Random: And the award goes to ...

How could I have missed this year's Ig Nobels? The winners were all quite worthy, but I must profess a particular admiration for the physics laureates (a joint Harvard-UCincinnati-UTexas team who analytically determined why pregnant women don't tip over) and the economics laureates:

The directors, executives, and auditors of four Icelandic banks — Kaupthing Bank, Landsbanki, Glitnir Bank, and Central Bank of Iceland — for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa — and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy.

So many scholars leave the implications of their research to be thrashed out by others; it's quite inspiring to see a team carry out the follow-up experiments themselves, and on such a scale. ;-p