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The Best of Annals of Improbable Research
Marc Abrahams, Ed. Freeman: New York, 1998. viii + 201 pp. ISBN 0-7167-3094-4. $14.95.
To find a listing of all the winners of the Nobel Prize you can consult an almanac or, for the chemistry prizes, the recently published Nobel Laureates in Chemistry: 19011992 (American Chemical Society and Chemical Heritage Foundation, 1993). But where can you find a listing of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes, awarded each year since 1991 to individuals whose achievements cannot or should not be reproduced? How many people know, for example, that the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for Art was awarded to Don Featherstone of Fitchburg, MA, for his invention of the plastic pink flamingo, or that the 1991 Ig Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Erich Von Daniken, the author of Chariot of the Gods, for explaining how human civilization was influenced by ancient astronauts from outer space? These are just two examples of the important (?) information contained in this new collection of scientific humor.
Scientific humor has a long history. For example, in 1931 G. Beck,...