The saddest part of today was realising that it had been FIVE YEARS since I last attended The Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses, and I never knew I missed it as much as I did until I sat down for both it and its double heading Ig Nobel Awards Tour.
Thankfully not much had changed, firstly with the Ig Nobels talking about weird and wonderful "real" science (including that to do with repeating words, anchovies having sex, the science of boredom, the behaviour of short referees and why we should all lick rocks).
BAHfest on the other hand was a masterclass in blag and sounding clever, which anyone who uses the internet should be able to relate to. Today we heard how to use live (as in flying) kestrels as a building material, how beauty of a population was directly correlated to naval power, how partying (hard) can be an effective treatment for infection control in a world of antibiotic resistance, how to choose (or perhaps predict?) who gets to use a lifeboat based on a genetic score, the reversing the Earth's spin as a solution to climate change and finally how hardened unwashed cereal could be used as a replacement for steel.
Five years is a long time and as such I didn't recognise any of the speakers, although Matt Parker was still in full swing as the MC. The whole thing was so easy, so quick and so hilarious I cannot imagine not attending in the future.
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