(First of two parts)
Seventeen years ago, science burst out the doors laughing in public and we welcomed it with our own roars of laughter. Since then, it is at this time during the Fall when the color of science changes from the usual gray of gravity to the orange, greens and yellows of comedy — no less serious to the researchers who did the research, but certainly a cause for rolling laughter and head-scratching for the rest of us. It started in 1990 when the IgNobel Prizes started to be given annually to “research that first make people laugh, then make them think.” Ready or not, here are the winners announced and given last Oct. 4 at Harvard’s Sander’s Theater.
The IgNobel for Literature goes to Glenda Browne who took it upon herself to finally articulate and wrestle with what has been a constant and dreadful annoyance for anyone trying to organize their files in alphabetical order, particularly those who index files — the “indexers.” Not only is this funny sounding word a word, it is also the name of the journal where Ms. Browne’s award-winning work appeared. I am so sure that many of us have encountered this problem but it has never occurred to most of us to finally acknowledge the elephant in the room. And the elephant is “the.” No typo there — Ms. Browne really homed in on the culprit and it is the word “the” — the definite article — the “plastic bag” in the Divisoria of English words. Her research entitled The Definite Article: Acknowledging ‘The’ in Index Entries appears in The Indexer, vol. 22, no. 3 April 2001, pp. 119-22. IgNobel gave the award to her for “her study of the word ‘the’ — and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things in alphabetical order.”
Since it has been six years since Ms. Browne undertook such a feat, maybe she could now be ready to come here and look over the student records of some universities and look at the problem of names starting with “Maria” (including its abbreviation — “Ma.”) and see the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to fit her name in an inch-long line in blank forms and find her record in a university of a country whose records are bursting with names of girls that start with “Maria.” Her research would be much appreciated. If it had been earlier, she would have saved the outburst of someone years ago who was told that the registrar’s office took weeks to find her record because she spelled “Maria” in full, instead of “Ma.” like most. Perhaps it was just a failure of miscommunication between The Abbreviators and The Indexers which I think could have been solved had they consulted their “Thinkerers.”
Speaking of “thinkerers,” this next IgNobel winner I think really spent a lot of time “thinkering” that they decided to contemplate the physics of something that ordinary mortals like us would just simply and literally iron out. I am talking about the physics of wrinkling — yes, wrinkling — the curves, lumps in textile — that chambermaids and stewards in hotels expertly iron out when they make hotel beds and fashion designers make so much income out of. I went through their journal article itself which appeared in no less than the prestigious Physical Review Letters and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the US and they really even had photos of drapery and textile, overlain by geometrical markings of the mathematics involved in wrinkling! The IgNobel curtain stage opened to welcome L. Mahadevan of Harvard University, USA, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile. In case you think you want to uncover what is under the sheets of this kind of physics, see “Wrinkling of an Elastic Sheet Under Tension,” E. Cerda, K. Ravi-Chandar, L. Mahadevan, Nature, vol. 419, Oct. 10, 2002, “Geometry and Physics of Wrinkling,” E. Cerda and L. Mahadevan, Physical Review Letters, vol. 90, no. 7, Feb. 21, 2003, and “Elements of Draping,” E. Cerda, L. Mahade0van and J. Passini, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 101, no. 7, 204.
If the Physics IgNobel went to studying sheets this year, the one for Biology went to what lurks on them. The IgNobel for Biology this year went to Prof. Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, “for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night.” The Dutch seem to occur in significant episodes in my life that featured “cleaning.” When I was 12, I was assigned to lead my group in school to look for and learn to sing a Dutch song for United Nations Day. I picked out the only one I could find — a song about a broom. Then, a couple of years ago during winter, I was in a small hotel in Amsterdam when I was awakened by the sound of scrubbing and when I opened my eyes, I saw a Dutchman outside my glass window scrubbing away, in the dead of an icy winter when there was no dust. For someone like me who was raised by a cleanliness-obsessed mother, only one thing flashed in my sleepy head — Dutch Cleanser. I told this to a Dutch friend I met over dinner and also told him the song I learned when I was 12 entitled “De Bezem.” He laughed so hard telling me how his grandmother would sing that song to extol them to clean. So it should not be a surprise that for the IgNobel, we have another instance from the Dutch in their unwavering commitment to remind us that we are never really alone, bug-wise! Her body of work is littered with empirical reminders of what lurks on our beds — with titles like “Huis, Bed en Beestjes” (House, Bed and Bugs), “Het Stof, de Mijten en het Bed” (Dust, Mites and Bedding), “Autotrophic Organisms in Mattress Dust in the Netherlands,” “A Bed Ecosystem,” appearing in different years, spanning 1972 to 1994.
Huis, Bed en Beestjes. Het Stof, de Mijten en het Bed. Try saying those (or their Japanese translations) backwards without asking me why and chances are, rats would not be able to tell that you are saying them backwards. Again, I do not fully understand why and how scientists choose research topics such as this one but it seems that for this next work that won the IgNobel for Linguistics, the researchers wanted to see if rats, like humans, can tell if you are pronouncing something you previously heard, backwards. As to why we inconvenience rats this way is something I have yet to figure out. Maybe because they inconvenience us and this is the human geeky way of revenge? If you will be rendered sleepless asking yourself why and how the scientists devised a method to test this, please do not e-mail me. I give you here the details to pursue for yourselves: “Effects of Backward Speech and Speaker Variability in Language Discrimination by Rats,” Juan M. Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, vol. 31, no. 1, January 2005, pp 95-100.
(To be concluded in next week’s column).
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