| THE IG-NOBEL
PRIZE 2004:
FARTING COMMUNICATION,
COMB-OVERS, AND KARAOKE
The Ig Nobel Prizes
2004, annouced this week, are awarded annually at Harvard
University as a spoof of the Nobel ceremony.
Now in their 14th year, the awards recognize achievements
that "cannot or should not be reproduced."
They are given to people who have done remarkably goofy things
-- some of them admirable, some perhaps otherwise.
These the awards of this year.
Communication by Farting. Among the other
winners were a team led by Magnus Wahlberg who discovered
that herrings apparently communicate by farting.
Comb-overs. Researchers who patented a comb-over
hairstyle in 1975 were top prize winners in the engineering
section of this years Ig Nobel awards. Father and son team
Frank and Donald Smith developed a method to cover partial
baldness using only the individual's own hair. The hairstyling
technique works by dividing a person's hair into three sections
and carefully folding one section over another.
Karaoke. The inventors of Karaoke were awarded
the IG-NObel prize for Peace, 2005.
Other. Steven Stack and James Gundlach won
the Medical prize for their report on The
Effect of Country Music on Suicide.
The prizes are awarded in a ceremony at Harvard, by actual
Nobel laureates. Winners traveled from Japan, Australia, Britain,
Germany, Missouri and Illinois for the award gala, which features
real Nobel laureates singing opera and handing out awards
while boisterous audience members throw paper airplanes onto
the stage.
Winners are selected from thousands of nominations by a secret
committee. If a recipient feels insulted by the award, it's
withdrawn,
The Igs are organized by the science humor magazine Annals
of Improbable Research (AIR), and co-sponsored by: the Harvard
Computer Society; the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association;
the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students.
A book is now available with the best of Improbable Research.
SEE SOME OF THE BEST PAST
IG-NOBELs !!!
|
The
Best of Annals of Improbable Research
by Abrahams
Marc, Marc Abrahams (Editor)
"Science is too human, too much fun, and too important
not to laugh at it." The Annals of Improbable
Research (and its predecessor, the Journal of Irreproducible
Results) has been making fun of science and scientists
for...
Read more |
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