Harvard hosted, yet again, the 2008 edition of the Ig Nobel Awards. “Ig Nobel” is a clever wordplay, as Ig Nobel is pronounced the same as ignoble, the latter meaning shameful, dishonorable or immoral. This year’s edition was themed around redundancy, and it was named, in honor of the theme, “The 18th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony”. The initiators of this gala are the founders of AIR – Annals of Improbable Research, a science-humor journal.

Since its beginning, the Ig Nobel awards those particular achievements that make you think after they make you laugh. This year, the ten prizes were handed out by William Lipscomb, the 1976 winner of the actual Nobel Prize, in chemistry. In the “Win a Date with a Nobel Laureate”, he had to hand himself out, as he was the prize!

One of the winners – Dan Ariely, a business professor from Duke University – was this year’s winner of the Ig Nobel Prize for medicine. He discovered, after conducting a study, that patients who are given placebos and who are told they are given generic brand medicine do not experience the same pain relief as patients who are also given placebos, but are told they are taking an expensive pharmaceutical product.

Anytime the speakers exceeded their allotted speech time – 60 seconds – an eight year old girl, named Miss Sweetie Poo, was supposed to take over the microphone and yell “Please stop, I’m bored!.” The winner of the Ig Nobel Prize for literature was David Sims, a professor with London-based Cass Business School. The book that won him this most honorable award was “You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation Within Organizations.” The point made by Sims in his book is that any type of consistent behavior is less irritating than an unexpected one.

The Ig Nobel Nutrition Prize was awarded to a couple of scientists whom, upon enhancing the sounds made when biting a chip, convinced consumers of the augmented crispiness of said chip. Proving that a slime mold can exit a maze and solve puzzles got Japanese and Hungarian scientists the Cognitive Science Award. The French acknowledged the Biology Honors Prize after proving that dog-dweller fleas jump higher than fleas that live on cats.

Brazil can now boast with pride for winning the Archaeology Ig Nobel prize, as a Brazilian archaeology team showed that the digging of armadillos in archeological sites can affect history. The coveted Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Urs Thurnherr (from the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology), as he and the citizens of Switzerland consider that plants have inherent dignity, and have thus adopted the belief as a constitutional principle. The Economics Prize went to the three New Mexico University scientists who proved that a stripper’s earnings fluctuate according to their ovulation cycles. The Physics Prize was awarded to a team that proved a principle very similar to one of Murphy’s Laws: a pile of strings will inevitably tangle in knots. Two teams shared the Chemistry Award, although one team proved that Coca-Cola is a functional and efficient spermicide, while the other proved the exact opposite.

The evening ended with the traditional valedictory: "If you didn't win an Ig Nobel Prize tonight—and especially if you did—better luck next year!"