I see that Instapundit linked an announcement about the 2008 Ig Nobel prizes, but the story he linked only mentioned one winner. Although a funny one it is (Diet Coke is a potent spermicide), it’s far from the only winner and not necessarily the funniest. Here is the official list of all the winners in all categories, as well as listing the winners of previous years.
My personal favorite for this year is the Ig Nobel for Archaeology.
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Actually.. some of those are useful studies.
Medicine is another piece of the puzzle on the Placebo Effect, which matters a whole lot.
Economics is also a useful datapoint in human sexuality.
Physics was the big one, though. The knotting of strings shows up in a lot of subtle places. One of them being solar physics, which could turn out to be rather unsubtle over the next couple decades.
Good stuff.
Well if you look closely, those prizes usually go to studies which genuinely are interesting and well-done. They really aren’t ignoble at all. They’re funny but underlying them is almost always something interesting that really is scientifically valid. Useful, not always, but sometimes even useful.
Even figuring out how to make people like a potato chip better purely by how it sounds in your mouth tells you something about the eating experience.
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