The Ig Nobel Prizes

You might have read about them in the paper today, but obviously there is only one source that you can trust on a topic like this: your faithful Fred and Fred. If ever something was right up our alley, it’s the Ig Nobel Prizes.

In case you missed it: the Ig Nobel Prizes (a pun on ignoble and Nobel) are awarded each year in October for ten unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research. The stated aim of the prizes is to ‘first make people laugh, and then make them think’.

Yesterday the 21st award ceremony took place at Harvard University, and a Leuven professor was on the receiving end. Indeed, Luk Warlop, together with a number of colleagues, received the prize for demonstrating that people make better decisions about some kinds of things – but worse decisions about other kinds of things – when they have a strong urge to urinate.

Funny, innit? And it gets even better if you remember that the Ig Nobel Prizes are almost always presented (by genuine Nobel laureates, by the way!) to actual researchers who have been labouring for years on extraordinarily difficult, but seemingly trivial or absurd topics. Just imagine what some academics apply themselves to. Here’s a small sample of the prizes over the years:

• Literature (1995): David B. Busch and James R. Starling, for their research report, ‘Rectal Foreign Bodies: Case Reports and a Comprehensive Review of the World’s Literature’. The citations include reports of, among other items: seven light bulbs; a knife sharpener; two flashlights; a wire spring; a snuff box; an oil can with potato stopper; eleven different forms of fruits, vegetables and other foodstuffs; a jeweller’s saw; a frozen pig's tail; a tin cup; a beer glass; and one patient's remarkable ensemble collection consisting of spectacles, a suitcase key, a tobacco pouch and a magazine.
• Chemistry (1998): Jacques Benveniste, for his homeopathic discovery that not only does water have memory, but that the information can be transmitted over telephone lines and the Internet.
• Physics (2000): Andre Geim and Michael Berry, for using magnets to levitate a frog. Geim later shared the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics for his research on graphene, the first time anyone has been awarded both the Ig Nobel and (real) Nobel Prizes.
• Physics (2001): David Schmidt, for his partial explanation of the shower-curtain effect: a shower curtain tends to billow inwards while a shower is being taken.
• Biology (2003): C.W. Moeliker, for documenting the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck.
• Economics (2005): Gauri Nanda, for inventing Clocky, an alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday.
• Mathematics (2006): Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes, for calculating the number of photographs that must be taken to (almost) ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed.
• Medicine (2010): Simon Rietveld, for discovering that symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller coaster ride.

Now say for yourself: surely it’s any academics dream to receive an Ig Nobel Prize one day? Therefore we from Fred and Fred are already hard at work for next year’s edition. Just imagine the possibilities…

• Cosmology (2012): Fred and Fred, for proving the possibility that parallel universes exist in which even numbers cannot be divided by 2.
• Linguistics (2012): Fred and Fred, for their study ‘Fly, Feel and Fall’, a list of 1,000 words which become very funny when pronounced with a Japanese accent (which turns every f into an h and every l into an r).
• Marketing (2012): Fred and Fred, for definitively disproving that cleaning products which feature animals (ducks, frogs, bears, etcetera) clean better than those which do not.
• Philosophy (2012): Fred and Fred, for (the title of) their paper ‘Does Existentialism Really Exist?’.
• Sports Science (2012): Fred and Fred, for discovering the constant h, representing the relation between the size of the ball and the size of the hole (basketball, snooker, golf, …).
• Medicine (2012): Fred and Fred, for their decennia-long research ‘Is it really impossible to lick your own elbow?’.
• Communication (2012): Fred and Fred, for talking for a whole night about the infinite monkey theorem, which states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Fingers crossed!