans, Mario Capecchi and Oliver Smithies
Economic: A free trade pro-IMF economis Leonid Hurwicz, Eric S. Maskin and Roger B. Myerson, all from the U.S.
Chemistry: A biologist Gerhard Ertl (Like the inquisition, no one saw that coming. This may also screw Whitesides, Nuzzo and Somorjai out of ever winning one. That’s kind of a bummer, I guess. But, like I said, too much weight has been given to these things.)
Don’t get me wrong, I think Tsien has one coming. Whitesides and Sir Frasier too, but I don’t see an ORGANIC CHEMIST getting one. I.E. Trost won’t be getting any long distance calls tomorrow tonight early Wednesday morning. But, if I had to guess, here is what I would put down:
Whitesides and Nuzzo for monolayer self assembly or Stoddart and Tour for molecular machines and self assembly or Tsien, Prasher and Chalfie for GFP and its use as a molecular probe.
I will not do a post on the Prize itself, unless an auto mechanic won it or something. Or my boss. So, I don’t think I’ll be doing a post.
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god help us if tour gets a nobel. Then again, I do believe Nanojesus will be making a big splash if he did…
Pretty good, but here are my predictions”
Peace: Al Gore, for his relentless use of Powerpoint.
Literature: Someone Eastern European, since the literature from the 90s got really popular with the use of magic realism in the region and it’s time to collect on that. If not, then someone Chinese.
Physics: A physicist, another physicist, and another physicist.
Medicine: A biologist
Biology: A biologist, another biologist, and another biologist.
Chemistry: A biochemist.
wait, there’s a nobel for biology?
that’s an excellent point, excimer.
replace biology with economics. it probably won’t be won by a biologist.
Oops…
I don’t know, I just copied and pasted Kyle’s outline and erased some stuff and filled in other fields. I never knew there was no Nobel for biology.
I do feel partly responsible. But only partly; and because I can unring bells on this here interweb.
What is there left to award in physics. Everyone has their head stuck up their butts trying to solve M-theory (which is a non-theory anyway), plamsa physics to get the fusion to work (not yet, not yet), and “me-too” condensate physics.
The only thing I can think of is quantum NMR computing, and that’s still pretty weak.
I predict a chemist wins the physics prize.
It’s been at least a year since someone won for NMR. That’s over due.
Or a mathematician? They don’t have one of their own. Apparently something sordid happened with Nobel’s daughter and a mathematician.
The “no math Nobel” story is thought to be urban myth
http://mathforum.org/social/articles/ross.html
Besides, they have the Fields Medal.
@Kyle:
“Chemistry: A biologist”
LOL! Sad but true.
Surprising Whitesides hasn’t come up yet, in my opinion.
The Fields medal only goes to under-40s, and only four (max, often just 2 or 3) can win every four years. The Wolf prize is more comparable, but then again bio, chem, and physics also have Wolff prizen.
Washington compassionately confiscates 37% of a Nobel Prize – at Immgration upon Laureate return – as income to be ground up and fed to the Officially Sad (i.e., swine). Sweden compensates the Laureate for suffered theft. In proper world said additional income would be taxed at the maximum Federal rate as well. Round and round toward the asymptote.
The IRS deserves a Nobel Prize in Economics and a Fields medal.
the IRS is too old to win the fields medal.
I’m still rooting (as usual) for the astro guys.
al gore will never win it for powerpoint… it’s all keynote.
hell yes.
Office 2007 has effectively copied Keynote in style and feature so, it’s back to the same. fwit, Word 2007 is gay as hell.
GFP sounds like a good bet.
Mitch
exactly, gfp ftw.
Biologist buddy and I were talking. A better bet for the chemistry prize is the ribosome structure. Who knows, maybe there will be a Kornberg trifecta.
How dare you accuse Uncle Al Gore of using powerpoint? He is going to send fire-breathing dragons through the tubes for you.
See if you can find phone numbers for some of the contenders and give them a call. There’s a good chance that they’ll answer and an irritating Swedish accent easily mimicked. A bit early for trick or treat but so what.
F.A. Cotton apparently used to get early-morning calls informing him that he once again hadn’t won the Nobel Prize. Unfortunately, he’s too dead for that joke this year
I’m going with Philip Roth for Lit. He’s overdue, and the bookmakers have him in the lead at 5/1.
Nah, the Nobel in Lit hasn’t been won by an American since Toni Morrison in 1993. You have to be oppressed to get it now.
Peace:
Irena Sendler: 10/3
Martti Ahtisaari: 4/1
Gore: 9/2
Lit:
Philip Roth: 5/1
Claudio Magris: 6/1
Les Murray: 6/1
Thomas Transtromer: 7/1
Then again, they’re also giving Paul Krugman 5/1 for Econ.
