Carmen Nobel (yes, that is her name), the noted journalist, dropped by the Ig Nobel party, two nights after the 2013 ceremony. She wrote about it, on the Science Friday blog:
Small Talk with Scientists: The Ig Nobel Prize Winners Unwind
Perched near a long table full of crudité and tiny brownies at a Boston-area house party this past Saturday, South African entomologist Marcus Byrne is waxing poetic about dung beetles. “Dung is the opera of their life,” he says with authority.Byrne and colleagues just won the 2013 Ig Nobel Prize in Biology and Astronomy for the recent study, “Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way for Orientation,” in which the researchers determined that “dung beetles transport their dung balls along straight paths under a starlit sky but lose this ability under overcast conditions.” (SciFri covered the research in this episode.)The Ig Nobel Prizes, a loose spoof of the Nobel Prizes, honor 10 unusual scientific achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think,” says Marc Abrahams, editor of The Annals of Improbable Research. The staff of the science humor magazine has administered the prizes every fall since 1991.Traditionally, after a campy, typically sold-out ceremony at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre and a lecture series at MIT, the participants attend an informal soirée a few nights later at the brownstone home of Jackie Baum (a former anthropologist) and Stanley Eigen (a math professor), friends of Abrahams’ who have been involved with the prizes since their inception. It’s a chance to relax and mingle with other people who understand what it’s like when people giggle at their life’s work….[read the entire essay]