'IgNobels' honor founder of dead people club

[Gauracandra]

'IgNobels' honor founder of dead people club

 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- An Indian who spent 18 years trying to prove he was alive, researchers who showed London taxi drivers have bigger-than-average brains and the inventor of Murphy's Law won this year's "IgNobel" prizes.

 

The spoofs of the Nobel prizes were also awarded to researchers who found politicians to have simple personalities, a Japanese inventor who studied a statue that seems to be repulsive to birds and an economist who chronicles annoying behavior.

 

The IgNobels -- a play on the word ignoble -- are given annually by the science humor magazine "Annals of Improbable Research" and several groups at Harvard and Radcliffe universities to "honor achievements that cannot or should not be reproduced."

 

"We try to make people laugh, but we also want people to think," said Annals editor Marc Abrahams, who puts together the awards -- presented in Boston -- every year.

 

This year's "peace prize" goes to Lal Bihari of Uttar Pradesh in India, "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," the IgNobel committee said in a statement Thursday.

 

Bihari, who lives in Azamgarh, 130 miles (220 km) southeast of Lucknow, was listed as deceased in 1976.

 

He eventually found thousands of other Indians in the same plight -- apparently a scam in which officials are bribed to declare landowners dead so their property can be "inherited."

 

Murphy of Murphy's Law noted

Abrahams said the Indian government at first refused to give a dead man a passport to travel to the IgNobel ceremony, but finally agreed last month to issue Bihari with travel documents. But it was too late for Bihari to get a U.S. visa.

 

"The Indian government, which didn't recognize his life, gave him a passport," Abrahams said.

 

"But the American government, the paragon of efficiency and helpfulness, won't give him a visa. You would expect a man who comes back from the dead would get a little extra help."

 

The engineering prize went to now-deceased Air Force Captain Edward Murphy, Air Force doctor John Paul Stapp, and George Nichols, who in 1949 came up with Murphy's Law -- "If anything can go wrong, it will."

 

The medicine prize went to a team at University College London for a study showing the brains of London taxi drivers are more highly developed than those of their fellow citizens.

 

Their report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in April 2000, showed that cabbies have an especially large hippocampus, associated with spatial memory.

 

London cabbies must memorize a map of the city and pass a grueling test on their navigational abilities.

 

A team at the University of Rome and Stanford University in California won the psychology prize for their report, published in the deadly serious science journal Nature in 1997, showing that voters judge politicians on two personality characteristics, as compared to five determinants of personality in most social interactions.

 

The chemistry prize went to Yukio Hirose of Kanazawa University in Japan for his study of a bronze statue that fails to attract pigeons.

 

John Trinkaus of the Zicklin School of Business in New York City was given the literature prize for more than 80 reports about oddities such as what percentage of automobile drivers fail to completely stop at one particular stop-sign and what percentage of shoppers exceed the number of items permitted in a supermarket's express checkout lane.