Ignoble accomplishments

[Guest]

I was researching Kansas for a faculty member and came upon the Annals of Improbable Research, which contained the Ig Nobel Prize page. "Every Ig Nobel Prize winner has done something that first makes people LAUGH, then makes them THINK." I only posted my faves. Enjoy, Perdita

The 2003 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

PHYSICS: Jack Harvey, John Culvenor, Warren Payne, Steve Cowley, Michael Lawrance, David Stuart, and Robyn Williams of Australia, for their irresistible report "An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces."
[PUBLISHED IN: Applied Ergonomics, vol. 33, no. 6, November 2002, pp. 523-31. A copy can be downloaded from http://www.culvenor.com/]

MEDICINE: Eleanor Maguire, David Gadian, Ingrid Johnsrude, Catriona Good, John Ashburner, Richard Frackowiak, and Christopher Frith of University College London, for presenting evidence that the brains of London taxi drivers are more highly developed than those of their fellow citizens.
[PUBLISHED IN: "Navigation-Related Structural Change In the Hippocampi of Taxi Drivers," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 97, no. 8, April 11, 2000, pp. 4398-403. Also see their subsequent publications.]

CHEMISTRY: Yukio Hirose of Kanazawa University, for his chemical investigation of a bronze statue, in the city of Kanazawa, that fails to attract pigeons.

ECONOMICS: Karl Schwärzler and the nation of Liechtenstein, for making it possible to rent the entire country for corporate conventions, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and other gatherings.
REFERENCE: <www.xnet.li> and <www.rentastate.com>

INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH: Stefano Ghirlanda, Liselotte Jansson, and Magnus Enquist of Stockholm University, for their inevitable report "Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans."
[PUBLISHED IN: Human Nature, vol. 13, no. 3, 2002, pp. 383-9.]

PEACE: Lal Bihari, of Uttar Pradesh, India, for a triple accomplishment: First, for leading an active life even though he has been declared legally dead; Second, for waging a lively posthumous campaign against bureaucratic inertia and greedy relatives; and Third, for creating the Association of Dead People.

BIOLOGY: C.W. Moeliker, of Natuurmuseum Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for documenting the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck.
REFERENCE: "The First Case of Homosexual Necrophilia in the Mallard Anas platyrhynchos (Aves: Anatidae)" C.W. Moeliker, Deinsea, vol. 8, 2001, pp. 243-7.

Ig Nobel Homepage

 

[cloudy]

Where's Mathgirl? She would love the Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Where's Mathgirl? She would love the Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces.

i can't wait for the application of Dr. Hirose's anti-pidgeon protection. i wonder if my truck would look good bronzed?

-Colly

 

[Guest]

Additions from earlier years:

PHYSICS: Arnd Leike of the University of Munich, for demonstrating that beer froth obeys the mathematical Law of Exponential Decay. [REFERENCE: "Demonstration of the Exponential Decay Law Using Beer Froth," Arnd Leike, European Journal of Physics, vol. 23, January 2002, pp. 21-26.]

MEDICINE: Chris McManus of University College London, for his excruciatingly balanced report, "Scrotal Asymmetry in Man and in Ancient Sculpture." [PUBLISHED IN: Nature, vol. 259, February 5, 1976, p. 426.]

BIOLOGY: Buck Weimer of Pueblo, Colorado for inventing Under-Ease, airtight underwear with a replaceable charcoal filter that removes bad-smelling gases before they escape.

ECONOMICS: Joel Slemrod, of the University of Michigan Business School, and Wojciech Kopczuk, of University of British Columbia [and who has since moved to Columbia University], for their conclusion that people find a way to postpone their deaths if that would qualify them for a lower rate on the inheritance tax. [REFERENCE:"Dying to Save Taxes: Evidence from Estate Tax Returns on the Death Elasticity," National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. W8158, March 2001.]

LITERATURE: John Richards of Boston, England, founder of The Apostrophe Protection Society, for his efforts to protect, promote, and defend the differences between plural and possessive.

PSYCHOLOGY: Lawrence W. Sherman of Miami University, Ohio, for his influential research report "An Ecological Study of Glee in Small Groups of Preschool Children." [PUBLISHED IN: Child Development, vol. 46, no. 1, March 1975, pp. 53-61.]

