Ig Nobels are out

With all the political news around (which I am not touching in this particular forum, except to say that everyone needs to make sure they are duly registered and participate in the process), I was glad to see the 2008 Ig Nobel prizes awarded.  For those who aren’t familiar with them, the Ig Nobels are meant to “honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.”

I laughed.  Did I think?  Maybe.

My favorites this year:

• NUTRITION PRIZE. Massimiliano Zampini of the University of Trento, Italy and Charles Spence of Oxford University, UK, for electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip to make the person chewing the chip believe it to be crisper and fresher than it really is.
• BIOLOGY PRIZE. Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert,, and  Michel Franc of Ecole Nationale Veterinaire de Toulouse, France for discovering that the fleas that live on a dog can jump higher than the fleas that live on a cat.
• PHYSICS PRIZE. Dorian Raymer of the Ocean Observatories Initiative at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA, and Douglas Smith of the University of California, San Diego, USA, for proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots.

The physics prize, in particular, is very relevant, as anyone who has ever handled a pair of headphones already knows.

I think the 2007 awards had more flair, but still.