Tag Archives: Ig Nobel Awards

The Uprising: the movie and the revolt it’s based on

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The movie The Uprising, about medieval England’s Peasants Revolt, has gotten some lousy reviews but it won’t get one from me. I haven’t seen it. I don’t see why that should disqualify me, but I’m not a reviewer and in any case it would surely be harder to review a movie I haven’t seen than one I have. So I’ll refrain. I’m still recovering from Covid and if an easy way is available, I’ll take it.

But none of that will stop me from riding the coattails of the People of 1381 database and an article about it in The Conversation, which in its turn is shamelessly riding the coattails of the movie.

The article tells us that the Peasants Revolt wasn’t exactly a peasants revolt. It was a revolt involving people from pretty much all classes below the aristocracy. That included peasants–lots of peasants, since society was laden with them–but it wasn’t limited to them and it might not’ve been led by them. You know how it is: in a hierarchical society, you might have to look a few rungs up the ladder before you find the skills needed to lead a good rebellion. You might also find that the people a few rungs up are used to leading and the people a few rungs down to following. 

Reeve and serfs. Compliments of Wikimedia.

Or you might not. In any society, plenty of talent is clinging to the lower rungs, waiting for its chance. The truth is that I haven’t led any good rebellions lately, so I was basing that last paragraph on the purest of cultural biases. It’s easy to imagine the gentry–those folks below the level of the aristocracy but well above the peasantry–leading. It’s also easy to imagine them getting shoved aside by people whose grievances weren’t identical with theirs and who wanted their own needs addressed and their talents given room to expand. 

 

What do we actually know?

The rebellion was broad-based, which made it dangerous. It involved a wide spread of classes and drew from both the countryside and the towns and cities. It also covered a wide geographical area: uprisings uprose in more than half of England’s counties. 

If you’ve been Notes for a while and are getting a feeling of deja vu, that’s because I’ve written about the Peasants Revolt before, drawing on the same source but without the excuse of a big-budget movie. You can find the posts here and here.

Well-heeled rebels included Thomas atte Raven, who was a Member of Parliament; Sir Roger Bacon, who was a sir; and Joanna Ferrour, who owned substantial property and was the former wife of an MP. In London, the rebels included council members and officers of various guilds, which translates to people who had some amount of money and power.

But Wat Tyler, the best known of the uprising’s leaders, doesn’t seem to have been well heeled. As far as the People of 1381 has been able to patch his history together, he was a former soldier and had probably been a tiler. The other well-known leader, John Ball, was a priest (possibly an excommunicated one) whose theology included social equality. That put him in conflict with both church and state. 

None of that proves that the leadership was from the upper classes, only that it included some people who were. Make of it what you can. The upper classes tend to carve a deeper mark in the historical records, making them easier to trace.

Wat Tyler’s (probable) background points out what is, from a government’s perspective, one of the problems with wars. You need all these people to go and fight in them, so you make soldiers of whoever your lower classes are. In spite of whatever cartoons you and I have seen, in the middle ages the peasantry did more than wave pitchforks and yell at the enemy. Archers–ordinary peasants and laborers–were the backbone of the English fighting forces. 

At some point, you (you’re the government, remember) send those soldiers home, and guess what: they still know how to think and fight like soldiers. And if they come home with no prospects of making a life for themselves, they’re likely to be on the grumpy side. As they were in the years leading up to 1381. All that skill and all that anger was running around loose. And they came home to a troubled land.

 

What was going on?

The country had been through the Black Death, in which as much as half the population died. Among other things, that left a lot of agricultural land available and shifted power from the lords toward the serfs, who were suddenly in a position to negotiate with the lords, who were of course the landowners. The feudal system was crumbling. 

No cloud but has a silver lining, right?

That created a group of peasants who were better off than they used to be but were held back by the remnants of the feudal system. They had no interest in playing by the old rules and weren’t happy. 

