Improbable Research

The Ig Nobel Prizes are awarded for things that first make people LAUGH, and then make them THINK. The name “Ig Nobel” is said to be derived from a pun in the English languge.

The pun draws out only one of several very different aspects of Ig Nobility.

That pun seems to crop up in the strangest places. And it crops up elsewhere, too. Investigator Regula Noetzli writes:

“Please tell me this is not a coincidence! The web site dictionary.com always chooses a “Word of the Day.” Today, the day of the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, their Word of the Day is ‘ignoble’”:

Word of the Day for Thursday September 30, 2004

ignoble \ig-NOH-bul\, adjective

Investigator Henry Kleta sent us this note:

I’d love to report a long-running experiment that has been started by coincidence and is running now nearly 25 years.

Round about 25 years ago my dad tried to seal the roof of our house with tar. A whole bag of that stuff was left over and was thrown on top of the old oven (used to melt that stuff) and was long forgotten somewhere in the depth of dad’s garage. The whole equipment was – luckily for the scientific community -
forgotten and kept in peace all the time.

While reading the article in AIR volume 7, number 3, “The latest on long-running experiments,” the pictures of that old equipment came up and I started to dig through dad’s garage to check the “experiment” he has started without knowing it.

I’ve enclosed a picture of the bag of tar after turning it around to check the results of the experiment. See the picture here.]

I hope to be able to continue the experiment and will happily report every ten years the results.

Here are some photos from the recent Ig Nobel events in Canberra.

A visitor to Stalin World, in Grutas, Lithuania, took and posted some photos of the facility. Of course, Viliumas Malinowskus, the founder of Stalin World, was awarded the 2001 Ig Nobel Peace Prize.

By the way, Stalin World now has a competitor of sorts. in Budapest, Hungary.

(Thanks to Mark Dionne for bringing this to our attention.)

The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS) is proud to welcome Dr. Shen, Dr. Mann, Dr. Glasauer, and the other new members!

Here are some photos from the recent Ig Nobel event in Alice Springs.