A nasty blizzard has swept through the Black Hills, leading to two back-to-back school cancellations, something unheard of in my time at Komplexify U. In any event, this left me with plenty of time to do research and get caught up on my classes, which meant, of course, that I screwed around on Teh Internets and wasted the opportunity.
For example, everyone has probably heard of the Darwin Awards, which honor those idiotic humans who do a service to the long-term survival of the species by eliminating themselves from it. For example, a Darwin Award from 1998 involves a guy who snuck into the Mammoth Mountain ski run to go sledding at 3 AM but, forgetting to bring a sled, improvised one by yanking off the protective yellow foam padding at the base of one of the ski towers. He then sledded down the mountain in the dark and died when he crashed into the only unpadded ski tower on the run.
Of course, most of the Darwin Awards read like mean-spirited urban legends, and few provide explicit substantiation, and I tend to chalk them up to being funny stories as opposed to real awards. (In particular, how do you host an awards ceremony in which every recipient is dead, or at the very least, has painfully rendered his- or herself sterile? Or more to the point, who would attend?)
Thus, I was extremely pleased to discover the Ig Nobel Prizes, an honest-to-God awards ceremony sponsored by the Annals of Improbable Research, the Harvard Computer Society, and the Harvard-Racliffe Society of Physicists and held each October to award ten achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” This year’s winners:
- The Ig Nobel Physics Prize went to a pair of San Diegans for proving mathematically that string (hair, MP3 ear-buds, etc.) will, if left to its own devices, inevitably and hopelessly tangle itself into knots. Suck on that, Epicureans! [reference]
- The Ig Nobel Nutrition Prize went to two scientists who electronically modified the sound of a potato chip to fool the person chewing it into thinking it was better and fresher than it actually was. I think they should be awarded a (genuine) Nobel Prize if they can extend this work to Hollywood movies. [reference]
- The Ig Nobel Peace Prize went to the people of Switzerland for writing to law in their national constitution that plants have dignity. Even the nipplewort, knobwood and shagbark. [reference].
- The Ig Noble Archaeology Prize was awarded to two Brazilian archaeologists for quantifying how the course of human history, or at least our understanding of it, can be distorted by armadillos. Skynet, take notes! [reference]
- The Ig Nobel Biology Prize went to a group of French scientists who discovered that fleas living on dogs can jump higher than fleas living on cats. Then again, given that the average dog is taller than the average cat, maybe that’s how they got up there in the first place. Recount! [reference]
- The Ig Nobel Medicine Prize went to a gaggle of doctors who discovered that really expensive fake medicine is more effective than cheap fake medicine. So only buy the priciest ginko biloba from now on. [reference]
- The Ig Nobel Cognitive Science Prize was awarded to the discovery by Japanese scientists that slime mold can solve mazes. Next up, bath scum that can solve Sudoku. [reference]
- The Ig Noble Chemistry Prize, which is jointly awarded to an American team of scientists that discovered that Coco-Cola is an effective spermicide and a Taiwanese team of scientists that discovered the exact opposite. “Can’t beat the real thing,” indeed. [reference and countereference]
- The Ig Nobel Literature Prize was awarded to David Sims for his poetically entitled You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations. Read up, bitch.
My personal favorite?
- The Ig Nobel Economics Prize, which went to a UNM team who discovered that professional lap dancers earn higher tips when they’re ovulating [reference].
I’m not exactly sure how sure how these guys pitched this to get it funded, but clearly I’ve picked the wrong branch of science in which to specialize.
