nobel season

oh man, remember when vonnegut received the nobel prize in 1997? of course, when i say nobel prize i mean the ig nobel prize and when i say vonnegut i mean bernard vonnegut, kurt’s physicist brother.

bernard was awarded his ig nobel for a paper that he wrote in 1975 entitled chicken plucking as measure of tornado wind speed. 

One way of estimating the wind in a tornado vortex is to determine by experiment what air speed is required to blow all the feathers off a chicken, a phenomenon known to occur in severe storms.

vonnegut then turns a century of meterology/poultry science on its head by suggesting that fear causes a physiological reaction in a chicken’s body which makes it lose all of its feathers. note to factory farms: if you make your conditions even scarier, the chickens will defeather themselves!

you can read more about the paper here as well as the way in which vonnegut’s predecessors studied the featherless chicken phenomenon: by shooting them out of cannons.

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related: the ig nobel and nobel officially hadron super-collided last week!