The Ig Noble Prize, the Flat Earth Society, and the Burning Question of Dragon/Drogon Gender

Long ago, in 1955, at first in Israel, which is a nation state, then in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT], which is a state of mind, the Journal of Irreproducible Results [JIR] -- which was and is a bunch of genuine scientists making tongue-in-cheek send-ups of fake science -- began to explain everything in elaborately scientific terms with pseudo-scientific reasoning.  In those pre-Internet days for example it was well known that few people ever threw away a thick, glossy National Geographic magazine. A JIR researcher therefore meticulously demonstrated with statistics, charts, graphs and maps that 1) most Nat Geo subscriptions were in the eastern United States, and therefore 2) the combined weight of all those Nat Geo magazines stacked in eastern US closets and attics and under eastern beds was causing a tectonic shift. 

A follow-up JIR article showed that this maldistributed weight of hoarded copies of National Geographic was in fact opening a new rift valley in the center of the US that would soon swallow the Mississippi River and through it the Gulf of Mexico.... 

Yet another JIR analysis meanwhile conclusively demonstrated that those single socks that people had lost in clothes driers ended up in bedroom closets as hitherto-unexplained extra wire coat hangers. 

Early readers were a responsible lot. No pre-Internet reader was ever recorded as having tried to turn their wire coat hangers back into lost socks, or having attempted to gather half the Nat Geos and send them to California to prevent tectonic catastrophe, so JIR ran into no problems with the authorities. A cult classic, it flourished. Granted, disappointing purists, the scope of JIR articles soon expanded to include real scientific findings that only sound as though they belong in JIR -- like the well-documented fact that ostriches get sexually aroused by the presence of humans.... 

THE IG NOBLE PRIZE, FLAT EARTHERS AND DRAGONS

Each year, Marc Abrahams, editor and co-founder of the nonexistent Annals of Improbable Research [AIR]. has awarded the Ig Noble Prize, named for completely unknown scientist Iggy Noble. The prize goes to each of those JIR researchers who have made major discoveries in their fields "that cannot, or should not, be reproduced." 

Some would therefore say that JIR is a hugely elaborate prank created by crafty professors and students -- appreciatively read by their weak-from-laughing followers everywhere. Anyone would spot a thing like that, right? Well, no. The Flat Earth Society [FES] was once like the early JIR an hilarious meme, a troll, a proudly shameless hoax, complete with really good pseudo-scientific proofs. Long ago, that is. Credulous to a fault, uncounted people across the world have swallowed the flattened hook. They earnestly "demonstrate" the purported pancake flatness of the Earth, often quoting FES and replicating its "experiments". 

MIT-types insist that true believers do so without the slightest understanding of physics, but what would anyone at MIT know? Heck at MIT they believe in interplanetary travel, even in using rockets to correct trajectories, which flatearthers say is "obviously impossible because in space, there's nothing to push against". Flat-earthers say moreover that if the earth were spinning we'd "get nauseated and fly right off it", apparently unaware of the effect of Earth's atmosphere and discounting Einstein, another no doubt clueless MIT professor....