The Ignobels

[maxx]

This year's winners: http://improbable.com/ig/winners/

You can hear the entire "ceremony" here.
http://improbable.com/ig/2010/

My 2010 fave: MANAGEMENT PRIZE: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy, for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.
REFERENCE: “The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study,” Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo, Physica A, vol. 389, no. 3, February 2010, pp. 467-72.

My all time fave: ASTROPHYSICS [2001]
Dr. Jack and Rexella Van Impe of Jack Van Impe Ministries, Rochester Hills, Michigan, for their discovery that black holes fulfill all the technical requirements to be the location of Hell. [REFERENCE: The March 31, 2001 television and Internet broadcast of the "Jack Van Impe Presents" program. [[at about the 12 minute mark).]

[Jimaz]

I love it. Academia's answer to The Onion.

Here's a passionate book review of A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates.

q.v. The Journal of Irreproducible Results.

[douglasm]

Did the bacteria that scientists taught to solve Sudoku win a prize?

[1KielsonDrive]

I got a big laugh from Maureen ?Dowd? in the NYT recently. Not one of my favorites, but worth checking out once in a while when she manages to be very incisive. She called it Obama's Nobel Peace Prize awarded on layaway. So true it couldn't be any funnier.

[maxx]

Obama's Nobel Peace Prize was the world's sigh of relief that the U.S. had elected a president with real compassion and brains after 8 years of enduring the shrub and company.