Marc Abrahams Turned Strange Science into an Event Known Around the World

Marc Abrahams, Ig Nobel emcee, 

Illumination by Human Spotlight

Marc Abrahams is the editor and founder of the Annals of Improbable Research and the co-founder and Emcee of the annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. Both the Ig Nobel Prizes and the magazine are approaching their thirtieth year of making people laugh and then think.

I met Marc Abrahams in 2006 when the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting was in St. Louis.  The AAAS meeting is always over President’s weekend in February.  During that weekend in 2006, the temperature in St. Louis never got higher than ten degrees Fahrenheit.  

We were introduced in a crowded bar in the conference hotel by the science writer Katharine Sanderson, then a science writer for Chemistry World magazine in the U.K. Sanderson had written about the history of the chemistry museum I worked for and thought Marc would like it.  

I had never heard of the Ig Nobel Prizes, but loved the idea from the moment Marc began explaining them.  The ten annual prizes mirror the actual Nobel prizes, though not strictly.  They are awarded for actual published scientific research about strange topics.  For example, this year, the Medicine Ig Nobel Prize went to a Japanese doctor who published a paper describing a self colonoscopy. 

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The winner of the 2018 Ig Nobel Prize 

in Medicine for Self Colonoscopy

Another 2018 Ig Nobel laureate received the prize in the Nutrition category—not a Nobel category. He showed from research based on DNA from three millennia ago that a cannibal diet is not as nutritious as diet based on eating other animals and plants.  His findings show it’s better to eat with your neighbor than to eat your neighbor.

The Ig Nobel Prizes are bestowed on the winners by actual Nobel laureates. People, who have been honored in Stockholm by the Swedish Academy for brilliant research, laugh along with everyone else as they hand out prizes for research on bras that become gas masks or frogs that levitate in magnetic fields. They even help to sweep up the paper airplanes.

This year, the woman who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry told Ira Flatow on Science Friday that she wanted an Ig Nobel Prize! It seemed as she was also quite happy with the Nobel Prize.

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Since 1991, Marc has donned a tux and top hat and acted as emcee for this annual ceremony that includes a comic opera and, to add nerdiness, a blizzard of paper airplanes.  

Paper airplanes fill the air in Sanders Theater

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After the September ceremony in Sanders Theater at Harvard each year, Marc travels the world talking about the Ig Nobels.  This year he was in a festival in Japan just a week after the ceremony in Cambridge.  He also puts on an abbreviated ceremony at the annual meeting of AAAS—the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which is always held on the President’s Day weekend in February. Sometimes the AAAS meeting also conflicts with Valentine’s Day and with the Daytona 500.  What this says about scientists, I leave to others to decide.

Marc speaks to audiences around the world.

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My first volunteer job with the Ig Nobel was ushering at the Ig Nobel ceremony at the AAAS meeting beginning in 2006.  However, after I returned from Iraq in 2010, Marc added me to the volunteer staff in Cambridge as a press wrangler. Each year I escort reporters in and out of the ceremony. Because of copyright and legal restrictions, broadcast reporters are limited in how much time they can record.  My particular job is to escort the reporter and cameraman from Channel One (ПервыйКанал) in Russia.  Camera crews from many countries have filmed the Ig Nobel ceremony over the years, but Channel One Russia and NHK Japan have been there every year since I have been a volunteer.

This year, for the first time, I was able to attend one of the Ig Nobel picnics. The picnics bring together volunteers who are running past each other on the day of the event. This year I arrived early enough to hear practice for the Opera. In addition to playing at the Ig Nobel ceremony and the picnic, one of the pianists, Ivan Gusev, will be playing a solo concert at Carnegie Hall next month.  

One of the best pieces of career advice I have ever received said that happiness at work depends more on who you work with than on what you do.  Marc Abrahams took this one step further: he created a ceremony that became an institution that attracts people who laugh and think and who want others to join in and do the same.

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Commie Plots! Chick Tracts! My Visit to the Global Headquarters of the Sectarian Review Podcast

Danny Anderson meeting Philip Roth

at the celebration of Roth's 80th birthday

Danny Anderson is a professor of literature at Mount Aloysius College near Cresson, Pennsylvania. He grew up near Cleveland in a center of American fundamentalism: the kind of place where Barry Goldwater was considered a Liberal, the Earth was 6,000 years old, fluoride was a Commie plot, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were real, not just a nickname for top-rated defensive linemen. 

And yet, Danny earned a Masters Degree in American Jewish literature, followed by a PhD comparing the Campus as a setting in Jewish film and literature.  So what school could be a better fit for an expert in Jewish literature who grew up Conservative Evangelical than a rural Catholic College that was founded as a convent and school for girls in 1853? 

