Fun for Fridays III

Here's another of my favorite websites. Maybe it's not one of my favorite websites exactly, but certainly one of my favorite events captured by HTML. What is it, you ask? Well it's the results from the Ig Nobel Awards, of course! And what is an Ig Nobel award you wisely ask next? Well the Ig Nobel is an award given to "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative -- and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology." But really? They're awards given to real researchers (people with Ph.Ds included) for research that is mostly ridiculous. One of my favorites is the one given in Physics in 2001 to a UMass professor who studied why shower curtains always billow inwards. Very intriguing. Or what about in 1993 when the Mathematics prize was given to someone who calculated the exact odds that Mikhail Gorbachev is the Antichrist. Eeeenteresting. And a very applicable one: in 2004 the award in Public Health was given to researchers who studied the scientific validity of the five-second rule. Talk about one applicable to our daily lives!

It is my recommendation that you watch the video of the entire ceremony (search around the website for the link). You can also catch an hour of highlights from the show by listening to NPR's Science Friday the day after Thanksgiving (or listen to the podcast some time after that). But whatever you do, either read them or listen to the broadcast because the show and the awards are hysterical.