While we're on the topic of scrotal asymmetry, I should mention the landmark, and possibly only, research paper on the subject, Scrotal Asymmetry in Man and in Ancient Sculpture.

Written by Dr. Chris McManus, of the University College of London's psychology department, the paper reports that in most men, the right testicle is more often higher, larger and heavier than the left. I had no idea.

Yet Dr. McManus found that of 187 ancient museum statues he examined - most of them Greek - many of the sculptors got it wrong, making the higher right testicle smaller in size, because they assumed it to be lighter, and the lower left testicle larger, because they assumed it to be heavier. This was artistic licence of some gravity.

McManus published his paper in 1979 to little notice. However, real acclaim for his research arrived in 2002, when a man named Marc Abrahams, who we had breakfast with Friday, learned of the McManus paper.

Abrahams - Harvard graduate, former computer entrepreneur, and a smart guy who admits to have been, as a kid, "weird" - is the editor of the science humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research.

He is also founder of the infamous Ig Nobel Awards. The Ig Nobels are the alternative-universe, parody version of the Nobel Prize, and are awarded to research findings that "first make people laugh, then make them think." Ten Ig Nobels are awarded each year. Abrahams awarded McManus his Ig Nobel in 2002 for medicine. Now McManus is an academic star, doing talks on scrotal asymmetry using juggling balls as props.

Abrahams is in town to speak tonight about the Ig Nobel Awards at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science convention. (His talk begins at 7 p.m. in the Mackenzie Room of the Fairmont Waterfront Hotel. The public is welcome.)

"The first Ig Nobel Prize ceremony was in 1991," Abrahams said. "I started them mostly because, through my work on the magazine, I was meeting all kinds of people who had done bizarre things, and almost nobody knew they existed. I thought it was a shame nobody was giving them a prize and patting them on the back."

For that first awards ceremony, he rented a hall at MIT, got some real Nobel Prize winners to take part as presenters (they readily agreed) and told a couple of reporters about it.

The event sold out. The press seized on the sheer weirdness of the award winners' research, and news of the Ig Nobels went global. The real Nobels may confer more prestige and money than the Ig Nobels, but nowhere near the glee. They are, generally, accepted happily by those they are bestowed upon. In this, the academic world mirrors the entertainment world: Any publicity is good publicity.

"One thing that's important to know," Abrahams said, "is that in almost every case that we pick somebody to win a prize, we'll get in touch with them very quietly to give them the opportunity to turn down this honour if they want. Happily for us, not many do."

Some notable Ig Nobels over the years:

. The 2004 prize in biology to Ben Wilson of UBC and Lawrence Dill of SFU for their land-mark study, Pacific and Atlantic Herring Produce Burst Pulse Sounds, which demonstrated that herring fart. They do so, Wilson and Dill speculated, either to communicate or to affect buoyancy.