Ig Nobel Awards

I keep being asked about these awards and the un-related, but nonetheless also entertaining, Darwin Awards ('The Darwin Awards honor those who improve our gene pool... by removing themselves from it'). The Ig Nobel Awards have the merit of being awards for real scientific or academic work of often unimaginably esoteric "worth", but which can also be understood, as the awarders explain, as work 'that first makes people laugh, then makes them think': An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces; Navigation-Related Structural Change In the Hippocampi of Taxi Drivers; What percentage of young people wear baseball caps with the peak facing to the rear rather than to the front?; Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans — all winners, inter alia, in 2003.