May I have the envelope please…it’s time to once again inform my faithful readers of the results of the Ig Nobel Prizes, given annually by the science humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research to those who have done something that first makes people laugh, then makes them think.
This year’s winners received a solid gold bar–which, alas, was only one nanometer (one billionth of a meter) long–encased in a clear plastic cube.
The Engineering Ig Nobel provided long-overdue recognition to the late Edward A. Murphy, Jr., the late John Paul Stapp, and George Nichols, all involved in the creation and popularization, in 1949, of Murphy’s Law: “If anything can go wrong, it will.”
Murphy’s Law deserves a whole column, but, briefly, it arose from rocket-sled tests designed to see what kind of impact pilots could survive if properly restrained–the rocket sled accelerated to enormous speeds, then was stopped very suddenly. Stapp headed up the project and rode the sled; Nichols was an engineer; and Murphy came on board briefly because he had designed some strain gauges that should have provided more accurate G-force measurements–except they didn’t work, because they had been put together wrong. Murphy, talking about the technicians who built the instruments, said something like, “If there’s any way they can do it wrong, they will.” At a press conference a few weeks later, Col. Stapp said no one had been killed or seriously injured because “We do all of our work in consideration of Murphy’s Law,” which, of course, he then had to explain. Murphy’s Law caught the media’s and public’s fancy, and a legend was born.
The Physics Ig Nobel went to an Australian research team for their study, “An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces.” They discovered that it’s easier to drag sheep downhill than over a level surface–important knowledge if you’re a sheep shearer!
The award in Medicine went to a team from University College London, for showing that the brains of London taxi drivers, who must memorize a map of London, are more highly developed than normal.
The Psychology winners were two researchers from the University of Rome, and one from Stanford, for their report “Politicians’ Uniquely Simple Personalities.” (To be fair, the report doesn’t say politicians have simple personalities, just that voters construct their view of politicians’ personalities using fewer elements than the five that psychologists believe are necessary to construct a fully rounded personality model.)
The Literature Ig Nobel went to John Trinkaus of the Zicklin School of Business in New York City, who’s more than 80 detailed academic reports answer such burning questions as “What percentage of young people wear baseball caps with the peak facing to the rear rather than to the front?”, “What percentage of shoppers exceed the number of items permitted in a supermarket’s express checkout lane?”, and “What percentage of automobile drivers almost, but not completely, come to a stop at one particular stop sign?”.
On a grander scale, the award in Economics went to Karl Schwärzler and the nation of Liechtenstein, which is now available for rent for corporate conventions, weddings, bar mitzvahs and other gatherings. The $190,000 U.S. fee includes all 450-or-so hotel rooms, plus access to restaurants, meeting places and sports facilities, which can be temporarily re-branded with your logo.
The Peace Ig Nobel went to Lal Bihari of Uttar Pradesh, India, for his efforts to return from the dead and forming the Association of Dead People. (Apparently thousands of people in India have been declared legally dead, usually as part of a swindle by relatives and corrupt officials to steal their land. It took Bihari eight years, but he was finally able to prove he was alive and regain his land.)
Finally, three awards are really for the birds. In Chemistry, Yukio Hirose of Kanazawa University in Japan won for his chemical investigation of a bronze statue that fails to attract pigeons. In Biology, the award went to C.W. Moeliker of Natuurmuseum Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for documenting the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck (about which the less said the better). And finally, the award in Interdisciplinary Research went to a team from Stockholm University for their report, “Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans,” which proved that chickens and college students have the same sexual preferences…um, let me rephrase that; it proved that chickens show preferences for faces consistent with human sexual preferences (obtained from university students).
Do humans, vice versa, prefer beautiful chickens? Perhaps someone is already working on Ig Nobel-worthy research that will provide the answer.
