Friday, October 15, 2004
www.improbable.com
Have you heard of this website. not yet ? Tragic. It is one of the
billions of internet pages that relieves you for a while . It leads to
a home page which is titled as Annals of Improbable Research . The
group which collects these researches from various disciplines around
the world , not only lists them for you with hypertext enabled links
to the actual research pages and sites , but also organises an yearly
ceremony in which they award what is called Ig Nobel prizes. Unlike
the Real Nobel prizes which are confined to just 6 disciplines, these
span out over a variety of topics. According to the organizers of this
web site, every Ig Nobel Prize winner has done something that first
makes people LAUGH, then makes them THINK. The Igs are intended to
celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative -- and spur people's
interest in science, medicine, and technology. Every year , the Prizes
are awarded at a gala ceremony in Harvard's Sanders Theatre. 1200
splendidly eccentric spectators watch the winners step forward to
accept their Prizes. The Prizes are physically handed to the winners
by genuinely bemused genuine Nobel Laureates. The Igs are inflicted on
you by the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR),
and co-sponsored by organizations like The Harvard Computer Society;
The Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association; The
Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students etc. I would suggest
every internet user to visit this site on one of their lighter days .
After all internet should not be only for serious things like
knowledge and entertainment. Just to instigate you, I am copying one
each of the Ig Nobel prize winning works, in different disciplines ,
awarded from its inceptionin 1991.
1991-BIOLOGY
Robert Klark Graham, selector of seeds and prophet of propagation,
for his pioneering development of the Repository for Germinal
Choice, a sperm bank that accepts donations only from Nobellians
and Olympians
1992-ART
Presented jointly to Jim Knowlton, modern Renaissance man, for his
classic anatomy poster "Penises of the Animal Kingdom," and to the
U.S. National Endowment for the Arts for encouraging Mr. Knowlton
to extend his work in the form of a pop-up book
1993-VISIONARY TECHNOLOGY
Presented jointly to Jay Schiffman of Farmington Hills, Michigan,
crack inventor of AutoVision, an image projection device that
makes it possible to drive a car and watch television at the same
time, and to the Michigan state legislature, for making it legal
to do so.
1994-ENTOMOLOGY
Robert A. Lopez of Westport, NY, valiant veterinarian and friend
of all creatures great and small, for his series of experiments in
obtaining ear mites from cats, inserting them into his own ear,
and carefully observing and analyzing the results. [Published in
"The Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association,"
vol. 203, no. 5, Sept. 1, 1993, pp. 606-7.]
1995-PSYCHOLOGY
Shigeru Watanabe, Junko Sakamoto, and Masumi Wakita, of Keio
University, for their success in training pigeons to discriminate
between the paintings of Picasso and those of Monet.
[:"Pigeons' Discrimination of Paintings by Monet and Picasso,"
"Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior," vol. 63, 1995,
pp. 165-174.]
1996-PHYSICS
Robert Matthews of Aston University, England, for his studies of
Murphy's Law, and especially for demonstrating that toast often
falls on the buttered side. [ "Tumbling toast, Murphy's
Law and the fundamental constants," "European Journal of Physics,"
vol.16, no.4, July 18, 1995, p. 172-6.]
1997 ASTRONOMY
Richard Hoagland of New Jersey, for identifying
artificial features on the moon and on Mars, including a human
face on Mars and ten-mile high buildings on the far side of the
moon. [ "The Monuments of Mars : A City on the Edge of
Forever,"by Richard C. Hoagland,North Atlantic Books, Berkeley,
CA,1996.]
1998-STATISTICS
Jerald Bain of Mt. Sinai Hospital in Toronto and Kerry Siminoski
of the University of Alberta for their carefully measured report,
"The Relationship Among Height, Penile Length, and Foot Size."
[Published in "Annals of Sex Research," vol. 6, no. 3, 1993, pp.
231-5.
1999-LITERATURE: The British Standards Institution for its six-page
specification (BS-6008) of the proper way to make a cup of tea.
