The Wacky World of the ig Nobel Prize Awards
Man who lived as goat for 3 days wins this years ig NOBEL PRIZE for Biology.
photo: Tim Bowditch
Tom Thwaites from the Uk had artificial goat legs made and spent 3 days making friends, and enemies of goats in a field in the Swiss Alps.
Other prizes awarded September 2016 include:
The Chemistry prize was awarded to Volkswagen for reducing vehicle emissions by producing fewer emissions whenever the cars were being tested.
The Peace Prize was awarded Gordon Pennycook and colleagues, for their scholarly study entitled 'On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit'.
The Literature Prize was collected by Fredrik Sjoberg, for his three-volume autobiographical work about 'the pleasures of collecting flies that are dead, and flies that are not yet dead**.'
Join me in a little mirth merriment and mind numbing madness whilst i draw your attention to the ig nobel awards.
For the uninitiated the Ig nobel awards are the antithesis to serious scientific research where a panel of genuine Nobel Award winners judge and make awards to a diverse range of wacky research undertakings.
The raison de etre of the Ig Nobel awards is to honor achievements that make people Laugh, and then think.
Looking back over the list of prize winners since the launch of the Ig Nobel Awards on Wikipedia I have compiled the following list of my favourite most amusing awards as listed below.
1992 Art - Jim Knowlton for his poster - Penises of the Animals
credit Icelandic Phallological Museum1992 Biology - Dr Cecil Jacobson relentlessly generous sperm donor,
and prolific patriarch of sperm banking, for devising a simple,
single-handed method of quality control.1993 Mathematics – Presented to Robert W. Faid of Greenville, South
Carolina, farsighted and faithful seer of statistics, for calculating
the exact odds (710,609,175,188,282,000 to 1) that Mikhail Gorbachev
is the Antichrist.1993 Medecine Medicine – Presented to James F. Nolan, Thomas J.
Stillwell, and John P. Sands, Jr., medical men of mercy, for their
painstaking research report, "Acute Management of the
Zipper-Entrapped Penis".1994 Literature – Presented to L. Ron Hubbard, ardent author of
science fiction and founding father of Scientology, for his crackling
Good Book, Dianetics, which is highly profitable to mankind, or to a
portion thereof.1994 Mathematics – Presented to The Southern Baptist Church of
Alabama, mathematical measurers of morality, for their
county-by-county estimate of how many Alabama citizens will go to
Hell if they don't repent1995 Economics – Presented jointly to Nick Leeson and his superiors
at Barings Bank and to Robert Citron of Orange County, California for
using the calculus of derivatives to demonstrate that every financial
institution has its limits.1996 Peace – Presented to Jacques Chirac, President of France, for
commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima with atomic bomb
tests in the Pacific.1996 Physics – Presented to Robert Matthews of Aston University,
England, for his studies of Murphy's Law, and especially for
demonstrating that toast often falls on the buttered side.1998 Biology – Presented to Peter Fong of Gettysburg College,
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, for contributing to the happiness of clams
by giving them Prozac.1998 Safety Engineering – Presented to Troy Hurtubise, of North Bay,
Ontario, for developing and personally testing a suit of armor that
is impervious to grizzly bears.1999 Science Education – Presented to the Kansas State Board of
Education and the Colorado State Board of Education, for mandating
that children should not believe in Darwin's theory of evolution any
more than they believe in Newton's theory of gravitation, Faraday's
and Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, or Pasteur's theory that
germs cause disease.2000 Computer Science – Presented to Chris Niswander of Tucson,
Arizona, for inventing PawSense, software that detects when a cat is
walking across your computer keyboard.2001 Astrophysics – Presented to Jack Van Impe and Rexella Van Impe
of Jack Van Impe Ministries, Rochester Hills, Michigan, for their
discovery that black holes fulfill all the technical requirements for
the location of Hell.2001 Biology – Presented to Buck Weimer of Pueblo, Colorado for
inventing Under-Ease, airtight underwear with a replaceable charcoal
filter that removes bad-smelling gases before they escape.2004 Peace – Presented to Daisuke Inoue of Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan,
for inventing karaoke, thereby providing an entirely new way for
people to learn to tolerate each other.2005 Chemistry – Presented jointly to Edward Cussler of the
University of Minnesota and Brian Gettelfinger of the University of
Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, for conducting a
careful experiment to settle the longstanding scientific question:
can people swim faster in syrup or in water?2006 Ornithology - Ivan R. Schwab, of the University of California,
Davis, and Philip R.A. May of the University of California, Los
Angeles, for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don't get
headaches.2007 Aviation - Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A.
Golombek, for discovering that hamsters recover from jetlag more
quickly when given Viagra.2007 Peace - The United States Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton,
Ohio, for suggesting the research and development of a "gay bomb,"
which would cause enemy troops to become sexually attracted to each
other.2008 Literature - David Sims, for his study "You Bastard: A Narrative
Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within
Organizations".2009 Economics - The directors, executives, and auditors of four
Icelandic banks—Kaupthing Bank, Landsbanki, Glitnir Bank, and Central
Bank of Iceland—for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly
transformed into huge banks, and vice versa (and for demonstrating
that similar things can be done to an entire national economy).2009 Mathematics - Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe's Reserve Bank,
for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of
numbers by having his bank print notes with denominations ranging
from one cent to one hundred trillion dollars.2009 Peace - Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg,
Michael Thali, and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern,
Switzerland, for determining whether it is better to be hit on the
head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.2010 Economics - The executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, AIG,
Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Magnetar Capital
for creating and promoting new ways to invest money—ways that
maximize financial gain and minimize financial risk for the world
economy, or for a portion thereof.2011 Literature - John Perry of Stanford University for his Theory of
Structured Procrastination, which states: "To be a high achiever,
always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing
something that's even more important."2012 Psychology - Anita Eerland, Rolf Zwaan, and Tulio Guadalupe for
their study "Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem
Smaller".2013 Psychology - Laurent Bègue, Brad Bushman, Oulmann Zerhouni,
Baptiste Subra, and Medhi Ourabah, for confirming, by experiment,
that people who think they are drunk also think they are
attractive.[182]2014 Economics - ISTAT — the Italian government's National Institute
of Statistics, for including revenue from illegal drug sales,
prostitution, smuggling, etc., in GDP reporting, in order to meet an
EU regulatory mandate.2014 Neuroscience - Jiangang Liu, Jun Li, Lu Feng, Ling Li, Shubham
Bose, Jie Tian, and Kang Lee, for trying to understand what happens
in the brains of people who see the face of Jesus in a piece of
toast.2015 Biology - Bruno Grossi, Omar Larach, Mauricio Canals, Rodrigo A.
Vásquez, José Iriarte-Díaz, for observing that when you attach a
weighted stick to the rear end of a chicken, the chicken then walks
in a manner similar to that in which dinosaurs are thought to have
walked.