The 19th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony was held last night and it was a doozy.
This year’s features included the “Big Bank Theory” opera (wherein stylish bankers in a swanky Wall Street bar explained the explosive rise and fall of big banking and big bankers – how banking started, money-wise, from nothing and ended in the biggest explosion (of socioeconomic proportions) ever encountered by man), the Win-a-Date-with-a-Nobel-Laureate Contest, a little girl whining “PLEASE STOP. I’M BORED.” loudly over and over again when an award recipient went over their allotted thank you speech time, and, as always, actual Nobel Laureates handing out the Ig Nobel prizes.
The award winners were the big draw of course, and this year included:
- A curiously popular Ig Nobel Prize in Public Health: Elena N. Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee, and Sandra Marijan of Chicago, Illinois, USA, for inventing a brassiere that, in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of gas masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander. There was a live demonstration by Dr. Elena Bodnar using Nobel Laureates as the “needy bystander” test subjects (and just how Dr. Bodnar managed to get two gas mask brassieres along with her non-gas mask brassiere under that little black dress, much less off in front of a theater full of people while (mostly) maintaining proper public decorum, is anyone’s guess).
- Ig Nobel Prize in Chemisty: Javier Morales, Miguel Apátiga, and Victor M. Castaño of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, for creating diamonds from liquid — specifically from tequila.
- Ig Nobel Prize in Veterinary Medicine: Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK, for showing that cows who have names give more milk than cows that are nameless.
ig nobel :: 2 October 2009 :: leave a comment
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