2008 Ig Nobel Prize winners

The winners of the 2008 Ig Nobel Prizes have been announced and the awards ceremony was held yesterday at Harvard. The Ig Nobel Prizes, obviously punning on ignoble and the Nobel Prizes, are given out each year for research that “first make[s] people laugh, and then make[s] them think.” Many of the categories mirror the Nobels: physics, chemistry, physiology/medicine, literature, and peace, but awards are also often given out for accomplishments in the fields of public health, engineering, biology, et cetera.

A full list of this year’s winners is available here, but here are some highlights from this year’s prizes:

ARCHAEOLOGY PRIZE. Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and José Carlos Marcelino of Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, for measuring how the course of history, or at least the contents of an archaeological dig site, can be scrambled by the actions of a live armadillo.

BIOLOGY PRIZE. Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert, and Michel Franc of Ecole Nationale Veterinaire de Toulouse, France for discovering that the fleas that live on a dog can jump higher than the fleas that live on a cat.

ECONOMICS PRIZE. Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur and Brent Jordan of the University of New Mexico, USA, for discovering that a professional lap dancer’s ovulatory cycle affects her tip earnings.

I’m usually most interested in the Ig Nobel Peace Prize, the first of which was given to Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, “for his lifelong efforts to change the meaning of peace as we know it.” Last year it went to The Air Force Wright Laboratory “for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon—the so-called ‘gay bomb’—that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.” (Don’t worry, the presumably non-lethal weapon never got beyond the concept phase.) This year’s peace prize winner?

The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) and the citizens of Switzerland for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity.

Enshrining the dignity of plants in law? Funny, but it doesn’t come close to the most hilarious award citation ever. That distinction, in my view, is that for the 2005 literature prize. That award went to

the Internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria, for creating and then using e-mail to distribute a bold series of short stories, thus introducing millions of readers to a cast of rich characters—General Sani Abacha, Mrs. Mariam Sanni Abacha, Barrister Jon A Mbeki Esq., and others—each of whom requires just a small amount of expense money so as to obtain access to the great wealth to which they are entitled and which they would like to share with the kind person who assists them.

The winners are invited to the awards ceremony to accept their awards in person (last year, no one from Wright Laboratory showed up to claim the “gay bomb” prize, no Nigerians attended either); actual Nobel Prize winners serve as presenters. It used to be traditional for attendees to throw paper airplanes onto the stage, but that was discontinued in 2006 over “security concerns.” Apparently they are worried that al-Qaeda might hijack one of the paper airplanes or something. I guess.

Anyway, the winners of the Nobel Prizes will be announced soon. In the meantime, I’ll close this blog post the same way the Ig Nobel Prize awards ceremony is traditionally concluded: “If you didn’t win a prize—and especially if you did—better luck next year!”