October 10, 2005

The IgNoble Awards have been announced!
by Liza Sabater

Another year has come and gone and another batch of the scientifically dubious and infamous has been crowned. The Winners of the Ig Nobel Prize is like a massive clusterfuck of Nobel Prize winners going full Monty Python for a whole weekend at that sanctuary of all things geeky, Harvard University.

The awards are bestowed to works on a variety of toipics : Agricultural History, Medicine, Literature, Biology, Nutrition and Fluid Dynmics; the constants being the awards in Physics, Economics and Peace.

What is amazing about these awards is that they are given to scientific papers or articles that have actually been published. Stefano Ghirlanda, Liselotte Jansson, and Magnus Enquist of Stockholm University did publish a report in Human Nature journal about how "Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans."

Then there are the cultural phenomena like the 2002 Economics prize to "executives, corporate directors, and auditors of Enron, Lernaut & Hauspie [Belgium], Adelphia, Bank of Commerce and Credit International [Pakistan], Cendant, CMS Energy, Duke Energy, Dynegy, Gazprom [Russia], Global Crossing, HIH Insurance [Australia], Informix, Kmart, Maxwell Communications [UK], McKessonHBOC, Merrill Lynch, Merck, Peregrine Systems, Qwest Communications, Reliant Resources, Rent-Way, Rite Aid, Sunbeam, Tyco, Waste Management, WorldCom, Xerox, and Arthur Andersen, for adapting the mathematical concept of imaginary numbers for use in the business world. "

My favorite picks of this years awards are for artificial testicles for dogs, viral entreprenurial literature and Star Wars loving locusts:

MEDICINE: Gregg A. Miller of Oak Grove, Missouri, for inventing Neuticles
-- artificial replacement testicles for dogs, which are available
in three sizes, and three degrees of firmness.
REFERENCES: US Patent #5868140, and the book Going
Going NUTS!, by Gregg A. Miller, PublishAmerica, 2004, ISBN 1413753167.
ACCEPTING: "The winner was unable to travel, and deliverd his acceptance
speech via videotape."

LITERATURE: The Internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria, for creating and then
using e-mail to distribute a bold series of short stories, thus introducing
millions of readers to a cast of rich characters -- General Sani Abacha, Mrs.
Mariam Sanni Abacha, Barrister Jon A Mbeki Esq., and others -- each
of whom requires just a small amount of expense money so as to obtain access
to the great wealth to which they are entitled and which they would like
to share with the kind person who assists them.

PEACE: Claire Rind and Peter Simmons of Newcastle University, in the U.K., for electrically
monitoring the activity of a brain cell in a locust while that locust
was watching selected highlights from the movie "Star Wars."
REFERENCE: "Orthopteran
DCMD Neuron: A Reevaluation of Responses to Moving Objects. I. Selective
Responses to Approaching Objects," F.C. Rind and P.J. Simmons, Journal
of Neurophysiology, vol. 68, no. 5, November 1992, pp. 1654-66.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Claire Rind

These awards just make geekatude cool. So cool that Roy Glauber, the guy sweeping in the picture above, just won a Nobel Prize in Physics!

Grock, that's not just cool, it's sexy hot.

If the biggest sexual organ is the brain, then Yes! geeks are the best studmuffins around.

Posted by Liza Sabater in Humor, Memes, Parody, Science
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