October 13, 1999
By Bob Suter
TODAY Announcements of this year's Nobel
Prizes continue with the award today
in Stockholm of the prize for economics. The Peace Prize
winner will be
announced Friday in Oslo. (Prizes for medicine and physics
were announced in
Stockholm Monday and Tuesday.) The Nobel Foundation's
Web site, www.nobel.se, is
a complete resource on all past and current winners.
While there, learn about
ongoing construction of the Electronic Nobel Museum to
be launched in 2001 to
mark the first century of Nobel Prizes. The Norwegian
Nobel Institute, which
awards the Peace Prize, maintains a site at www.nobel.no,
where you'll find a
section that offers speculation on why Alfred Nobel specified
in his will that
the Peace Prize be awarded separately in Oslo.
Many Nobel laureates were on hand at Harvard
University on Sept. 30 for
presentation of the Ig Nobel Prizes, an annual exercise
in enlightened humor
conducted by the Annals of Improbable Research, a science
humor magazine for
people who prize their pocket protectors.
As its Web site, www.improbable. com, explains:
"The annual Ig Nobel Prize
ceremony honors individuals whose achievements 'cannot
or should not be
reproduced.' Ten prizes are given to people who have
done remarkably goofy
things-some of them admirable, some perhaps otherwise."
This year's festivities,
documented with audio and video, include the world premiere
of "The Seedy
Opera," a mini-opera based on the legend of human cloning
and Dr. Len Fisher's
long-awaited research paper on "The Optimal Way to Dunk
a Biscuit."