The Ig Nobel Awards

With the childish fetishisation of science in recent years hordes of people who would otherwise not have cared, are now swept along to heap derision or swoon in adoration according to who or what is for or against “science”. One beneficiary of this craze is the Ig Nobel Prize awards that since 1991 have served as an excuse for practicing scientists to slightly overstate the whackiness of some colleague or others’ research project.

Sadly though this is leading to instances where the research of actually very high interest and utility being regarded as “funny” by the mindless fans because they are told to think that it is. This is an example, a perfectly legitimate and likely avenue of enquiry in the discipline of linguistics which as an interpreter I find immediately relevant to my work. Please have a look.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0078273