Rural and urban laborers weren’t happy either. They wanted–actually, they needed–better pay and were mad enough to spit tax over the Statute of Labourers, the 1351 attempt to hold down wages. Then in 1380, along came a poll tax–a tax on everyone’s poll, or head. The poorest and the richest were expected to pay the same amount. You can pretty well figure out who was angry about that and who wasn’t. I could go on, but basically we’re looking at a country ready to boil over. The king, or at least his government, had managed to infuriate level after level of people. 

If the rebellion had gone on long enough or been in a position to take power, those varied grievances and interests would almost certainly have meant splits among the rebels, but it didn’t last long enough and we can paint a heroic picture without those contradictory details. It’s perfect for a big-budget picture if you have a few million dollars–or pounds–that you want to invest. 

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The Ig Nobels

New and unrelated topic: Now that the Nobel prizes have been soberly awarded, it’s time to turn back the clock and consider this year’s Ig Nobels. The winners included a study establishing that the parents of babies think their kids smell wonderful but the parents of teenagers don’t, and a study in which 1,000 people buried two pairs of cotton underpants and six teabags for 30 (one pair, with associated teabags) and 60 (second pair, with ditto) days to test soil health. 

Settle down at the back of the room, please. This is science and it established that the underpants index is as reliable a way to measure soil health as the standard teabag index. 

Another study compared people’s social status to their tendency to unethical behavior–cutting off pedestrians and other drivers; taking candy meant for children in another lab; lying about their scores on rolls of the dice. It established that upper class participants not only were less ethical and felt more entitled but saw greed as a positive thing. 

And then there was a study that involved stepping on venomous snakes to demonstrate something or other. The snakes don’t find any of this amusing and expect their study of human entitlement to win an award next year.

Winners’ speeches were limited to 60 seconds and five top scientists explained their work twice, first in 24 seconds and then in 7 words. 

The winners of the underpants study were each presented with a pair of men’s Y-fronts, either because the awards committee was entirely male and couldn’t imagine any other kind of underpants or because they all agreed that Y-fronts are funnier than other cotton undies.

This was the first year the awards ceremony was held outside the US. Last year, ten of the winning teams weren’t allowed into the country. In fact, the lab group of one of this year’s winners, which included people from Uzbekistan, India, and Nigeria, would’ve faced travel bans and visa difficulties barring all but two of them from the U.S. 

“We had to move it to a friendlier place,” said Marc Abrahams, founder and master of ceremonies of the Igs and editor of the scientific humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research. The organizers settled on Switzerland. 

What tea bag makes the best cup of tea, and other British dilemmas

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Every year, Britain’s consumer champion, the oddly named Which?, does a blind test of the nation’s teabags and picks a winner. Because, folks, this is important. You’re a consumer. You need the experts’ opinion on this before you wander cluelessly into a supermarket and buy the tea you, in your ignorance, think you like.

Besides, Which? gets some free publicity out of it. 

This year, in what one headline called a “shock result,” a budget tea, Asda’s Everyday–the cheapest of the contestants–came in first. The high-end Twinings was in joint last place with it doesn’t matter who. What does matter is that Twinings’ tea bags cost four times more than Asda’s. 

My favorite, Yorkshire, wandered in somewhere between the two. 

What qualities do the experts judge tea on? Color. Aroma, Appearance. Taste’s on the list somewhere. Ability to boot you into consciousness first thing in the morning isn’t.

Irrelevant photo: Last week’s post also had an irrelevant picture of Fast Eddie, but surely it’s not possible for a childless cat lady (who’re you calling a lady, asshole?) to post too many cat pictures. So here’s Fast Eddie in slow mode.

The advice column

If you’re in the market for free advice, allow me to offer you this: never try to communicate in an accent or dialect you didn’t come by honestly. I mention this because a local council–in non-British English, that’s a governmental body–tried to use the local dialect for an anti-littering campaign and got it wrong. In very large type.

The North Yorkshire Council put up signs–hundreds of the beasts–urging people to “Gerrit in’t bin’” 

Oops. That should’ve been “Gerrit in t’bin.”