So many strands of American faith are woven through Danny’s life that he is an ecumenical event when he is eating lunch alone at his desk. 

Actually Danny has two desks in the Homage-to-Hogwarts structure he works in.  The second desk is the studio where he records podcasts.  Danny is the founder and host of SectarianReview, a podcast about Faith, Culture, Music, Economics, Film, History, Religion and Politics.  If that sounds sane, here are ten actual topics:

·      Elon Musk

·      The John Birch Society

·      Spiderman

·      Andrei Rublev

·      Seven Mountains Dominionism

·      Donald J. Trump

·      Oscar Romero and Redemption

·      Science Fiction & Theology

·      Chick Tracts

·      The Wolf Man

From these topics, and from many others, like Alex Jones being banned on Social Media, you could get the idea that Sectarian Review is all fun and crazy. But the most affecting episode for me was “Black Exodus from White Evangelicalism.” I listened to that interview twice and read her article "For Those Who Stay" by Danny’s guest Tamara Johnson the same day the podcast dropped on my iPhone. 

In that episode Johnson talked about her struggle to be part of a white Evangelical congregation and how Charlottesville changed everything for her.  I am struggling with being an ethnically Jewish believer with Black sons and wondering how I can worship with people who drank the full pitcher of Trump Koolaid and continue to be devoted to him after Charlottesville. Listening to Johnson helped me to deal with that conflict in my life.

I was in the Johnstown area Monday, so I took a forty-minute drive northeast and met Danny at his office, got a brief tour of the campus then went to lunch. During lunch we mainly talked about Danny’s research area.  I grew up in a completely secular Jewish home and read very little American Jewish literature. Danny is now my Sherpa on that high mountain. He posted a list of his ten favorite Jewish novels on the Sectarian Review website. During lunch he recommended a half-dozen books and movies I should see and read, with a supplemental list of Woody Allen movies.  I was texting titles to myself while he spoke. It’s a good thing my iPhone has lots of memory.

If you were wondering what kind of person grows up fundamentalist, studies Jewish literature, teaches at a rural Catholic College, Danny is the only one. I cannot recommend the podcast highly enough. I suggest scanning the Sectarian Review website for your favorite conspiracy theory then begin listening, and smiling.    

  Danny Anderson

Sectarian Review is part of the Christian Humanist Network.  

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Books and War: The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

A Tour Bus Ride from Hell to Heaven

War gave me faith in 1973 when I was blinded by shrapnel in a missile explosion. War almost took my faith away in 2009 when I saw the people we had invaded in Iraq trying to live in the wake of all we had done through misguided policy. Were the wretched people a thousand feet below our helicopters going to Hell because they did not believe the way a 300-pound millionaire preacher on TV said they should?  If rich televangelists were right, God was unjust.

In Iraq, I re-read The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis. Lewis says the doors of Hell are locked from the inside. He says in many of his works that Pride is the worst sin, a thousand times worse than Lust.  The proud will lock the doors of Hell from the inside rather than admit they are wrong.

The central story in the Great Divorce is a tour bus ride that takes residents of Hell to visit Heaven.  All but one of the tourists decides to return to Hell.  They could all stay, but it would mean asking forgiveness and admitting they were wrong.  Their punishment is not the exquisite torment in Dante or the flames licking the pews in Hellfire preaching.  The only punishment is separation from God forever. 

The problem with most visions of Hell is that they are radically unjust.  How could someone who murders another man and is then executed for his crime get the same punishment as Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot? Could Jerry Falwell Jr. really be going to Heaven after selling out his faith for access to the most corrupt Presidential candidate ever? 

If the price of admission to Heaven begins with saying, “I was wrong, forgive me” then Heaven is open to everyone, and Hell is home to everyone who insists they are right.  As Lewis noted elsewhere, that means Hell is disproportionally home to the rich, the old and the opinionated. So I am properly worried about my own soul. 

I can’t say that this insight from the Great Divorce made the life of faith easy. But it keeps me from being distracted by the claims and counter claims of faith leaders and followers who are absolutely sure they are doing God’s will. In this context I know all defenders of God are wrong. 

Whenever someone makes punishing the sins of others their purpose in life, they are always wrong. Always. Jihad claims to be defense of God. Racism exalts one group over another and uses God as their excuse. All defenders of God from every faith will lock Hell’s doors behind them: whether they wave a bloody sword or preach from a plush pulpit for millions of donated dollars.

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My Next Race--Fighting Back Against Aging

Riding at Camp Adder, Iraq.

