GLOBE AND MAIL
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SAT NOV.15,1997 PAGE: D15 (ILLUS) 
BYLINE: STEPHEN STRAUSS 
CLASS: Book Review 
DATELINE: WORDS: 710 

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** Those wacky scientists and their silly games ** 
** THE BEST OF THE ANNALS OF IMPROBABLE RESEARCH ** 
Edited by Marc Abrahams 
W. H. Freeman, 208 pages, $21.95 

Review by STEPHEN STRAUSS

HOW can science, which along with television watching is as close to 
a secular religion as we have, not be a constant source of humour? 
True, Gary Larson and Sydney Harris draw some scientific cartoons, but 
no stand- up comedian has made his or her mark lampooning the intrinsic 
silliness of "doing science." There are no classic jokes in which the 
particle physicist has to fend off the farmer's daughter, or the 
molecular biologist is a passenger in a plane whose wing has 
fallen off. Which leads us to The Best of the Annals of 
Improbable Research. AIR, as it is known, is a small monthly 
scientific-humour magazine written largely by scientists and devoted 
to real and made-up funny things in science. The real things include 
scientific papers such as The Transmission of Gonorrhea 
Through an Inflatable Doll, Salmonella Excretion in Joy-Riding Pigs, and 
The Perception of Speech Sounds Recorded Within the Uterus of a 
Pregnant Sheep. The made-up things are imaginary scientific 
papers, such as How Dead is a Doornail?, The Aerodynamics of Potato 
Chips and The Taxonomy of Barney.

Every year the magazine hands out Ig-Nobel Prizes at the Massachusetts 
Institute of Technology to people in various fields who show a special 
talent for doing something scientific or technological that, upon 
reflection, is three giggles short of a belly laugh. The 1994 award in 
physics, for example, was given to the Japanese Meteorological Agency for 
a seven-year study of whether earthquakes are caused by catfish wiggling 
their tails. In 1995, the award-winner in nutrition was an Atlanta company 
that advertised its coffee as made from beans ingested and excreted by the 
bobcat-like palm civet. 

It should be mentioned that these awards, attended by Nobel Prize 
winners, have become events of great controversy. The publisher of a 
precursor humour magazine, The Journal of Irreproduceable Results, 
recently sued AIR and its editor, Marc Abrahams, for $4.2-million (U.S.) 
on a variety of counts including infringement of what it claims is its 
trademarked use of the words "Ig Nobel Prize." This is ironic: AIR, over 
the years, has fought off rival groups, including the Physicians Committee 
for Responsible Research, that wanted to give out their own versions of 
the ignominious awards. These same Ig Nobels drew the ire of Britain's 
chief science adviser, Robert May, who complained in the august journal 
Science that awarding a prize to British researchers doing studies of 
soggy cereal flakes brought ridicule to genuine scientific research - all 
of which suggests that apparently nothing is to be taken more seriously in 
science than humour. 

Which leads me to the serious part of this review. The funniest parts 
of this book are the examples of real research, as described above. To 
appreciate the faux scientific paper, it is probably helpful to have 
written a few scientific papers oneself. It is hard for the non-scientist 
to appreciate the inanity of some of the conventions of scientific 
publishing: Don't refer to yourself in the first person; use only big 
words; blather on with data; divide any large meaningful finding into five 
smaller, publishable but incomplete, findings, unless they are your 
conventions. And therein lies my main complaint. 
As a general reader, I found I had to force myself to read the fake 
papers to the end because their execution was much less funny than their 
over-arching conceit. The meta-truth in scientists' attempts to ridicule 
science is that there is something intrinsically ludicrous about the 
scientific method to begin with. It's absurdly reductionist, mechanical 
and self-reverential. To paraphrase Einstein, the silliest thing about the 
approach is that it finds anything but silliness. That said, you shouldn't 
be scared off the book. 

Scientists and and anyone with scientific leanings will love the inside 
jokes - such as the paper about recent advances in Artificial Intelligence 
that is absolutely blank. It is a special book for a special audience. 
Globe and Mail science writer Stephen Strauss, in his own small 
attempt to inject humour into the paper, once suggested that the 
headline to describe the Mars Pathfinders findings should be Mars: 
Still Red, Still Dead.