April Fooling: 2021 Edition

Well, the April 1st arXiv articles are out, and sure enough there are some of them that are in honor of April Fool's Day. For example, there is one about Taylor Swift and a paper that is "coauthored" by a cat in which the cat "analyzes" a laser pointer and a dot on a wall as a coupled dynamical system.

Update: Here are some other papers, although I don't think the one about procrastination qualifies. I saw that one in my own arXiv scouring, and in my opinion that one is more of the 'improbable research' style (something that first makes you laugh and then makes you think), rather than something that is simply a joke. (Tip of the cap to Celeste Labedz.)

Update (4/01/21): The article that I was thinking of — which concerns our poor estimation of how long things take — was indeed intended as a sort of a joke (based on the author's Twitter thread), but my own view of it is still as an example of 'improbable research'.

Update (4/01/21): Here is a joke about noodle knitting. (Tip of the cap to Katherine Seaton.)

Update (4/01/21): Some department websites also experienced a few changes. (Tip of the cap to Karen Daniels.)

Update (4/02/21): There is also now an article about various spoofs in physics and astronomy.

Update (4/02/21): The Santa Fe Institute finally created a web page for Dr. Ian Malcolm. Life finds a way, so to speak. (It has long been rumored that a certain SFI faculty member provided some inspiration for the fictional scientist. (As a subtle hint, think of The Power Law OF DOOM.)

Update (4/02/21): This fake rejection of Roxy Music fooled me.

April Fooling: 2019 Edition

It is April 1st in some timezones, so I'll be starting a round-up of some of the jokes that I see.

Eve Armstrong has posted a fake paper on arXiv. (While I am sometimes amused by the April Fool's Day papers that appear on the arXiv, what I don't understand is how some of them get to go on the arXiv, while a few of my real papers have actually been rejected from the arXiv.)

Theresa May looks set to become the next Cambridge vice-chancellor after stepping down as Prime Minister. (Tip of the cap to Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb.)

Here is a summary of some of today's pranks. I like the new depicted 50-pence coin. :) The bottom of the article includes a gallery of famous hoaxes (including some great ones), but sadly they missed out on Sidd Finch.

Some April Fool's Day Stuff

I'll try to keep a running tab of some of the April Fool's Day stuff I notice. As I write this, I haven't tried to look very much.

The first one that I want to mention is ThinkGeek's catalog. (Tip of the cap to Jennifer Ouellette.)

As usual, there are some special papers on the arXiv, including this one and this one.

Here is another joke arXiv paper. (Tip of the cap to Chad Topaz.)

Here is a roundup of Google's jokes, including the ability to play "Where's Waldo?" on Google Maps.

April Fooling Around: 2017

Here's an April Fool's Day paper on the arXiv. The title of the paper is: A Neural Networks Approach to Predicting How Things Might Have Turned Out Had I Mustered the Nerve to Ask Barry Cottonfield to the Junior Prom Back in 1997

(The arXiv doesn't have 1 April as a mailing day this year, so we get it early.)

The last sentence of the abstract is amusing: "Over-training is also discussed, although the linear algebra teacher assures us that in Barry’s case this is not possible."

As things catch my eye, I will post links to more April Fool's Day shenanigans.

Here are various past posts related to April Fool's Day (and a couple of other posts that show up in the search but aren't particularly related).

Update: Here is another joke arXiv paper. It is called: Schrodinger's Cat and World History: The Many Worlds Interpretation of Alternative Facts

Update: This article seems to purposely be dated April 1st, but it has a rather different flavor from the other two.

Update: According to an April 1st article in The Guardian, former British chancellor (more formally, "Chancellor of the Exchequer") George Osborne has become a fashion designer. (Tip of the cap to Dominic Vella.)

Update (4/01/17) Here is a screenshot of my April Fool's Day prank of 2006, for which I was able to convince a member of Caltech's public-relations department to post my article (actual fake news, which of course is an April 1st tradition) on the Caltech web page and include a link to it in an e-mail circular.

Update (4/01/17): Cherwell, a student publication from University of Oxford, published an interesting story about possible cancellation of the Cancer Research UK Boat Races. Here is another one from Cherwell.

Update (4/01/17): There's also the matter of the Spaced X rocket launch out of Santa Monica, California. (Tip of the cap to Andrea Bertozzi.)

Update (4/01/17): In other news, an ancient particle accelerator was discovered on Mars. (Tip of the cap to Jean Bellissard.)

Update (4/01/17): George Takei played an amusing prank.

Update (4/01/17): Also, the American Physical Society is launching a new journal called Physical Review Tweets. Awesome!

Update (4/02/17): Google remixed an old (but awesome) prank by letting people play Ms. Pac-Man on Google Maps. (Tip of the cap to Myah Evers.) Google also played a few other pranks.

Update (4/02/17): And here are various other pranks that you may have encountered yesterday.

Update (4/08/17): Well, the Reddit prank appears to have resulted in a rather interesting example of self-organization (and of astounding art, with some "This is why we can't have nice things." thrown in). (Tip of the cap to Kevin Hickerson, Maria Satterwhite, and others.)

April Fool's Day Round-Up

Let's start with this new paper on the arXiv. And also this one. Also this one. (Tip of the cap to Guido Caldarelli for the third one.) Also this paper and this one.

Here is something about Brexit from The Guardian. (Tip of the cap to Dominic Vella.)

Here is a collaboration between Mark Zuckerberg and H&M. (Tip of the cap to Ravi Montenegro.)

Google had some issues with its Gmail joke this year.

Meanwhile, according to the New York Times, Stanford University's admissions rate has plummeted to 0%. (Tip of the cap to Carlos Castillo Chavez.) This one is great!

