Not quite, he (Donald L. Unger) won an Ig Nobel prize, a satirical version of the Nobel prize, given to "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think". Basically anything that sounds way too silly but can still yield useful knowledge.

While silly, it's still (usually) all based on proper scientific method, and there's even an example of a man who first won the Ig Nobel prize in physics in 2000 (for levitating a frog with magnets), and then later went to win the Nobel prize in physics together with Konstantin Novoselov for their work on graphene. =)

Kawasaki introduced Jet Skis in 1972, so they could have had them in 1978, easily.

Hopefully it'll never come to that. Not because I dislike English as a general rule, but any language where the words you write only bear a passing semblance to how they're actually said out loud isn't a good, practical basis for a world language. What I mean is that almost every letter that's used in the English language can be pronounced in several different ways depending on what the surrounding letters are, or even written the same but depending on how you pronounce them can mean different things (heteronyms like for example bass the fish and bass the instrument/frequency). Then there are silent letters and all sorts of weird combinations of sounds.

The best basis for a proper world language would include at least a writing system where for one thing each letter in the alphabet directly corresponds to a specific sound and is always pronounced the same way (e.g. Japanese hiragana and katakana for example, or the Finnish alphabet), but also takes into consideration stuff like being syntactically unambiguous, the counting system being geared towards working as smoothly as possible with the SI-system, among other things.

English isn't that great of a language from a usability standpoint at the end of the day, the only thing it really has going for itself is that it's popular, but so is Chinese...