NORTHERN PLANNER

I was sorting through some cuttings and found this story about the Ig Nobel Awards. Organised by Harvard, they’re for the quirkier side of science.  The thinking and rigour is just the same, but these achievements are supposed to "make people laugh and then make them think". I like the way they use a mass of knowledge, learning and experience to make something most of us wouldn’t understand, or care about, into some brilliance, interest and relavance for us all. A useful skill for planners when you think of it.

One award went to a scientist who studied the mystery of why fingernails scraping on blackboards are excruciating, another was for a study for why spaghetti breaks into more than one piece when bent. The one I like is a teenager repellant that emits a high pitched shriek audible to younger people (our abilty to hear high frequency dwindles as we get older).