The Ig Nobel Prizes

by Abrahams, Marc

• ISBN13: 9780525947530
• ISBN10: 0525947531
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-09-29
• Publisher: E P Dutton

Summary

A sidesplitting compendium that pays tribute to those individuals whose scientific achievements cannot or should not be reproduced. Everyone knows about the Nobel Prizes, those prestigious awards that recognize the world's most talented and innovative minds. Unfortunately, not all of the hopeful thinkers and academics around the globe can become Nobel Laureates, but some are lucky enough to win the esteemed Ig Nobel Prizeinstead. Their unbelievable accomplishments are now documented in glorious detail in The Ig Nobel Prizes: The Annals of Improbable Research. Drawn from the world's wackiest actual scientific research, The Ig Nobel Prizesdemonstrates the extreme measures people will take in the quest for knowledge. Recent Ig Nobel honorees include: * The professor who won the Ig Nobel Prize in Physics for a study proving that toast falls buttered side down more often. * The Southern Baptist Church of Alabama, which won the Ig Nobel Prize in Mathematics for devising a formula to determine how many Alabamans will go to Hell. * The Australian man who successfully patented the wheel, and the Australian Patent Office that granted it. For this act, they were jointly awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in Technology. This hilarious book features these endeavors and many more, along with photographs from the annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremonies at Harvard University. An entertaining exhibition of brains and determination, The Ig Nobel Prizesis the ideal gift for anyone who first wants to laugh and then wants to think.

Author Biography

Marc Abrahams is the editor and cofounder of the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), its online counterpart www.improbable.com, and the monthly e-newsletter mini-AIR. The father and master of ceremonies of the annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony at Harvard University, Abrahams has a degree in applied mathematics from Harvard.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
What's an Ig?	p. 2
How It Began, Briefly	p. 3
How the Winners Are Chosen	p. 4
The Ceremony	p. 5
Controversy	p. 9
How to Read This Book	p. 12
Medical Breakthroughs	p. 15
Failure of Electric Shock Treatment for Rattlesnake Envenomation	p. 16
Nose Picking in Adolescents	p. 19
Elevator Music Prevents the Common Cold	p. 23
Psychology and Intelligence	p. 27
A Forbidding Experiment: Spitting, Chewing Gum, and Pigeons	p. 28
Ignorance Is Bliss	p. 31
Economics	p. 35
Squeezing Orange County/Bringing Down Barings	p. 36
The Good Lloyd's Shepherds Insure Disaster	p. 40
Dying to Save Taxes	p. 43
Enron--and Then Some (and Then None)	p. 46
Peace--Diplomacy and Persuasion	p. 51
The Levitating Crime Fighters	p. 52
Daryl Gates, the Gandhi of Los Angeles	p. 55
Stalin World	p. 59
Peaceful Ejaculations and Explosions	p. 63
Booming Voices of Britain	p. 64
Father of the Bomb	p. 67
Pacific Kaboom	p. 70
Love and/or Reproduction	p. 73
The Compulsive Biochemistry of Love	p. 74
High-Velocity Birth	p. 78
Taking Fatherhood in Hand	p. 82
Insert Here	p. 86
Height, Penile Length, and Foot Size	p. 90
Discoveries--Basic Science	p. 93
The Happiness of Clams	p. 94
Cold Fusion in Chickens	p. 97
Mini-Dinosaurs, Mini-Princesses	p. 101
The Remembrance of Water Passed	p. 106
Discoveries--Things That Rise or Fall	p. 111
Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts	p. 112
The Fall of Buttered Toast	p. 116
The Collapse of Toilets in Glasgow	p. 120
Levitating Frogs	p. 124
Troy and the Grizzly Bear	p. 127
Troy and the Grizzly Bear	p. 128
Inventions	p. 133
The Most Inventive Salesman	p. 134
The Kitty and the Keyboard	p. 138
Patenting the Wheel	p. 141
Hellish Technicalities	p. 145
Who Is Going to Hell	p. 146
Mikhail Gorbachev Is the Antichrist	p. 149
Scents and Sensibility	p. 155
The Self-Perfuming Business Suit	p. 156
Filter-Equipped Underwear	p. 159
Food for Thought	p. 163
Extremely Instant Barbecue	p. 164
Sogginess at Breakfast	p. 167
The Effects of Ale, Garlic, and Soured Cream on the Appetite of Leeches	p. 170
No Need for Food	p. 174
How to Make a Cup of Tea, Officially	p. 178
The Sociology of Canadian Donut Shops	p. 183
The Optimal Way to Dunk a Biscuit	p. 186
Education	p. 191
Banning the Beaker	p. 192
Deepak Chopra	p. 195
Dan Quayle	p. 199
Literature	p. 201
976 Coauthors in Search of a Title	p. 202
The Father of Junk E-mail	p. 204
Appendices	p. 209
Year-by-Year List of Winners	p. 210
How to Nominate Someone	p. 229
The Web Site	p. 231
About the Annals of Improbable Research	p. 232
Acknowledgments	p. 234
Index	p. 237
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