The Army won't deploy a soldier who is more than sixty years old without a waiver signed by a general officer.

I had one of those waivers in 2013 when I turned 60. I was supposed to deploy to Afghanistan with the 56th Stryker Brigade.  But President Obama cut troop deployments to our nation's longest war and I stayed home.

In preparation for that deployment, I went to a three-month Army school at Fort Meade, Maryland.

During the school I was training to do an Ironman triathlon the following year.  If the deployment fell through, I would have a huge athletic challenge. While I was at Fort Meade, I took two fitness tests. I scored 296 and 300--the max.  I completed the Ironman at age 61.

Since the Ironman, I have tried a couple of times to start running again, and could not.

The next year swimming got more difficult. My left shoulder would last for a mile before giving out, then less.  It's a good thing I did the Ironman when I did, because running and swimming got harder and harder in the two years following.

Last year I rode across Eastern Europe.  This year I rode to Boston but I was having knee trouble.

Now, four years after the Ironman, I get knee surgery in three weeks. Next week I get an MRI for a lower back problem and I just got a cortisone shot in my right shoulder.

In 2013, I was ready to deploy to Afghanistan with an infantry brigade.  In 2014 I did an Ironman.  In the coming year I could be getting one or two more surgeries as a result of injuries and a genetic tendency to arthritis.

One of my riding buddies is 71 years old and has none of these problems. He also has no arthritis.  I have an Army buddy who is younger than I am but the cumulative damage of Airborne and Ranger service means his serious workout days are over.

In some ways, I am amazed I could get this far.  Today I rode 10 miles to the doctor to get the shot. On the way back, I met another riding buddy on the road and ended up riding almost 40 miles.

People ask me what my next big event is. My next big event will be getting healthy enough to do another big event.

Catching Up with a World Traveling Friend: Ivan Porccino

Ivan Porccino at a visit to Georgia Military Institute

Twenty years ago I worked for a big American company that bought a big Brazilian company. As a result of this deal Millennium Inorganic Chemicals acquired a manufacturing plant, a sales office and a mine in Brazil; I got a friend I have kept in touch with ever since. I recently met Ivan for dinner in New York. 

When we met in Sao Paulo in 2000 Ivan Porccino was a 27-year-old junior sales guy who knew lots of people in Sao Paulo and could help his American colleagues like me navigate the biggest city in South America.  We worked together in arranging a big event for our CEO to talk to all of our new customers through the acquisition. 

Ivan seemed to know everyone and languages of Brazil’s biggest communities.  So whomever we needed to talk to, Ivan could talk to them in Portuguese, German, Spanish, and Italian, then talk to me in English.  Although Ivan saw his future in international business, he was also interested in philosophy, history and read great books in all the languages he could speak. 

When we were stuck in Sao Paulo cabs going slower than Amish buggies we could talk about whether Hume was right about free will, whether Adam Smith, John Locke and the philosophical Scots were the true beginning of the modern world, and if Dostoevsky saw the world most clearly of all the Russians. 

Ivan was back in New York to take over a major commodity chemical shipping operation. He sees it as the next stepping-stone toward a top job in international commerce in South America. In his eyes, America creating tariff barriers is bad for the world, but it creates opportunities for other countries that live in the shadow of the world dominance of the U.S.  For Ivan, America is the greatest and most brilliant sociological experiment in the history of the world, and it is currently being squandered.

But the long game for 47-year-old Ivan is to get his teenage kids through University then have more time to spend with philosophy and literature. He may retire before he’s 60. After we talked about business, we were back to talking about Dostoevsky and Machiavelli, because they are the authors that see the evil as well as the good inside all of us. 

By the way, dinner was Japanese because what else would a North and a South American eat in New York City?

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Unforgettable Moment, B-52s Scramble, Hill Air Force Base, 1974

B-52 Bombers taking off on full throttle on Strategic Air Command alert

I was stationed at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, from 1972-74. Early in 1974, Strategic Air Command stationed a wing of B-52s on Hill.  

My duty station was four miles from the airfield on the north end of the base.  Sometimes I went to the hangar for electronic parts.  On a warm spring day, I happened to be in the hangar when I heard an enormous roar, then another, then another, and another.  

Six B-52s filled the air with black smoke and the howl of 48 jet engines on throttle. The planes took off one after the other less than a minute apart. When all six formed up in the sky above the base, the giant airplanes flew east toward the Rocky Mountains and disappeared.

It was magnificent.

I was 21 years old when those planes took off.  Those airplanes were about my age, first entering service in 1952, a year before I was born. Like me they have had a lot of maintenance, but still have an active life today. Some of them, like me, are in their 60s.