Friday coffee break: Ig Nobel Prizes 2009

VIA NEAT-O-RAMA: The 19th annual Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded Thursday night at Sander’s Theater on the Harvard campus. The awards are given to "honor achievements that make people laugh, and then make them think." A few of the winners:

PEACE PRIZE: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining — by experiment — whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.

VETERINARY MEDICINE PRIZE: Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK, for showing that cows who have names give more milk than cows that are nameless.

LITERATURE PRIZE: Ireland’s police service (An Garda Siochana), for writing and presenting more than fifty traffic tickets to the most frequent driving offender in the country — Prawo Jazdy — whose name in Polish means “Driving License”.

See the entire list of winners at Improbable Research.