Hilarity Wins at Ig Nobel Prize Show

A 60-second wedding ceremony, nose-picking and Miss Sweetie Poo dominated the “Eleventh 1st Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony” held last evening in Sanders Theatre before a paper-airplane throwing audience, whose members clearly enjoyed themselves.

The Ig Nobel awards, billed as “annual awards for achievements that cannot or should not be reproduced,” were started in 1991 at MIT. But they have been held at Harvard for the last seven years.

“[This show] is revenge for having to sit through Ec 10 for one year,” said Marc A. Abrahams ’81, the master of ceremonies and organizer of the show.

The awards were presented by genuine Nobel laureates, but in diverse categories ranging from public health and economics to medicine and physics.

Perhaps the most interesting award-winner last night was Chittaranjan Andrade from Bangalore, India, who recieved the Ig Nobel prize for public health for his research in “Rhinotillexomania”—the disease of habitually picking one’s nose.

“Some people poke their noses into other people’s business—I poke my business into other people’s noses,” Andrade said in his acceptance speech.

But not all award-winners were allowed to complete their speeches.

Miss Sweetie Poo, an “exceptionally cute” nine-year-old girl, cut short speakers who exceeded their time limit by strolling up to the lecturn and saying, “Please stop, I’m bored. Please stop, I’m bored. Please stop, I’m bored....”

Miss Sweetie Poo was first introduced to the show in 1999 as a nine-year-old girl, and Abrahams made it a point to tell the audience that she was still nine years old.

This year’s show featured the 60-second marriage of two scientists, William Stefanov and Lisa Danielson, both geologists at Arizona State University.

“I feel great—this was everything I expected and more,” said Stefanov, right after his wedding.

Another new feature in the show was the “24/7 seminar,” in which speakers had 24 seconds to define their topic of research, after which they had to condense their definition to seven words that everyone could understand.

Harvard Professor Margo I. Seltzer ’83 aptly described her topic, computers, as “computer software—cheap, fast, good. Pick two.”

The show, produced by humor magazine “Annals of Improbable Research,” gave members of the scientific and teaching community an opportunity to “let their hair down and enjoy themselves for an evening,” Andrade said.

The event’s theme was “complexity,” as was evinced in the show’s proceedings.

Of the 10 prize winners this year, seven journeyed to Harvard from abroad, from countries as far away as India, Lithuania and Australia.

Other prize-winners included the award for medicine, on research for “injuries due to falling coconuts,” and psychology, for “an ecological study of glee in small groups of school children.”