Laughing is still the best medicine
Amid all the seriousness of the Nobel Prize, there have been another prize ceremony that “honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think”.
Introducing the Ig Nobel Prize.
Now if you think this is some foolish awards just to spoof the Nobel prize, think again. Every year, the prizes were given out by genuine Nobel prize laureates. And the prizes given out are real science and literature but also extremely funny.
Examples of Ig Nobel Prizes:
- 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.
- CHEMISTRY: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin — vanilla fragrance and flavoring — from cow dung.
- 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.
- ORNITHOLOGY: Ivan R. Schwab, of the University of California Davis, and the late Philip R.A. May of the University of California Los Angeles, for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don’t get headaches.
- MEDICINE : Steven Stack of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, USA and James Gundlach of Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama, USA, for their published report “The Effect of Country Music on Suicide.”
- ECONOMICS: Gauri Nanda of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for inventing an alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people DO get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday.
I have lots of fun reading through the list of winners at Wikipedia. (the winner list on the original site is a mess to plow through)
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