The geek lives!

There's a measure of which you may not have heard, but others have. In fact, Google's conversion function can convert measurements into it.

It's the smoot, and it's a unit of distance equal to five feet, seven inches.

It's named for Oliver Smoot, who as a pledge to the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1958 was used - literally, physically - to measure the length of the Massachusetts Avenue bridge across the Charles River. He lay down repeatedly and fraternity members used his height to mark off the bridge, smoot by smoot. It proved to be 364.4 smoots long.

It became a tradition that every year, freshmen at MIT would repaint the lines marking off each smoot across the bridge. In fact, it became so much of a tradition that when the bridge was rebuilt in 1989, the concrete pavements were scored at 1-smoot increments instead of the normal 6 feet. Police no longer try to prevent the annual repainting.

Today, 50 years after it's creation, the unit's originator was honored at Smoot Celebration Day at MIT with a plaque to be installed on the bridge to "brighten the lives of windblown pedestrians," in the words of MIT President Susan Hockfield. He was also presented with a smoot stick - which is, of course, five feet seven inches long.

After his graducation with a BS from MIT and a doctorate from Georgetown, Oliver Smoot went on to become chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).

But while he was honored with the plaque and smoot stick, he did not receive one of the major awards given out two days earlier: the Ig Nobels, presented at the 18th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony.

Given every year by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine, the awards honor research that may seem trivial or even silly but which might have merit; research, the magazine says, that makes people "laugh, then think."

This year's award recipients included among others a team of researchers who showed that Coca-Cola is a spermicide, another that showed it isn't, a behavioral scientist who determined that expensive fake medicines work better then cheap fake medicines, an archaeologist concered with how armadillos can affect the reading of history by moving artifacts around as they dig their tunnels, and a psychologist who examined the relationship between the incomes of strippers and their fertility cycles.

The magazine itself is a satire on standard scientific journals. While it does feature reports on serious research on what would seem odd topics, most of its articles are about absurd research, some of it fictional but some of it real. It grew out of an earlier (still-publishing) science humor magazine called the Journal of Irreproducible Results when JIR's then-editor, Marc Abrahams, broke away to found AIR in 1994. (His version of the tale can be found at this link.)

As I recall, the very earliest Ig Nobels were directed at research "that could not, or should not, be replicated." But as the tone has shifted over the years to work that unintentionally raises questions about how to measure what is "important" in science research, many recipients have recognized the light-hearted nature of the awards and come to accept theirs personally.

How many scientists does it take to change a light bulb?

One - but only if the research grant comes through.