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[ThatHawaiiGuy]

An Over-the-Top Prize That's Better to Give Than to Receive

October 7, 2003
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Oct. 4 - If irony nowadays is the first
refuge of blasé youth and the ultimate self-deprecatory
gesture of the aged and accomplished, what is it nobler to
win: a Nobel or an Ig Nobel?

And from the paper-airplane-encrusted stage of Harvard's
Memorial Hall, where the 2003 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded
on Thursday night, can you really tell?

You are a scientist who thought he was doing serious work,
and you are being assaulted by missiles flung by 1,200
howling nerds. Here is a real Nobel laureate in a
moose-antler hat lauding you because your time has come.
And here is Miss Sweetie Poo shushing you because your time
is up.

If your measure is the company you keep, what do you make
of those who have gone vaingloriously before you into
ignominy: Dan Quayle for his grasp of science ("It's time
for the human race to enter the solar system"), Edward
Teller for his contributions to world peace, Ron Popeil,
inventor of the Veg-O-Matic, and tobacco company presidents
for presenting scientific evidence to Congress that
nicotine is not addictive.

This year, the 13th in which the Ig Nobels have been
inflicted on befuddled recipients, the awards were not so
blatantly political, unless one is a displaced
Liechtensteiner or one of India's ungrateful dead.

The economics prize went to Xnet Event Marketing, which
normally arranges the rental of quaint Alpine villages for
corporate events, bar mitzvahs and the like, but recently
contracted with Lichtenstein to offer the entire charming
nanostate.

And the first post-posthumous Ig Nobel Peace Prize went to
Lal Bihari of the village of Amilon, India, who discovered
in 1976 that his uncle, in line to inherit his land, had
paid a $25 bribe to have him declared dead. He was revived
18 years later by a sympathetic court. In the interim, he
founded the Association of Dead People to help hundreds of
similarly dead Indians fight the stench of corruption.

Still beset by bureaucratic red tape - this time American -
Mr. Bihari could not get a visa in time for this year's
ceremony. He sent a speech, which left the impression that
his outlook was still a bit rigid: He felt better, he said,
"but 75 percent of all people are spiritually dead."(Mr.
Bihari has no phone and speaks only Hindi, so the message
may have suffered in transit.)

A truly posthumous award, the engineering prize, went to
Edward A. Murphy Jr. In 1949, when the mark of lesser
genius was the phrase "Well, he's no rocket scientist," Mr.
Murphy was an Air Force rocket-sled scientist. Multiple
failures of test sensors led him to make the remarks later
refined into Murphy's Law, "Anything that can go wrong
will."

His son, Edward III, accepted for him. Flawlessly.

The
year's other prizes went to the sort of research the Ig
Nobels are best-known for: an Australian study of the
forces needed to drag sheep over various surfaces, a
Japanese scientist's attempts to unlock the secret of a
pigeon-repelling statue, a Dutch ornithologist's eyewitness
report of an act of homosexual necrophilia by a duck.

All these scientists were in earnest, and all swore they
had never heard of the Ig Nobels before.

John F. Culvenor, a workplace engineer, showed that sheep
shearers were less likely to suffer back injuries dragging
their victims to the barbering pit if the floor were wood
and gently sloped.

"We Aussies have proved that it's easier to drag sheep
downhill, so Newton was right," he boasted. He was proud to
be in Ig Nobel company, he said. "You have to be prepared
to have the mickey taken out of you."

Dr. Yukio Hirose of Kanazawa University found that the
123-year-old statue was an unusual alloy: copper, lead and
arsenic. He forged sheets of it, and birds shunned them
even if food was scattered on them.

And Dr. Kees W. Moeliker, a curator at the Rotterdam
Natural History Museum, brought the victim, stuffed. It
happened just outside his window, he said, because the
mallard was killed hitting the glass fleeing his pursuer,
another mallard, and he was able to photograph the ensuing
"cruel scene" for an hour before chasing off the offender.
He later wrote it up dryly for the museum's annals.

"Rape is normal with ducks," Dr. Moeliker said in an
interview. "It's a well-known reproductive strategy.
Homosexuality among ducks is common. There's no big
difference between being a human being and a duck. But the
necrophilia thing, that's new. I talked to many
ornithologists about this."

Every year, the awards committee, organized by Marc
Abrahams, publisher of The Annals of Improbable Research, a
science humor magazine, receives more than 5,000
nominations.

It has just published the first collection of winners as
"The Ig Nobel Prizes."

Mr. Abrahams, 47, a Harvard mathematics graduate who once
eked out a living by writing software simulating office
crises, said only one self-nominee had ever won - the
Norwegian authors of "Effect of Ale, Garlic and Soured
Cream on the Appetite of Leeches." (Leeches are used in
microsurgery as clot-busters, but those with sluggish
appetites need stimulating. The study was in the British
Medical Journal. F.Y.I.: leeches detest garlic, and those
dunked in beer became too wobbly and obstreperous to
operate.)

Each year's ceremony is chaos theory in practice and
includes a nano-opera. This year's was "Atom and Eve," a
tale of disproportionate love.

And each year, Miss Sweetie Poo, an 8-year-old on contract
in a party dress, limits speakers to one minute by whining:
"Please stop. I'm bored!" Three slipped her dollars or
lollipops but got the hook anyway.

Real Nobel winners hand out the prizes, and one lucky
audience member wins a date with one. This year's was
Richard Roberts, who took the 1993 Nobel Prize for
Medicine. He is 60, British, married and wore the moose hat
with strobe-light earrings. His Nobel Web site biography
includes the promising phrase: "Three-quarters of the
world's first restriction enzymes were discovered or
characterized in my laboratory. I made a lot of friends in
those days!"

The winner came screaming down to the stage to hug him,
then disappeared. (Only in that element of the ceremony did
it sound as if the fix was in. Dr. Roberts offered his body
to science once before, and said Siamese twins won. Asked
by a skeptic how they were conjoined, he said it was an
artfully designed dress.)

Two days after the ceremony, the winners got a full 10
minutes in a lecture hall at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology to explain their work in all seriousness. But
few in the audience deigned to cooperate. For example, one
scientist who proved that Kansas is flatter than a pancake
was challenged over the validity of his pancake
standardization.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/07/science/07IGNO.html?ex=1066640513&ei=1&en=2d6bc0bbd162ba78