2000-MEDICINE
Willibrord Weijmar Schultz, Pek van Andel, and Eduard Mooyaart of
Groningen, The Netherlands, and Ida Sabelis of Amsterdam, for their
illuminating report, "Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Male and Female
Genitals During Coitus and Female Sexual Arousal." [Published in
British Medical Journal, vol. 319, 1999, pp 1596-1600.]
2001-PUBLIC HEALTH
Chittaranjan Andrade and B.S. Srihari of the National Institute of
Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, India, for their probing
medical discovery that nose picking is a common activity among
adolescents. [ "A Preliminary Survey of Rhinotillexomania in an
Adolescent Sample," Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, vol. 62, no. 6,
June 2001, pp. 426-31.]
2002- HYGIENE
Eduardo Segura, of Lavakan de Aste, in Tarragona, Spain, for inventing
a washing machine for cats and dogs.
2003-PEACE
Lal Bihari, of Uttar Pradesh, India, for a triple accomplishment:
First, for leading an active life even though he has been declared
legally dead; Second, for waging a lively posthumous campaign against
bureaucratic inertia and greedy relatives; and Third, for creating the
Association of Dead People.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Lal Bihari overcame the handicap
of being dead, and managed to obtain a passport from the Indian
government so that he could travel to Harvard to accept his Prize.
However, the U.S. government refused to allow him into the country.
2004-ECONOMICS
The Vatican, for outsourcing prayers to India.
Did the said researchers and institutions really Do These Things? Are
these things real? Yes, indeed. You can look it up then and there , if
you are online. That's why the website gives you the references, as
hypertext enabled. It is also true that some people lack the sense of
humour to go and receive it ! For extensive background info and
additional reference for many of the past winners, you can also see a
book "Ig Nobel Prizes" by Marc Abrahams, Orion, London, 2002, ISBN
0752851500.
But, I should say at least in one instance, I found one of the awarded
research projects was not improbable at all. I will first copy the
award description and the PubMed ( a medical repository owned by
National Library of Medicine of US ). It was the Ig nobel prize for
medicine in 2001. The work was a study on injuries by falling
coconuts. The PubMed citation reads as follows :
1: J Trauma. 1984 Nov;24(11):990-1. Related Articles, Links
Injuries due to falling coconuts.
Barss P.
Falling coconuts can cause injury to the head, back, and shoulders. A
4-year review of trauma admissions to the Provincial Hospital, Alotau,
Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea, revealed that 2.5% of such
admissions were due to being struck by falling coconuts. Since mature
coconut palms may have a height of 24 up to 35 meters and an unhusked
coconut may weigh 1 to 4 kg, blows to the head of a force exceeding 1
metric ton are possible. Four patients with head injuries due to
falling coconuts are described. Two required craniotomy. Two others
died instantly in the village after being struck by dropping nuts.
PMID: 6502774 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
The organizers of the site are obviously unaware of the millions of
quite tall coconut trees in some of the Asian countries like India and
Sreelanka. In fact, I hail from the Indian state of Kerala and though
I myself had been fortunate enough not to sustain a coconut induced
fracture, in spite of walking miles underneath coconut trees during
school days, as a radiologist I have seen plenty of skull fractures
caused by falling coconuts and way back in 1983, I distinctly remember
having listened to a presentation by neurosurgery colleagues of
Trivandrum medical college, on an analysis of hundred and odd coconut
fractures handled by them during a few years.
But, Vatican outsourcing prayers to India ( and possibly to China ! )
is the ultimate !!
|
| ARCHIVES |
SUBSCRIBE |
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Tuesday, September 07, 2004
Thursday, September 16, 2004
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Thursday, September 30, 2004
Thursday, October 07, 2004
Friday, October 15, 2004
Friday, October 22, 2004
Saturday, October 30, 2004
Sunday, October 31, 2004
Saturday, November 06, 2004
Friday, November 12, 2004
Saturday, November 20, 2004
Saturday, November 27, 2004
|
|
|
|
