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April 21, 2005
"What's that you say? The flux capacitor has destabilized the potentiometric gradulometer?"
Man, I love stories like this:
Some smartasses at MIT recently had a paper called "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" accepted for presentation at a peer-reviewed computer science conference. The trouble is, the contents of the paper were not just a complete fabrication, but were in fact totally meaningless collections of CompSci buzzwords strung together by a computer (Sentences can be grammatically acceptable while being semanitcally meaningless, like Noam Chomsky's famous "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"). I'm guessing the technology uses augmented transition networks and context-free grammars, or something. Whatever the nuts and bolts, the students did a damn fine job of showing how out of control much of academia has gotten.
You can check out the application on Jeremy Stribling's (one of the students) website. Another example of similar technology is the much-beloved (by me) Postmodernism Generator which gives you a new critical theory paper every time you reload your web browser (and calls to mind the so-called"Sokal Hoax").
(Thanks to Greg LOAG for sending the story along)
In less happy news from the land of the impossibly smart, Professor Saunders Mac Lane died last week at the age of 95. Prof. Mac Lane was instrumental in developing category theory, a branch of abstract algebra that deals with the commonalities between structures in all branches in math and logic. It's fascinating stuff, and it's got tons of applications in and out of math. I'd hate to tell you all of the time I've spent struggling through Prof. Mac Lane's Categories for the Working Mathematician. Despite his preternaturally lucid handing of the arcane subject matter, my being somewhat of a dullard kept me from getting too much out of it. My dimwittedness aside, his impact on many fields will be felt for generations to come.
Posted by matt at April 21, 2005 10:58 AM
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