ASTROPHYSICS: Dr. Jack and Rexella Van Impe of Jack Van Impe Ministries, Rochester Hills, Michigan, for their discovery that black holes fulfill all the technical requirements to be the location of Hell. [REFERENCE: The March 31, 2001 television and Internet broadcast of the "Jack Van Impe Presents" program. (at about the 12 minute mark).]

PEACE: Viliumas Malinauskus of Grutas, Lithuania, for creating the amusement park known as "Stalin World"

PHYSICS: Andre Geim of the University of Nijmegen (the Netherlands) and Sir Michael Berry of Bristol University (UK), for using magnets to levitate a frog and a sumo wrestler. [REFERENCE: "Of Flying Frogs and Levitrons" by M.V. Berry and A.K. Geim, European Journal of Physics, v. 18, 1997, p. 307-13.]

CHEMISTRY: Donatella Marazziti, Alessandra Rossi, and Giovanni B. Cassano of the University of Pisa, and Hagop S. Akiskal of the University of California (San Diego), for their discovery that, biochemically, romantic love may be indistinguishable from having severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. [REFERENCE: "Alteration of the platelet serotonin transporter in romantic love," Marazziti D, Akiskal HS, Rossi A, Cassano GB, Psychological Medicine, 1999 May;29(3):741-5.]

COMPUTER SCIENCE: Chris Niswander of Tucson, Arizona, for inventing PawSense, software that detects when a cat is walking across your computer keyboard.

PEACE: The British Royal Navy, for ordering its sailors to stop using live cannon shells, and to instead just shout "Bang!"

PHYSICS: Dr. Len Fisher of Bath, England and Sydney, Australia for calculating the optimal way to dunk a biscuit, and Professor Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck of the University of East Anglia, England, and Belgium, for calculating how to make a teapot spout that does not drip.

CHEMISTRY: Takeshi Makino, president of The Safety Detective Agency in Osaka, Japan, for his involvement with S-Check, an infidelity detection spray that wives can apply to their husbands' underwear.

ENTOMOLOGY: Mark Hostetler of the University of Florida, for his scholarly book, "That Gunk on Your Car," which identifies the insect splats that appear on automobile windows. [The book is published by Ten Speed Press.]

LITERATURE: The editors of the journal "Social Text," for eagerly publishing research that they could not understand, that the author said was meaningless, and which claimed that reality does not exist. [The paper was "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," Alan Sokal, "Social Text," Spring/Summer 1996, pp. 217-252.

ART: Don Featherstone of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, for his ornamentally evolutionary invention, the plastic pink flamingo. [REFERENCE: "Pink Flamingos: Splendor on the Grass"]

MATHEMATICS: The Southern Baptist Church of Alabama, mathematical measurers of morality, for their county-by-county estimate of how many Alabama citizens will go to Hell if they don't repent.

BIOLOGY: Paul Williams Jr. of the Oregon State Health Division and Kenneth W. Newell of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, bold biological detectives, for their pioneering study, "Salmonella Excretion in Joy-Riding Pigs." [Published in American Journal of Public Health and the Nation's Health, vol. 60, no. 5, May 1970, pp. 926-9.]

MATHEMATICS: Robert Faid of Greenville, South Carolina, farsighted and faithful seer of statistics, for calculating the exact odds (710,609,175,188,282,000 to 1) that Mikhail Gorbachev is the Antichrist. [REFERENCE: "Gorbachev! Has the Real Antichrist Come?"]

CHEMISTRY: Ivette Bassa, constructor of colorful colloids, for her role in the crowning achievement of twentieth century chemistry, the synthesis of bright blue Jell-O.

ART: Presented jointly to Jim Knowlton, modern Renaissance man, for his classic anatomy poster "Penises of the Animal Kingdom," and to the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts for encouraging Mr. Knowlton to extend his work in the form of a pop-up book.

 

[Guest]

Stalin World

Jack Womack.

 

[R. Richard]

The 2003 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

PHYSICS: Jack Harvey, John Culvenor, Warren Payne, Steve Cowley, Michael Lawrance, David Stuart, and Robyn Williams of Australia, for their irresistible report "An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces."
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Since sheep can walk and all, would it not be simpler to try to talk them into traversing at least some of the more probable surfaces under their own power?

Wait a minute! Does any of this involve black sheep? Is this a color discrimination thing? If so SHAME!