She Blinded Me With Science

On Thursday 4 October 2007 The 17th First Annual Ig® Nobel Prizes were awarded at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

HUH?

What is an Ig Nobel prize?

Who awards them?

WHY?

Who cares?

The prizes are awarded by Improbable Research. They are given each year for achievements that make people laugh, and then make them think.

I'll quote from their website for the answer to WHY?

"Our goal is to make people laugh, then make them think. We also hope to spur people's curiosity, and to raise the question: How do you decide what's important and what's not, and what's real and what's not -- in science and everywhere else?

The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative -- and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology. "

As for who cares, that depends. Obviously the group that gives them does, the winners may care (although it seems some past winners are still not aware that they did win), those who believe in the idea of science for science's sake, & anyone who likes a good laugh & wants to ponder why it made them laugh. In short, maybe all of us.

(NOTE: I am not going to debate the question of who & why the research was funded? Nor am I going to debate the question should it even have been done? That is for another time & place. All I will say that as crazy as some of the research seems, there are 1 or 2 over the years that i can see having some practical applications. On the other hand, do we need to encourage people who come up with things like Pink Flamingos? [1996 winner])

Anyhow, here are the 2007 winners (& other pertanant info):

MEDICINE: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, USA, for their penetrating medical report "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects."REFERENCE: "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects," Brian Witcombe and Dan Meyer, British Medical Journal, December 23, 2006, vol. 333, pp. 1285-7.WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Brian Witcombe and Dan Meyer

PHYSICS: L. Mahadevan of Harvard University, USA, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled.REFERENCES:"Wrinkling of an Elastic Sheet Under Tension," E. Cerda, K. Ravi-Chandar, L. Mahadevan, Nature, vol. 419, October 10, 2002, pp. 579-80."Geometry and Physics of Wrinkling," E. Cerda and L. Mahadevan, Physical Review Letters, fol. 90, no. 7, February 21, 2003, pp. 074302/1-4."Elements of Draping," E. Cerda, L. Mahadevan and J. Passini, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 101, no. 7, 2004, pp. 1806-10.WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca's sister Mariela.

BIOLOGY: Prof. Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night.REFERENCES: "Huis, Bed en Beestjes" [House, Bed and Bugs], J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde, vol. 116, no. 20, May 13, 1972, pp. 825-31."Het Stof, de Mijten en het Bed" [Dust, Mites and Bedding]. J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk Vakblad voor Biologen, vol. 53, no. 2, 1973, pp. 22-5."Autotrophic Organisms in Mattress Dust in the Netherlands," B. van de Lustgraaf, J.H.H.M. Klerkx, J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, Acta Botanica Neerlandica, vol. 27, no. 2, 1978, pp 125-8."A Bed Ecosystem," J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, Lecture Abstracts -- 1st Benelux Congress of Zoology, Leuven, November 4-5, 1994, p. 36.WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk

CHEMISTRY: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin -- vanilla fragrance and flavoring -- from cow dung.REFERENCE: "Novel Production Method for Plant Polyphenol from Livestock Excrement Using Subcritical Water Reaction," Mayu Yamamoto, International Medical Center of Japan.WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Mayu YamamotoPRESS NOTE: Toscanini's Ice Cream, the finest ice cream shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, created a new ice cream flavor in honor of Mayu Yamamoto, and introduced it at the Ig Nobel ceremony. The flavor is called "Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist."

LINGUISTICS: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.REFERENCE: "Effects of Backward Speech and Speaker Variability in Language Discrimination by Rats," Juan M. Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, vol. 31, no. 1, January 2005, pp 95-100.WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: The winners could not travel to the ceremony, so they instead delivered their acceptance speech via recorded video

LITERATURE: Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word "the" -- and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order.REFERENCE: "The Definite Article: Acknowledging 'The' in Index Entries," Glenda Browne, The Indexer, vol. 22, no. 3 April 2001, pp. 119-22.WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Glenda Browne

PEACE: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon -- the so-called "gay bomb" -- that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.REFERENCE: "Harassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals," Wright Laboratory, WL/FIVR, Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, June 1, 1994.

NUTRITION: Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings, by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup.REFERENCE: "Bottomless Bowls: Why Visual Cues of Portion Size May Influence Intake," Brian Wansink, James E. Painter and Jill North, Obesity Research, vol. 13, no. 1, January 2005, pp. 93-100.REFERENCE: Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, Brian Wansink, Bantom Books, 2006, ISBN 0553804340.WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Brian Wansink.

ECONOMICS: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a device, in the year 2001, that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them.REFERENCE: U.S. patent #6,219,959, granted on April 24, 2001, for a "net trapping system for capturing a robber immediately."NOTE: The Ig Nobel Board of Governors has attempted repeatedly to find Mr. Hsieh, but he seems to have vanished mysteriously. [Breaking news: Mr. Hsieh reportedly has seen a news account of the Ig Nobel ceremony, and contacted the news agency. Details soon.]

AVIATION: Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek of Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.REFERENCE: "Sildenafil Accelerates Reentrainment of Circadian Rhythms After Advancing Light Schedules," Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 104, no. 23, June 5 2007, pp. 9834-9.WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Diego A. Golombek

Each year they have a theme that sets the tone for many of the variety of momentously inconsequential events that are a part of the ceremony. The 2007 theme: Chicken. That themes showed up in the Keynote speech ("Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken") by Doug Zongker, which was followed by chicken-related Nano-Lectures by three of the world's great thinkers.

Then there is the annual mini-opera (World Premiere) that is inspired by the theme. This year's opera: "Chicken versus Egg", starring the mother-daughter singing team Gail Kilkelly and Maggie McNeil.

Another important part of the ceremony is The 24/7 LECTURES, in which several of the world's top thinkers each explained 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. (Times strictly enforced)

Congratulations (My sympathy) to the winners.

In conclusion I leave you with this thought posted on their website:

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but, 'That's funny..." --Isaac Asimov