June 24, 2004
These awards remind me of my love/hate relationship with academia
by Liza Sabater
I was going to publish this as a sidelink but The Ig Nobel Prizes merit a shout out all to themselves. Whenever I feel like my life is useless, I always head over to this Harvard housed website. The 2001 Winners of the Ig Nobel Prize were definitely an extra frothy creme de la creme group with each winner topping the next one in absurdity. My pick for 2001? I can't decide if it's the Peace Prize to Stalin World, the Literature Prize to the Apostrophe Protection Society or a partial solution to the question, why do shower curtains billow inwards?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm procrastinating a bit, but really, when I'm down, there is nothing like reading an IgNoble prize white paper. How can you not appreciate the time an effort spent on "An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces" or on the devastating discovery that Chickens prefer beautiful humans ; especially if the scientists where not beautiful? How can you not respect a guy who gets paid to look at men's balls to study the "Scrotal Asymmetry in Man and in Ancient Sculpture"? How not to marvel at people in lab coats getting paid to look at people having sex --and take pictures too!-- for a paper titled Magnetic resonance imaging of male and female genitals during coitus and female sexual arousal?
My all time favorite excuse of an academic paper? C.W. Moeliker, of Natuurmuseum Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for documenting the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck. That beats the 2002 award in Economics to Enron et al for the use of imaginary numbers in accounting practices and the 2000 Peace prize to the British Royal Navy, for ordering its sailors to stop using live cannon shells, and to instead just shout "Bang!"
Update: The next IgNobles are on September 30th, 2004 @ Harvard.
Posted by Liza Sabater in Humor, Science
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