Each year the Ig Nobel committee hand awards to research that in their words – first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.
To give you a sense of what sort of research attracts an Ig Nobel you can find a list of last years winners here .
My favourite for absurdity has to be the following –
LITERATURE PRIZE: The US Government General Accountability Office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.
REFERENCE: “Actions Needed to Evaluate the Impact of Efforts to Estimate Costs of Reports and Studies,” US Government General Accountability Office report GAO-12-480R, May 10, 2012.
For this year I would like someone to nominate the study titled – Is “Huh?” a Universal Word? Conversational Infrastructure and the Convergent Evolution of Linguistic Items by Mark Dingemanse, Francisco Torreira, N. J. Enfield of the Language and Cognition Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
