Friday, October 07, 2005

The 2005 IgNobel Prizes

The winners of the 2005 IgNobel Prizes have been announced. My personal favorites are:
MEDICINE: Gregg A. Miller of Oak Grove, Missouri, for inventing Neuticles -- artificial replacement testicles for dogs, which are available in three sizes, and three degrees of firmness.

PEACE: Claire Rind and Peter Simmons of Newcastle University, in the U.K., for electrically monitoring the activity of a brain cell in a locust while that locust was watching selected highlights from the movie "Star Wars."

ECONOMICS: Gauri Nanda of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for inventing an alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people DO get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday.
Click here for the link. Hat tip to David Tufte at VoluntaryXchange for the link.

And just to show that economics applies to everything, David has also written a piece on the economics of neuticles. It's all about asymmetric information (or, inquiring minds want to know).

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