The Ig Nobel Prizes, which we have awarded every year since 1991, honor achievements that “first make people laugh, then make them think.” Mr. Milloy has no connection — and never has had any connection — with the Ig Nobel Prizes.
Mr. Milloy’s October 30 column discards the basic Ig Nobel notion of laughter and thought. The column is a personal attack on 76 Nobel Prize winners (several of whom happen to be on the editorial board of the Annals of Improbable Research). The column begins:
FOXNEWS.COM HOME > OPINION
IgNobels for ObamaThursday, October 30, 2008
By Steven Milloy
Seventy-six American Nobel laureates in science endorsed Barack Obama this week. Despite their scientific successes, their political analysis just doesn’t make the grade.
Featuring signatories such as James Watson — the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA who shocked the world in 2007 with his assertion that blacks were not as intelligent as whites — the Nobelists praised Obama in an Oct. 28 letter as a “visionary leader who can ensure the future of our traditional strengths in science and technology and who can harness those strengths to address many of our greatest problems: energy, disease, climate change, security, and economic competitiveness.”
We awarded the real 2008 Ig Nobel Prizes on October 2, in a ceremony at Harvard University. Click here to see the list of winners, and here to watch video of the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. Click here to see Fox News’s report about the real Ig Nobel Prizes.
*The column also appears in the October 30 issue of The National Post, with the headline “Ig-Nobels for Obama.” Click here to see a National Post report about the real Ig Nobel Prizes, and here to see another.
(Thanks to Mark Perew for bringing Mr. Milloy and his several junky, non-scientific quests to our attention.)