The 2021 Ig Nobel Prizes have been awarded and, once again, nobody from New Hampshire got the most coveted prize in academia.
GraniteGeek has long been a big Ig Nobel fan. I have attended more than a dozen of the goofy events at Ha-vahhd, and I brought the founder and Chief Ig himself, Marc Abrahams, to be the panelist at Science Cafe NH in Concord in 2018.
But I’ve also long lamented the shortage of Granite State winners. Here’s what I wrote in 2015, and it still stands:
“Throughout the 25 years (now 31) this prestigious award has been given, the Granite State’s only Igs have been:
- Four NH doctors were among the 976 authors of a 1993 research paper about treating heart attacks. That one got a literary Ig Nobel for its staggeringly enormous author list. (In past years I tried to talk to these doctors, but none ever returned my call.)
- Stanford Wallace, a one-time infamous spam king who had many connections to the Seacoast, won the 1997 communications award for his streams of illegal junk mail.
That’s not enough, I say, not enough! Researchers of New Hampshire, get to work. I suggest concentrating on research that involves sexual malfunction, farting, dead animals, or loud funny noises.”
That 2015 lament led to a follow-up post about Ig Nobel connections from a couple with a summer house in N.H.
Return to the Concord Monitor
Do you happen to know how many (if any) of the Ig Nobels went to Maine affiliated folks?
I am a researcher and live in NH, but my colleagues are all in Maine. I am going to suggest we think seriously about IgNobel contention next year. If Maine is also under-represented perhaps that could be a spur to action.
Thank you.
I haven’t waded through the data for other states – you can find the list of all past winners on wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ig_Nobel_Prize_winners