Slashdot Mirror
Irrelevant Scientific Research Honored
More than 1,000 people attended this year's Ig Nobel awards, a light-hearted alternative to the Nobel Prizes. Scientists who unlocked the inner secrets of dog fleas, crisps and tangled string swept the show. Handing out awards was William Lipscomb, the 1976 Nobel laureate for chemistry, also doubling Thursday, at the age of 89, as the hero in the "Win-a-Date-With-a-Nobel-Laureate Contest." The prize itself is a plaque that reads, "This Ig Nobel Prize is awarded in the year 2008 to an Ig Nobel Prize Winner, in recognition of the Ig Nobel Prize Winners' Ig Nobel Prize winning achievement." At last I can submit my paper, "Everything is Really Wet, Even Dry Stuff." for peer review.
I know it's all in fun but seriously, just because research is funny doesn't mean it isn't meaningful. One paper was in knot theory, which is apparently a pretty large and under-researched area of mathmatics. Another was convincing people that their potato chips were fresh by playing crunching noises while they were being eaten, which I imagine provides insights into how what we taste is influenced by our other senses.
Don't forget, the point of the Ig Nobel Awards is to 'Make you laugh, then make you think'.
Too bad the Creationists can't come up with any actual scientific research, they'd win this honour every year!
Trolling is a art,
There was even more agitation over the chemistry prize, awarded jointly to rival teams - one from the United States which determined Coca-Cola to be an effective spermicide and one from Taiwan which proved it is not.
I don't see how any self-respecting scientist can sleep at night until this situation is rectified. I know I can't!
I got a catholic block.
Funny coincidence, I just watched the Fish & Chips episode of Heston Blumenthal's BBC series "In Search of Perfection", which discussed just the same thing. Blumenthal is the head chef at The Fat Duck, the restaurant mentioned in the article, and a major figure in the "molecular gastronomy" scene.
He visits a scientist in the UK to test the crispiness of different batter recipes, using an apparatus that analyzes the sound waves generated by poking the food with a probe. It's not the same scientist as mentioned in the Ig Nobel article, though, no idea if it's related to the specific research citing by Ig Nobel.
There's video from the episode online, the relevant segment begins at the 2 minute mark.
"He says his work has implications for the way drugs are marketed. People often think generic medicine is inferior. But gussy it up a bit, change the name, make it appear more expensive, and maybe it will work better, he said."
Well I'd rather be convinced that cheaper medicine is better or the same as expensive medicine :).
"In the 18 subjects Miller studied, average earnings were $250 for a five-hour shift. That jumped to $350 to $400 per five-hour shift when the women were their most fertile, he said."
There's research that shows that women tend to actually appear more attractive during their most fertile days (and probably might behave in a more attractive manner too ).
http://www.radio.cz/en/article/52484
BTW there's also:
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080226/full/news.2008.625.html
http://www.newlifeafterdivorce.com/Relationships/Married-fertile-women-prefer-single-men.html
Knot theory is a significant and active branch of topology. It is certainly not "under-researched" in any sense in which the expression can be applied to mathematics. In other words, it is not like there are obvious results left undiscovered because people don't care about the field. While knot theorists would certainly think that we should work on it more, in that they are no different than other mathematicians: most people think the problems in their field are the most interesting ones -- otherwise they wouldn't be working on them!
I am sure that knot theory would be useful to cosmologists studying string theory.