September 9th, 2006Ig Nobel Prize
The Clock is the winner of the 2005 Ig Nobel Prize for Economics.
The Ig Nobel Prize, is an hysterical award for real accademic research.
According to Wikipedia, The Ig Nobel Prizes are a parody of the Nobel Prizes and are given each year in early autumn — around the time the recipients of the genuine Nobel Prizes are announced — for ten achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.†Organized by the scientific humor journal Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), they are presented by genuine Nobel Laureates at a ceremony at Harvard University.
A few Ig Nobel Prizes include:
ECONOMICS
The Vatican, for outsourcing prayers to India.
PEACE
Charl Fourie and Michelle Wong of Johannesburg, South Africa, for inventing an automobile burglar alarm consisting of a detection circuit and a flamethrower.
BIOLOGY
C.W. Moeliker, of Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for documenting the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck.
[REFERENCE: “The First Case of Homosexual Necrophilia in the Mallard Anas platyrhynchos (Aves: Anatidae)†C.W. Moeliker, Deinsea, vol. 8, 2001, pp. 243-7. Photographs can be viewed at
MANAGED HEALTH CARE
The late George and Charlotte Blonsky of New York City and San Jose, California, for inventing a device (US Patent #3,216,423) to aid women in giving birth — the woman is strapped onto a circular table, and the table is then rotated at high speed.
NUTRITION
John Martinez of J. Martinez & Company in Atlanta, Georgia, for Luak
Coffee, the world’s most expensive coffee, which is made from
coffee beans ingested and excreted by the luak (aka, the palm
civet), a bobcat-like animal native to Indonesia.
FLUID DYNAMICS: Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow of International University Bremen, Germany and the University of Oulu, Finland; and Jozsef Gal of Loránd Eötvös University, Hungary, for using basic principles of physics to calculate the pressure that builds up inside a penguin, as detailed in their report “Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh — Calculations on Avian Defaecation.â€
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