What’s with the “t’”? It’s short for the and it’s a Yorkshire thing. 

Why? 

Why not? There’s no arguing with accents or dialects. They are what they are and they do what they do. 

But let’s not take anything for granted: “gerrit” means get it. “Bin”? It’s what I grew up called the garbage can–that thing you throw trash in. But that’s a Britishism, not Yorkshire’s own invention

To be fair to the council, I don’t know that they’re not from Yorkshire. They may just be people who had some apostrophes to spare and got caught dropping one in the wrong place. As I understand the apostrophe process, we’re born with a certain number and the instructions about how to use them were written by Ikea. So as the years go by, some people get desperate, and they drop theirs in any spot that looks likely. Or if not likely, possible.

It’s not entirely their fault.

A lot of the posters were put up in tourist sites on the theory, no doubt, that visitors would be charmed by a bit of local color, but whether the visitors are looking at the original version or the corrected one, 76.3% are locked in place while they try to unscramble the letters and think, What????

 

The ghost of prime ministers past

Fifty-six days after he became Britain’s prime minister and moved into his new office, Keir Starmer had a portrait of a former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, moved out. Apparently short of things to get outraged about, Conservative Party leaders pitched a fit.

But since I’ve been making fun of people’s apostrophe use, I should be careful about this: if multiple people do that thing I just mentioned, do they pitch a single collective fit or multiple individual ones?

Either way, they accused Starmer of being vindictive and petty, of spending his time rearranging the furniture instead of governing, and of appeasing the left wing of his party. 

To which the left wing of his party said, “If only.

That kept the news cycle fed for nearly a day, but when the nation failed to rise up in arms the outrage machine went into sleep mode, during which it appears to be doing nothing but is in fact searching the internet for new and surely more popular sources of potential outrage.

 

The Ig Nobels

A winner of this year’s Ig Nobel Awards, Saul Justin Newman, from University College Lonon, reports that the claims about extreme aging–living past 110–are, to be scientific about it, mostly bullshit. 

“I’ve tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world,” he said. “(The other 20% are from countries you can’t meaningfully analyse). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. In the US there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only about 10% have a death certificate.”

To be clear: he only looked for death certificates for the people believed to be dead. The ones who were still alive? It’s pretty much expected that they wouldn’t have one yet.

A lot of the over-110s are concentrated in blue zones, where a startling number people are said to live past 100. “For almost 20 years, they have been marketed to the public. They’re the subject of tons of scientific work, a popular Netflix documentary, tons of cookbooks about things like the Mediterranean diet, and so on.”

But in a 2010 review by the Japanese government, “82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. The secret to living to 110 was, don’t register your death.”

Don’t have anyone else register it either.

Okinawa, which was supposed to be a hotspot of extreme aging, turned out to have the worst health in Japan. The best way to find concentrations of super-agers in Okinawa super-agers is to figure out where the halls of records were bombed during World War II. 

“If the person dies [in the bombing], they stay on the books of some other national registry, which hasn’t confirmed their death. Or if they live, they go to an occupying government that doesn’t speak their language, works on a different calendar and screws up their age.”

As for hotspots in Italy and Greece, “By my estimates at least 72% of centenarians were dead, missing or essentially pension-fraud cases. . . . [In Greece], over 9,000 people over the age of 100 are dead and collecting a pension at the same time. In Italy, some 30,000 ‘living’ pension recipients were found to be dead in 1997.”

In England, several low-income areas–”the worst places to be an old person”–have a high number of people over 100 but surprisingly few 90-year-olds. Unfortunately, if you’re going to live to 100, one of the requirements is that you have to live through your 90s first, even if there’s no glory in it.

So will getting an Ig Nobel get people to take his research seriously? 

“I hope so. But even if not, at least the general public will laugh and think about it, even if the scientific community is still a bit prickly and defensive. If they don’t acknowledge their errors in my lifetime, I guess I’ll just get someone to pretend I’m still alive until that changes.”