It’s October, which means not only that I am now getting up in the dark, but that it is time for the Ig Nobel Prizes, given annually by the Annals of Improbable Research “For achievements that first make people LAUGH then make them THINK” (apparently IN CAPITAL LETTERS).
The 2008 prizes were handed out last Thursday at Harvard by “genuine, genuinely bemused Nobel Laureates.” The ceremony also featured the “World premiere for the very first time of the mini-opera ‘Redundancy, Again’,” and the 24/7 lectures, “in which several of the world’s top thinkers each explains his or her subject twice: FIRST: a complete technical description in TWENTY-FOUR (24) SECONDS AND THEN: a clear summary that anyone can understand, in SEVEN (7) WORDS.” (And, presumably, IN CAPITAL LETTERS.)
My favorite this year is the Nutrition Prize, which went to Massimiliano Zampini of the University of Trento, Italy and Charles Spence of Oxford University “for electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip to make the person chewing the chip believe it to be crisper and fresher than it really is.” Apparently the louder the crunch, the fresher people believe the chip is. I can’t wait to see what the fast-food industry does with this knowledge.
New ammunition in the ongoing war between cat-lovers and dog-lovers emerged from the Biology Prize winner: French scientists discovered that the fleas that live on a dog can jump higher than the fleas that live on a cat. This either means that dogs are superior because their blood gives fleas more strength, or that cats are superior because fleas try harder to get away from dogs than they do from cats. I’ll reserve judgment.
Research has already shown that people think high-priced wine tastes better than low-priced wine, even when the “high-priced wine” they’re drinking is cheap plonk. Further proof humans are really, really shallow comes from the research that won the Medicine Prize, which demonstrated that high-priced fake medicine (oh, all right, “placebos,” if you prefer) is more effective than low-priced fake medicine.
The Peace Prize went to the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology and the citizens of Switzerland for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity. (Except dandelions. Sprawling everywhere, letting themselves go to seed, littering with abandon–they’re slobs.)
The Archaeology Prize went to Brazilian researchers who measured how the contents of an archaeological dig site can be scrambled by the actions of a live armadillo. I suspect the researchers just happened to have a live armadillo and didn’t know what else to do with it. Or maybe they just like saying the word armadillo. I know I do. “Armadillo armadillo armadillo.” Fun!
The Cognitive Science Prize went to researchers from Japan (plus one from Hungary) who discovered that slime molds can solve puzzles. So the next time you have trouble finishing the New York Times crossword, try leaving it out in your garden overnight.
The Economics Prize went to a trio of Americans who discovered that a professional lap dancer’s ovulatory cycle affects her tip earnings. I’d prefer not to know their research methods.
The Physics Prize went to the U.S. researchers who proved mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots. It’s nice to have mathematical proof of something I demonstrate experimentally every morning by brushing my daughter’s hair.
The Chemistry Prize went to a trio of American researchers who discovered Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide–and to a trio of Taiwanese researchers who discovered it is not, that even the most time-honored and trusted truisms of science are subject to modification when new data are obtained.
And finally, the Literature Prize went to David Sims of London for his “lovingly written study” “You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations.”
The abstract to his paper states, “The time comes when we lose interest in trying to understand, and conclude that another person is behaving in a way that is simply unacceptable.” I would have read more, but I just couldn’t put up with his arrant nonsense any longer.
Since you’re probably feeling the same way about this column, I’ll end it here.
