The Ig Noble pursuit of knowledge

Want the secret to instantly increasing your brain power? Drink three gallons of water, lock the bathroom door, and wait. Like hanging, a desperate need to urinate has a wonderful ability to concentrate the mind.

Or so say a team of researchers from the Netherlands, Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Belgium, winners of this year’s Ig Noble Award for Medicine, for their groundbreaking, leg-crossing research into bladder control and decision making.

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It appears people with a strong urge to purge do better on color choice tests but worse on word-naming quizzes, while those who can hold it longer are less likely to make foolish last-minute monetary decisions.

This is why the Ig Noble Awards, handed out by The Annals of Improbable Research every year since 1991, are the best awards given in any field, anywhere.

“What has this got to do with information technology?” I can hear my readers sigh. But why exactly do people sigh? That was the research topic for the University of Oslo’s Karl Halvor Teigen, winner of this year’s prize for Psychology. (It turns out that sighs are a kind of an emotional sorbet, signaling the end of an activity that has been abandoned before a new one begins.)

At least you’re not yawning, something people find contagious but red-footed tortoises apparently don’t, according to the multinational research team that won an Ig Noble in Physiology for their research into the yawning habits of these endangered reptiles.

Because if you were yawning, somebody would have to spritz you with airborne wasabi, which as it turns out makes for a pretty effective alarm clock, according to the Japanese team that took home the Chemistry prize.

Even then you’d still have it better than the male buprestid beetle, which when no female buprestid beetles are present will attempt to mate with an empty beer bottle. (We all know that feeling.) That research brought an Ig Noble in Biology to a pair of entomologists from Canada and Australia, for whom drinking beer while watching beetles do the dirty must make for a pretty raucous Saturday night.

But wait, there’s more.

The Mathematics prize was handed out to a half-dozen math nerds who, using exacting calculations, determined the precise date the world would end, from 1954’s Dorothy Martin through today’s Harold Camping, who predicted Armageddon would fall on May 21 of this year but has since revised that prediction to Oct. 21. Strangely, none of them showed up to accept the Ig Noble. Probably because they stopped opening their mail — with the world ending, what was the point?

There were other Ig Nobles handed out, but I’ll end this post here, because I have to go.

I mean, I really have to go.

Hey, I feel smarter already.

If the Ig Nobles were given out for high tech, who would win? Nominate your award winners here or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “The Ig Noble pursuit of knowledge,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.