April 21, 2005

Family paper

As a sometime dabbler in computer science, I had to frequently read through papers that looked a lot like this one. As I note with pride and pleasure, it is written by my 14 month old daughter, her nearly six year old brother and their mother. I note with even more pride and pleasure that it is every bit as opaquely learned-looking as the ones I had to read when I was that sometime dabbler.

"Dogfooding Our Heuristic" is an especially deft touch. I know it would find immediate approval with a once-colleague who wrote reams of papers over the months I knew him, getting paid handsomely all the while, about something he called "Simulacrum." Twenty years later, I have no doubt he's still at it. The dogfooder!

Anyway, congratulations to my family!

Or really, congratulations to these guys.

5 comments:

Kartik said...

Hehe,

Looks like the folks down at MIT got really bord writing their own papers ... so they decided to benefit the world as well! :-D

-- Kartk

Suhail said...

Dilip,
Alan Sokal, a physicist, played this parody way back and he got his paper - full of meaningless gibberish and hi-fi jargon - published in a very prominent magazine too :) Here's all the details abt that episode, and his subsequent revelation, which is more fun than the paper.

Sriram said...

Dilip, the paper link is not working. Thanks.

Dilip D'Souza said...

Suhail, I know about Sokal's efforts. Thanks for the pointer -- yeah, the furore afterward is more fun than the paper!

Sriram, seems the paper generated is cached for a few hours then removed. I hadn't counted on that (though silly me, I should have known). So the masterpiece I had on my screen as I wrote this post is lost to posterity. Or a posterior.

But if you click on the link, it takes you to a page where you can generate another paper with the same authors. Give that a shot.

Anonymous said...

This post was very great. I'd love to see more like it.