Nobel Prizes announced

The Nobel Prizes were announced this week. Of greatest interest to me this year were the Literature and Medicine Prizes. The latter was awarded to three American researchers whose biological research has offered important insights into cell aging and death. This is a bit far afield of my own area of expertise, but I'm pleased for them nonetheless. The Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Romanian-born German author Herta Muller. It seems less than a quarter of her oeuvre has been translated into English, which might explain why I have never heard of her.

Though the Nobel Prize for Literature is my favorite of the awards, it's also the one with which I am often most dissatisfied. The award was founded in 1901 and since then has been awarded every year but seven. During that time some unquestionably brilliant authors have received it: Eliot, Yeats, Faulkner, Solzhenitsyn and Neruda, to name a few. Other recipients, however, have not been as deserving. 2004 laureate Elfriede Jelinek's The Piano Teacher, for example, is pornographic tripe. It is the nature of these awards that not everyone will agree with every choice of recipient. But let's look at who's doing the choosing.

There are more scientists and historians in the Swedish Academy than novelists, and none of them is widely known outside Swedish circles. Until resigning from her position, one of the members was best known for her detective stories. Are newspapermen and computational linguists really qualified to confer a prize of such global magnitude? Of course not. Great Britain's Man Booker prize, for example, is conferred by a board composed of the leading writers and critics in the Commonwealth.

The public is also culpable for blowing the award out of proportion. There is a certain weight conferred by the Nobel brand, but the award never claims to identify the single greatest author or work in the world. The public too frequently assumes otherwise and heaps exuberant laudation upon individuals who don't always deserve it. I do not mean to denounce any specific laureate (except Ms. Jelinek), merely to shed some light on a widely misunderstood prize. In the meantime, I look forward to reading Ms. Muller to see for myself.

And now I would like to announce a few Nobel Prizes of my own, in the following categories:

Dumb disclaimers:
1) The daily horoscope in the local newspaper: Predictions have no reliable basis in fact
2) Sleep aid warning labels: May cause drowsiness
3) The price-check gun at the supermarket: Small children should not shine laser in eyes

The winner is: The price check gun at the supermarket. It turns out that lasers will blind you at any age. Just ask Phil Cuzzi.

Exasperating engineering:
1) The $0.15 toll on Interstate 90 between Buffalo and Depew.
2) Alarm clocks
3) The jump seat in the back of van-style ambulances

The winner is: The jump seat in the back of van-style ambulances. It'd be more comfortable to sleep on a porcupine's back.

Coolest electronic device I've used in the past two months:
1) MonRoi Personal Chess Manager
2) Garmin GPS
3) Logitech Webcam

The winner is: The webcam. The MonRoi is great to have for chess tournaments and the Garmin gets me from A to B, but only the webcam lets me see Ellen while we're 400 miles apart.