IntroductionThis book exists because itís difficult to believe that these people really did these things. So, here is the evidence. Here are detailed accounts of a good many of the Ig Nobel Prize winners, and what they did, and the reasons (or, if you prefer, the ìreasonsî) why they did what they did.These triumphs of persistence over improbability beg for some sort of short, bracing introduction. Therefore, here is an introductory chapter in which you will find: ï Whatís an Ig? ï How It Began, Briefly ï How the Winners Are Chosen ï The Ceremony ï Controversy ï How to Read This Book Whatís an Ig?Some people covet it, others flee from it. Some see it as a hallmark of civilization, others as a scuff mark. Some laugh with it, others laugh at it. Many praise it, a few condemn it, others are just mystified. And many people are madly in love with it.It is the Ig Nobel Prize.Everything that has won an Ig Nobel Prize shares this quality: it first makes people LAUGH, then makes them THINK. What people think is up to them.The winners are a varied lot. Doesnít matter if what theyíve done is naughty or nice, important or inconsequential, intelligent or idiotic, famous or forgotten. If they have done something that first makes people LAUGH, then makes them THINK, thatís all it takes.The winners and their achievements are akin to what Sherlock Holmes craved in his famous collection of newspaper clippings:ìHe took down the great book in which, day by day, he filed the agony columns of the various London journals. ëDear me!í said he, turning over the pages, ëwhat a chorus of groans, cries, and bleatings! What a rag-bag of singular happenings! But surely the most valuable hunting-ground that ever was given to a student of the unusual!í îBut Sherlock Holmes was of course fictional. The Ig Nobel Prize winners are real. Each year, ten Ig Nobel Prizes are awarded to people whose achievements ìcannot or should not be reproduced.î The ìIgsî (as they are known) honor people who have done remarkably goofy thingsósome admirable, some perhaps otherwise.These things can be difficult to believe. That is why the Ig Nobel Board of Governors publishes information that you can use to verify and savor the details.That is also why the winners are invited to come to the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, which is held each October at Harvard University. The winners must travel at their own expense, and for many it is apparently worth the cost. A friendly, standing-room-only audience of 1,200 welcomes them with warm wild applause, and paper airplanes.In a unique ritual, genuine Nobel Laureates physically hand the Ig Nobel Prizes to the new Ig Nobel Prize winners. Each time this occurs, it is a magical instantóat that moment it feels as if the universe has two opposite ends, and these two opposite ends have somehow managed to meet and touch. Nobel Laureate and Ig Nobel Laureate look each other in the eye, each filled with gleeful wonder. How It Began, BrieflyThe Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony was born not long after I unexpectedly became the editor of a magazine called The Journal of Irreproducible Results. The Journal was started in 1955 by Alex Kohn and Harry Lipkin, two eminent and very funny scientists in Israel, but it eventually fell into other hands and withered to near-extinction. In 1990, I mailed off some articles to see whether this journal (which I had never seen) still existed, and if so whether it might print them. Several weeks later came a telephone message from a man who said he was the publisher, that heíd gotten the articles, and would I be the magazineís editor.As the editor of a science magazine, even a funny one, I was besieged by people who wanted my help in winning a Nobel Prize. I always explained that I had no influence on these matters, but they invariably told me in great detail what