I’m going to say Patrick Sueskind on the literature because ‘Perfume’ and ‘Die Taube’ were just too good. Then again, I don’t read literature anymore; not really that often, so my opinion shouldn’t matter. I haven’t read a book since… since… damn. I guess it was since Civ 4 and FFXII came out.
My favorite newspaper says that a Canadian woman writer (who writes stories about a small town in Ontario and how some stranger from Europe comes for a few days, wild sex happens, and life changes forever for everyone involved), should win the nobel prize and that she’s on the minds of the committee. However, my newspaper is often thought of as snooty, so she probably won’t win it (I also don’t remember her name so that’s another sign).
The literature Nobel always reminds me of the Secretary Generalship of the UN. Spread it around, keep it diverse and even throw in some former Wermacht personnel. Not too sure about the Swedish taste in this sort of thing. Take a look at The Seventh Seal some time. Filmed in uplifting black and white, the film tells the tale of Antonius Block, a knight returning from the crusades, and his film-long game of chess with Death. Actually I quite liked it but I’m not sure the people who make movies like this are the best people to be handing out literature prizes.
I’ve seen that movie, and I didn’t like it all that much. It was one of the reasons I stopped watching movies. Ingmar Bergmann is not on the committee, you can trust me on that one. Grass deserved the prize I think; no matter what you say, his past was not a negative there. The literature prize is not that diverse actually. Some European countries dominate and have been recognized again very recently.
And anyways, I’d trust it more if the committee was bigger. In my experience, a lot of literature profs are very overwhelmed with their own area to focus on a lot of others. Sweden is one of the best countries though, owing to their, er… worldliness?
I think you’re probably right about Ingemar not being on the the committee; he died late July this year! Death (Bengt Ekerot) died much earlier. According to the IMDB back in 1971. Six od seven years ago I read an interview with Max von Sydow (Antonius Block, The Knight) in which he seemed to be quite taken by this, commenting gleefully that ‘Death is dead’.
However the Crapshoot really needs to live up the title with a hot tip. Kim Jong-il makes double sweep, taking both Peace and Economics.
Can someone tell me why Al Gore deserves the Peace prize? I mean, come on! Not that it ever meant anything anyway, I guess…
Gore has a very long record of championing environmental causes, it’s not some new bandwagon he jumped on. How this contributes to world peace? I don’t know. It just does.
Gore can wait. Give the darn thing to Burma’s bonzes.
The nobel peace prize has an illustrious history of going to people who do not deserve it. Rabin and Arafat — not much of a “peace” there. The UN? At the same time that it sat on its hands as genocide occured in the Sudan and human rights situation deteriorated in Myanmar? IAEA? Wow, they’re really doing a great job with nuclear containment.
Given how Nobel made his bucks, it’s not clear what a Peace Prize funded by those bucks actually means.
By making dynamite more stable so that it could be used to clear rock to dig mines and tunnels easier to improve the livelihoods of all as he wanted?
The UN notwithstanding, Aung San Suu Kyi did get the Nobel Peace Prize for her work promoting peaceful resistance of the military dictatorship in Myanmar. Say what you will of the other prizewinners, she did deserve it.
I think the guys who negotiated the Dayton accords deserve it more (although the jury is still out on how long the peace will last, though the outlook is good); as much as Ms Suu Kyi did some amazing work, the military dictatorship is *still there*.
I’m not saying that all nobel peace prizes are crocks, just that the nobel peace prize has a higher likelihood of being crap. This is partially because it can be motivated by the politics of the time (in stead of honoring solidly accepted political acheivements, as it should), and sometimes is used as a “carrot”.
You got only the last name correct, the other two are Martin Evans and Mario Capecchi! We all like your blog so much, so don’t be sloppy, please!!
Yeah, but it’s free.
For some reason your website borks my FreeBSD box (firefox) about 20% of the time. Actually it consumes all of the cpu power to the point where doing anything except sshing remotely is not doable. I think could fix it by restricting the processor power that firefox is allowed to consume, but I’m too lazy. It seems to also run particularly slowly on some MacOSes running Safari. I think this is a javascript issue. Windows boxen, Apples running firefox, and my slamd-64 machine running firefox (1.5) are all a-ok.
I’m convinced it’s the scrolling RSS feed. I’ll remove it in the next few days. (Lazy at the moment)…errr (I mean busy at the moment)…
Thanks for fixing the RSS feed- my computer likes the new system better and I can still get the day’s blogs in one place.
Peace Prize: Arafat got it, Gandhi did not. DIsqualified right away. I don’t give a whit about it.
Gandhi would have gotten it, but was killed first.
And the physics prize goes to giant magnetoresistance! Well, at least they didn’t give it to a cosmologist again. Those cosmologists win everything— why can’t they get their own prize?
Although the physics prize is definitely based on fundamental science, I am glad that the Nobel committee chose something that at least has a whiff applied physics to it. It is too bad that most hard drives will be solid state in the next few years! Dooh! Anyway Giant Magnetoresistance, i just love writing it. It makes me feel important.
