An uneasy collision of science and comedy reigns in Marc Abrahams' new book, \The Ig Nobel Prizes: The Annals of Improbable Research.""
This book discusses the Ig Nobel Awards, an annual awards ceremony held at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Igs, as they are affectionately called, are the idea of this book's author. In 1990, Abrahams stumbled into an editorship at ""The Journal of Irreproducible Results"" and found an enormous amount of research that was more amusing than it was helpful. He figured the scientists needed some sort of prize, but certainly not a Nobel Prize. Thus, the Ig Nobel Prizes were born.
""The Ig Nobel Prizes"" brings together the best (or worst) of the winners and explains what inspired them to research the ridiculous and publish the results. Some winners come from far corners of the globe, while others fail to attend because they are stuck in a very small cell.
Winners fall into a variety of categories, from physics in which winner Robert Matthews demonstrated that toast usually falls buttered-side down, to the peace prize, which went to a man who created a theme park dubbed ""Stalin World.""
Scientists are not the only ones to receive Ig Nobel Prizes. For example, the former prime minister of Singapore, Lu Kuan, got an Ig for fining and punishing citizens for spitting, chewing gum and feeding pigeons. Troy Hurtubise, a Canadian outdoorsman popularized by the film ""Project Grizzly,"" received an Ig for testing a grizzly bear-proof suit of armor.
An astounding obscurity of information overruns ""The Ig Nobel Prizes."" The book mentions Robert Faid, a believer in statistics, who calculated the exact odds of Mikhail Gorbachev being the Antichrist (710,609,175,188,282,000 to one). Two Madisonians, David Busch and James Starling, received Igs for their research report, ""Rectal Foreign Bodies: Case Reports and a Comprehensive Review of the World's Literature.""
The book is a fantastically funny collection that manages to keep topping itself with page after page of oddities and obscurities. ""The Ig Nobel Prizes"" entertains and, somehow, informs its readers with every aspect of science gone awry.
