Showing posts with label Ig Nobel Prize. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ig Nobel Prize. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

All the hard work pays off

Hey! Guess what! I won the Nobel Prize!

I gotta give the guys in Stockholm a call back, though, because we were disconnected before I could hear the field for which they had chosen to honor me. I mean, take your pick.

Among the diverse areas acknowledged last year?

2007



Aviation: Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek, for discovering that hamsters recover from jetlag more quickly when given Viagra.




Biology: Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk, for taking a census of all the mites and other life forms that live in people's beds.


Chemistry: Mayu Yamamoto for extracting vanilla flavour from cow dung.



Economics: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, for patenting a device to catch bank robbers by ensnaring them in a net.



Linguistics: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Nuria Sebastian-Galles, for determining that rats sometimes can't distinguish between recordings of Japanese and Dutch played backward.



Literature: Glenda Browne, for her study into indexing words that start with the word "the".



Medicine: Dan Meyer and Brian Witcombe, for investigating the side-effects of swallowing swords.



Nutrition:
Brian Wansink, for investigating people's appetite for mindless eating by secretly feeding them a self-refilling bowl of soup.



Peace: The Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, for suggesting the research and development of a "gay bomb," which would cause enemy troops to become sexually attracted to each other.



Physics: L. Mahadevan and Enrique Cerda Villablanca for their theoretical study of how sheets become wrinkled.