17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The wise wizards of wacky but sometimes wonderful ideas, December 4, 2005
This review is from: The Ig Nobel Prizes 2: An All-New Collection of the World's Unlikeliest Research (Hardcover)
Back at the height of the Dot-Com boom, just before George Bush became president, billions of dollars were spent to attract viewers to specific web sites.
Since everyone was encouraged to stampede to specific sites, Larry and Sergey decidede to do just the opposite; they invented a web site to make it easier for people to look elsewhere. Thus Google was born.
It's what this book is all about: People who think different. Granted, Google isn't mentioned. Instead, it's a fun romp through the delightful imaginations of people who didn't come close to inventing Google, or much of anything else that might be of use to someone, somewhere, sometime for some unimaginable reason.
Like Google, Ig Noble Prizes are based on a simple criteria; they must make people THINK (that used to be the one-word slogan of IBM). Unlike Google, it must also make people laugh. In other words, Ig Noble honors apparently impractical new ideas on the basis that curiosity, originality and investigation are truly the basis of the human spirit.
Consider, for example, the virtually spiceless NuMex Primavera jalapeno chile pepper, developed by Professor Paul Bosland at the Chile Pepper Institute of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. New Mexico is famous for its Hatch chiles, which are flaming hot; so a "cool chile" may strike some as tasteless. Not true; the Primavera has lots of taste, just none of the usual hot spice. The goal is to gradually introduce people to chiles until they become addicted (it's a health food, after all) and everafter eat lots of New Mexico chiles.
This "wacky" idea may improve livelihoods for thousands of New Mexicans in the agricultural business, which is one of the goals of a land grant state college.
But what of the study showing the more radio stations broadcast country music, the greater the white suicide rate? The original study listed Nashville, Tenn., with the highest white suicide rate. It prompted ongoing studies about suicide, including a 2002 report, ". . . opera fans are 2.37 times more accepting of suicide because of dishonour than nonfans." There is a sneakily serious side to the Ig Noble awards.
My favourite, though, is the scientific study of the 'Five Second Rule' about whether it's safe to eat food that's been dropped on the floor. Sixteen-year-old Jillian Clarke did the research using environmental scanning electron microscopy to examine floor tiles, cookies and gummy bears. She came up with the perfect answer: It depends.
As the youngest recipient, she was the center of attention at Harvard when, "For courageously, meticulously, and scientifically playing with food, Jillian Clarke was awarded the 2004 Ig Noble Public Health Prize."
Anyone who cannot understand the fuss over Clarke n eed not buy this book; it's way above their understanding, intelligence and sense of humour. For the rest of us, it's a delightful reminder of the endless vistas of imagination, curiosity and originality. Abrahams has again come up with a gem to tickle the imagination of the curious everywhere.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Intelligence Of Single-Nostril Breathing, November 12, 2006
This review is from: The Ig Nobel Prizes 2: An All-New Collection of the World's Unlikeliest Research (Hardcover)
The Ig Nobel prizes are awarded annually to scholars in extremely diverse and unusual fields. This book is a compendium of some of the best examples of extreme scholarship that you are likely to ever encounter. In this book you will find out how to rent the entire country of Liechtenstein, you will be totally unsurprised that politicians are extremely simple humans, and you will learn the cause and effect relationship of country music on suicide.
Many even stranger pieces of research are likewise discussed from a discussion of poultry aerodynamics in "Chicken Plucking and Tornado Wind Speed," to brain efficiency manipulation in "The Intelligence of Single-Nostril Breathing." Without doubt, though, my absolutely favorite piece of scholarship begins on page 212, and is a piece originally published as "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," which originally appeared in "Social Text" (Spring/Summer 1996.) The author, Professor Alan Sokol, believes that academics use enormously complex language to describe the simplest of things, and as such decided to write a paper that was completely and utterly incoherent, that meant nothing, but that was cloaked in obscure jargon. Of course, the editors of "Social Text" didn't know this and found it brilliant and insightful. The joke was on them and they ran it and became the academic laughingstocks they so richly deserved to be. The book excerpts the article, which I have read in full elsewhere.
(I highly recommend that you do the same.) Readers of bigheaded nonsense will adore this work, a random excerpt of which follows: "Lacan's 'topologie du sujet' has been applied fruitfully to cinema criticism and to the psychoanalysis of AIDS. In mathematical terms, Lacan is here pointing out that the first homology group of the sphere is trivial, while those of the other surfaces are profound...."
Utterly brilliant, and highly recommended.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Science can be funny, April 5, 2007
This review is from: The Ig Nobel Prizes 2: An All-New Collection of the World's Unlikeliest Research (Hardcover)
This is another collection of what can only be described as very unique scientific research. The Ig Nobel Awards are handed out every October during an awards show at Harvard University. Presented by real Nobel Prize winners, they show just how far some people will go for knowledge.
Here are some titles of winning papers, some of appeared in real scientific journals: "The Effect of Country Music on Suicide," "Compliance With the Item Limit of the Food Supermarket Express Checkout Lane: An Informal Look," "Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans," "Scrotal Asymmetry in Man and in Ancient Sculpture," "Patient Preference for Waxed or Unwaxed Dental Floss," and "Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed."
Other winners include a man from Ontario who developed and personally tested a suit that is impervious to grizzly bears; the inventor of karaoke; the entire nation of Liechtenstein, which can be rented for conventions, weddings and other gatherings; a pair of Japanese researchers who invented a computer-based dog-to-human language translation device; the inventors of tamagotchi; a man who investigated why shower curtains billow inwards, and the inventors of Spam and Beano.
The only "requirement" for anyone to win an Ig Nobel award is that the research makes a person laugh, then think. This hilarious book certainly accomplishes that. It can be picked up and read starting at any point, and read anywhere, and shows that science can be funny.
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