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.
April 21, 2005
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4 comments:
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
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.
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.
This post was very great. I'd love to see more like it.
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