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.

4 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.

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.