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An
Indian who was officially dead for 18 years
and the scientists who invented Murphy's law
were among the winners of this year's IgNobel
Prizes.
The awards a spoof on the Nobel Prizes
are celebrated annually in Boston to
honor achievements that "cannot
or should not be reproduced."
They are presented by science humor magazine
'Annals of Improbable Research' and several
groups at Harvard and Radcliffe universities.
This year's peace laureate is Lal Bihari, a
shopkeeper from Uttar Pradesh in India. Government
documents list Bihari, who lives in Azamgarh,
130 miles southeast of Lucknow, as being dead
since 1976.
The IgNobel committee awarded him the
prize "for a triple accomplishment:
First, for leading an active life even
though he has been declared legally
dead; second, for waging a lively posthumous
campaign against bureaucratic inertia
and greedy relatives; and third, for
creating the Association of Dead People."
He discovered that thousands of other
Indians had suffered the same fate.
But it was apparently a scam in which
officials are bribed to declare landowners
dead so their property can be "inherited."
The engineering prize went to three scientists
the late Edward A Murphy Jr, the late John Paul
Staff and George Nichols for formulating Murphy's
Law in 1949.
This law states: "If anything
can go wrong, it will."
The economics award went to the people
of Liechtenstein. This tiny European
nation was cited "for making it
possible to rent the entire country
for corporate conventions, weddings,
Bar Mitzvahs and other gatherings."
A team from University College London
won the medicine prize. They discovered
that the brains of London cabbies are
bigger than those of ordinary mortals.
Brain scans revealed the black cab drivers
have more grey matter than usual in
the hippocampus that portion of the
brain that deals with navigation as
a result of doing "the knowledge."
The physics prize went to a group of
Australian scientists for a report entitled
"An Analysis of the Forces Required
to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces."
The IgNobel Prize for biology went
to Dr Kees Moeliker, of Rotterdam's
natural history museum, for documenting
the first scientifically recorded case
of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard
duck.
- October 3, 2003
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