BS: 2011 IgNobel Awards

Subject: BS: 2011 IgNobel Awards
From: Rapparee
Date: 29 Sep 11 - 08:04 PM

Winners of the 2011 Ig Nobel Awards

The 2011 Ig Nobel winners, awarded Thursday at Harvard University by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine:

PHYSIOLOGY: Anna Wilkinson, Natalie Sebanz, Isabella Mandl and Ludwig Huber for their study "No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise."

CHEMISTRY: Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami for their wasabi alarm.

MEDICINE: Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder, Robert Feldman, Robert Pietrzak, David Darby, Paul Maruff along with Mirjam Tuk, Debra Trampe and Luk Warlop for studying the effects of holding in urine.

PSYCHOLOGY: Karl Halvor Teigen for trying to understand why people sigh.

LITERATURE: John Perry for his theory of procrastination: To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that's even more important.

BIOLOGY: Daryll Gwynne and David Rentz for discovering that certain kinds of beetles try to mate with certain kinds of Australian beer bottles.

PHYSICS: Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, Dominique Deviterne, Bruno Ragaru and Herman Kingma for trying to determine why discus throwers become dizzy, and why hammer throwers don't.

MATHEMATICS: Assorted doomsday predictors throughout history for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.

PEACE: Arturas Zuokas for solving the problem of illegally parked cars by crushing them with an armored vehicle.

PUBLIC SAFETY: John Senders for his experiments in which a driver on a major highway repeatedly has a visor flapped down over his face.

Subject: RE: BS: 2011 IgNobel Awards
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 30 Sep 11 - 04:41 AM

There usually are numerous commentaries on the awards, and it's hard to pick a "best source" but since rap violated our strictly enforced rule about always providing a source link, I'll suggest one (among many) at:

Silly science prizes highlight beer-loving bugs, pee pressure

By Alan Boyle

Beetles who boink beer bottles ... a car-crunching mayor ... and researchers who study the link between pee pressure and decision-making? These have got to be the silliest science laureates of the year. At least that's what the folks behind this year's Ig Nobel Prizes intended.

John

Subject: RE: BS: 2011 IgNobel Awards
From: Charley Noble
Date: 30 Sep 11 - 08:09 AM

I always look forward to these fascinating listing.

Cheerily,
Charley Ignoble

Subject: RE: BS: 2011 IgNobel Awards
From: saulgoldie
Date: 30 Sep 11 - 10:20 AM

You know, there will always be investigations into one thing or another that may seem somewhere from silly to outrageously silly on the face of them. But some of these investigations actually do lead to other valuable understandings. But these are just plain f***ing silly!

Saul

Subject: RE: BS: 2011 IgNobel Awards
From: Rapparee
Date: 30 Sep 11 - 10:20 AM

What does it take to win an Ig Nobel Prize? There is but a single criterion: Do something that first makes people LAUGH, and the makes them THINK (WHAT people think is entirely up to them....An Ig Nobel-winning achievement can be good or bad, important of trivial, valuabel or worthless. Or all of those. It just has to make people laugh, and then make them think.
                     --Marc Abrahams, found of the Ig Nobel Awards