October 5, 1999
NO NOBEL? MAYBE YOU'LL WIN AN IG
Intellectuals and academicians debate every
year who should -- or should not
-- have won the prestigious Nobel prizes in areas ranging
from physics and
biology to literature and peace.
For the rest of us, there are the Ig Nobel
prizes, awarded by a Harvard
University science humor magazine called ''The Annals
of Improbable Research.''
''If you didn't win an Ig Nobel prize --
and especially if you did -- better
luck next year,'' said editor Marc Abrahams at an award
ceremony last week in
which real Nobel winners of years past handed out the
Ig Nobels.
The winners speak for themselves:
*Chemistry: Takeshi Makino, president of
a Japanese private detective agency,
for his contributions to the development of S-Check,
a spray wives can apply to
their husbands' underwear to detect infidelity.
*Medicine: Dr. Arvid Vatle of Norway, for
his exhaustive study of what kind
of containers patients select for collecting urine samples.
*Sociology: Steve Penfold of Toronto's York
University, for his doctoral
dissertation on the sociology of Canadian doughnut shops.
*Literature: The British Standards Institution
for its six-page specification
on the proper way to make a cup of tea.
Finally, the Ig Nobel Prize for Peace went
to Charl Fourie and Michelle Wong
of Johannesburg, South Africa, for inventing a car burglar
alarm consisting of a
detection device and a flame thrower.