And the winner is!

2005 IgNobel Prizes
The 2005 Iggies were awarded Thursday night at Harvard, at the Fifteenth First Annual Award Ceremony.  This year’s winners are truly an all-star cast.  My personal favorite:

FLUID DYNAMICS: Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow of International University Bremen, Germany and the University of Oulu , Finland; and Jozsef Gal of Loránd Eötvös University, Hungary, for using basic principles of physics to calculate the pressure that builds up inside a penguin, as detailed in their report "Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh -- Calculations on Avian Defaecation."PUBLISHED IN: Polar Biology, vol. 27, 2003, pp. 56-8.

One award, I am afraid, went for a development that can only be considered a crime against humanity:

ECONOMICS: Gauri Nanda of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for inventing an alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people DO get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday.

And one should gain the admiration of anyone who has spent the whole day at the lab bench waiting to take a measurement:

PHYSICS: John Mainstone and the late Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland, Australia, for patiently conducting an experiment that began in the year 1927 -- in which a glob of congealed black tar has been slowly, slowly dripping through a funnel, at a rate of approximately one drop every nine years.REFERENCE: "The Pitch Drop Experiment," R. Edgeworth, B.J. Dalton and T. Parnell, European Journal of Physics, 1984, pp. 198-200.

The complete list of honorees and their worthy endeavors can be found here.