Personally, I thought the next applied physics nobel would go to the inventors of Erbium-doped fiber (Desurvire and Payne and ?).
Yo Excimer, I read your cruciform presentation and noticed that you mentioned that there are only specific wavelengths available via lasers (ie coherent light). Nanostructured Ytterbium-doped fibers pumped with a high peak-power laser (ie fs-laser) generate supercontinuum light. Hence laser light can now span from the UV-NIR, simultaneously like a coherent light bulb.
o rly? I haven’t heard of that- I suppose I should have said “conventional lasers.” Are these a recent development? Can you link me to an example?
(I gave this presentation to a bunch of organic chemists, so… lol, I got away with a lot of hand-waving on the physical side. But I knew the shit out of those mechanisms.)
To my knowledge, the physical phenomenon has been known for 30 years. But the Laser has only been on the market for a couple of years.
This isn’t to say I didn’t like your presentation. Like any good nonlinear-responding molecule, they look rough and tough. They are the William Murderface in the organic chemical space.
Awesome. I’ll have to blog about it at some point. Thanks
No problem. Also, the
frequency comb
(1/2 Nobel Physics ‘05) is also based on supercontinuum light.
Actually nonlinear optics probably deserves something cool. Being able to add the frequencies of two lazers is mind-stupendifying. It shouldn’t be allowed to happen, and we cheated the laws of physics.
If I am not wrong, isn’t chemistry also important in realising GMR? So much seems to be based on solid state chemistry.
GMR requires atomically abrupt interfaces. So, yes, this is the realm of solid state chemistry and materials science.
We-took-the-physics-prize, Hooray! *Inflation theory can suck on it, whatever it is*
‘Karl Barry S.’ from now on please, its time to switch it up.
Sorry Professor. Now, please, tell me. Is it a great big novelty check signed by the king? Or do they send you an email and are all like…
Please give us your account number so we can deposit your Nobel Prize money lol no trix promis. -King Gustaf
I would like to claim partial victory here for saying Whitesides and Nuzzo for monolayer self assembly. Unfortunately, I was slightly mistaken about the exact chemistry on surfaces and apparently picked the wrong surface chemists.
Now, sadly, Nuzzo will never get a Nobel but Whitesides still might. He’s got a lot of shit in that large bag-o-chemistry in that brain of his that may still win one for another day.
Likewise, Somorjai is fucked. But… well… that’s life, I guess.
I, too, claim sort-of victory. I would like half of your prize money, Kyle.
You will get the giant half novelty check in the mail in 2 – 3 weeks.
The US Air Force Research Laboratory at the Wright-Patterson Air Force base proposed chemical aphrodisiacs to make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other. Dubbed the ‘gay bomb’… 2007 Ig Nobel Peace Prize.
Based on abortion and pregnancy rates, the US military is already a humpa-humpa burning love. Civil War General Joseph Hooker was a pragmatist, and provided for his troops,
“Civil War General Joseph Hooker was a pragmatist, and provided for his troops”
Couldn’t you tell from the name? Although I don’t know what came first, the name or the actual Hooker
Why would you even want to know a hookers name? You’re paying them as it is.
Yaay! Doris Lessing! The good guys win this time!
Actually, the literature prize is the most exciting one for me. Always has been and always will be. Much more so than chemistry.
wow, you were totally right on the gore thing.
Yeah. No need for the crossout. Now I just need a pro-IMF economist to win and I’m set.
Roald Hoffmann called the 1995 Prize (Crutzen, Molina, Rowland) “The greatest Nobel”. FYI, people in the Nobel foundation (part of the committee) really really really respect Roald, as they should.
And they most of them haven’t even read Solids and Surfaces. A Chemist’s View of Bonding in Extended Structures
So I am not surprised about Gore. I still think he would have made a mediocre president, but that is far better than Bush. Until Bush, I didn’t know what hubris meant.
He still yet might make a mediocre president. I hope he gets elected , and the big 20 ton gorilla that’s in the driver’s seat decides to decrease output for a hundred years.
isn’t the ozone mechanism suddenly back in the press as being possibly wrong?
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/2004/108.cfm
I’m not sure I buy the “fact” that a warmer troposphere results in a cooler stratosphere.
Oops, I meant this one:
http://www.nature.com/news/200.....9382a.html
I can’t believe they gave the Prize to Ertl! Leave it to the left-leaning Swedes to play politics once again and honor the study of oscillatory reactions on metal surfaces. It’s just what those granola-eating, platinum-hugging types had hoped for. I suppose now the upcoming presidential election will be all about low energy electron diffraction, ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscopy, and scanning tunneling microscopy by those pandering to the Left and jumping on the bandwagon of junk science.
Kyle: I assume you’ve seen this mention?: http://blog.wired.com/wiredsci.....e-in-.html
Mitch