2007 Ig Nobel Awards Announced

prostoalex writes "The annual Ig Noble awards by Annals of Improbable Research were announced tonight. The winners included the scientists who discovered that impotence drugs help with jet lag recovery, "a Dutch researcher who conducted a census of all the creepy-crawlies that share our beds, Spanish scientists who found that rats sometimes could not distinguish between Japanese spoken backwards and Dutch spoken backwards, an Australian woman who documented the indexing problems caused by the word "the", a Japanese researcher who extracted vanilla flavoring from cow dung, and a Taiwanese man who patented a Batman-like device that drops a net over bank robbers," MSNBC says."

Comments

The indexing thing

[Daimanta]

an Australian woman who documented the indexing problems caused by the word "the" Is it just me, or is that pretty handy to know. Words like "the" and "of" pretty much clutter non-smart registers.

Re:The indexing thing

[ribuck]

Heh, it's actually my sister who won this Ig Nobel prize for doing research on how to index "The". The premier geek in the family, and she doesn't even try to be one!

As she points out in her research, how are you ever going to look up the band "The The" unless the word "the" is indexed. And if you index it sometimes, shouldn't you index it always?