Ig Nobels Awarded – Another Year Of Wacky Research
from the Friday-time-waster dept
Might as well start off the Friday news with something that is completely useless. The latest set of Ig Nobels have been handed out – and the winner in the economics category won for creating a system that would allow anyone to rent out all 450 hotel rooms in the entire country for whatever sort of party you wanted. No one has take him up on the Liechtenstein offer (at $160,000/day it’s a bit out of my range), but he has successfully rented out random villages in Austria and Germany. The folks who created “Murphy’s Law” won for best engineering achievement – though, Edward A. Murphy Jr. proved his own law by being unable to collect the award by nature of no longer being alive. Other awards went to research with such wonderful titles as: “An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces”, “Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans” and “Politicians’ Uniquely Simple Personalities.” It seems that every year there’s no shortage of nominations for these awards. The best award winning speech came from well known psychologist Philip Zimbardo (of the simple politicians paper), saying “This is a very strange thing, this Ig Nobel. I had heard vaguely about it. At first, I thought it was an insult.” Maybe he should learn to trust his first instincts.
Comments on “Ig Nobels Awarded – Another Year Of Wacky Research”
insult
I don’t believe that it’s an insult. At least, not a vicious one.
I saw the video of an Ig Noble ceremony once. The popular institution it most closely resembles would be, I think, the Friar’s Club Roast.
It’s a kind of tongue in cheek self-satire by the acedemic community. It looked like good fun and didn’t seem mean spirited at all.
No Subject Given
shouldn’t that be:
Politicians, Uniquely Simple Personalities.
At least one of the topics is useful?
The chemistry award went to a Kanazawa University professor in Japan who developed a copper alloy that repels birds. Many public places throughout the world could benefit from such alloys — replace the ugly spikes currently in use.