I assume that this CNN.com article about an SUV chase in which the SUV ultimately takes out a fighter jet is a fake.

The country of Estonia is now going to run an OS for other countries. (Tip of the cap to Guillermo Valle Pérez.)

CERN also got into the act with a musical number that missed a perfect rickrolling opportunity. Techers should consider themselves suitably warned, and I got caught offguard by this one.

George Takei posted a prank on his Facebook page about a new sitcom costarring Cloris Leachman and him.

Here is CNN.com's round-up of today's pranks.

National Geographic announced that they would stop publishing nude animal photos. (Tip of the cap to Karen Kustedjo.)

Also, the New York Times crossword puzzles are ending.

And then there is the video advertisement for all-new Quilted Northern "Rustic Weave" toilet paper, which is hilarious. (Tip of the cap to Aaron Clements.)

30th Anniversary of the "Sidd Finch" Prank

This snuck up on me.

Baseball Tonight's Facebook post, which links to this article, brings up (and reminds me of) the Sidd Finch prank from 1 April 1985. It's amazing that that prank is now 30 years old. Sidd Finch had his 168 mile per hour fastball (and various other oddities), and the New York Mets played along with the hoax. So awesome!

April Fool's Day!

I am sure that there will be many gems for April 1st this year, just as there was last year and in previous years. Here is a link to some pranks from 2011 and to April-Foolish arXiv papers from 2010 (here and here). I have more April-Foolish blog entries around here somewhere...

This year, Google got into the act early by letting people play Pac-Man on Google Maps.

Now, CERN has demonstrated that The Force exists. (Now that is a truly fundamental force!) [Tip of the cap to Josie Messa for the "news" from CERN.] And in other news out of CERN, apparently rainbow universes are for real.. [Tip of the cap to Kevin Hickerson.]

And now we have an article in Nature by Bob May and collaborators indicating that dragons might be real after all. The article has been published in Nature, so we know that we can count on its scientific accuracy. [Tip of the cap to Catarina Amorim and another source that I can't recall.]

The journal Science has also gotten into the act, indicate that NASA has found strong evidence at least one Hell (the many-Hells theory is more plausible than the existence of just a single Hell), and it appears to be located on Mercury. Considering the planet's namesake, it kind of makes sense that one might find a Hell there. I really love the article's culminating quote: "Congress told NASA to go to hell, and, by Jove, they made it." [Tip of the cap to Physics Today.]

The BBC has summarized some of the pranks from "Tech sites", and of course technology sites tend to take the lead when it comes to April Foolishness. :) [Tip of the cap to Carlos Castillo Chavez.]

Also, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum unveiled a "limited exhibition" of Wonder Woman’s invisible jet. [Tip of the cap to Foster McLane.]

And the American Physics Society, in their popular blurb, reported on killer app for graphene. It was published in a strange journal called Physical Review Graphene. Choice quote: Markus Merk of the Max Planck Institute for Topological Physics in Dingenskirchen, Germany, who wasn’t involved in the research, said the finding is “Refreshing—and potentially very important.” But he thinks other materials could outperform graphene. “Graphene, unfortunately, has no spin-orbit coupling. But topological insulators do. Using these novel materials could increase the plaque-prevention efficiency of toothpastes by at least 35% at liquid helium temperatures.” I love it!

And the world apparently went backwards over at Google. [Tip of the cap to Jimmy Lin.]

The "Association for Computational Heresy" at Carnegie Mellon University produced an entire conference proceedings with serious realizations of joke ideas and joke realizations of serious ideas. [Tip of the cap to Juegren Pfeffer.]

Meanwhile, in a new paper on the arXiv, some scholars have proposed that we give up not only on Falsifiability (as others have suggested) but also on other 'F' words, such as Fidelity, Factuality, and Frugality. [Tip of the cap to Vinko Zlatić.]

Even DARPA got into the act. They advertised new programs that simultaneously test the limits of technology and credulity. [Tip of the cap to Heather Dean.]

Fooling Around in April

This entry from CafePress is a big win. (Tip of the hat to Heather Dean.)

In a Facebook post, Tears For Fears announced a new collaboration with Kid Rock.

As usual, there are also some appropriate papers on the arXiv. I noticed one on my own that just isn't funny, so I'm ignoring it. But Kevin Hickerson and Physics Today found A Necro-Biological Explanation for the Fermi Paradox, which has been submitted for publication in The Necronomicon.

My former colleague Lew Lefton from Georgia Tech was on the receiving end of a joke this year. (Tip of the cap to the School of Physics at Georgia Tech.)

For those with some time on their hands, there is the Google Maps Pokemon Challenge.

The Guardian also included a report about a curious and symmetry-breaking outcome of Scottish independence. (Tip of the cap to Cecilia Mascolo.)

Here is a summary of fake products from a few tech companies. (Tip of the hat to Sham Kakade.)

The White House got into the action with a President's Council on Beards. (Tip of the cap to whoever posts for MLB on Facebook.)

Depeche Mode has an April Fool's Day prank with new t-shirt designs with lyrics on them, but this joke was really lame.

Update (4/04/14): I'm posting this belatedly, but here is a summary of some of the April Fools Day pranks from various tech companies and some others. I like the one from CERN. :)

Update (4/04/14): NPR's prank was brilliant. (Tip of the cap to Lada Adamic.)

April Fools Day Roundup (2013)

Here is TechCrunch's 2013 April Fools Day roundup.

New "Quest Mode" in Google Maps

This appears to be an early April Fools joke, and it is an awesome one indeed! Check out quest mode in Google Maps. It's available in the upper right corner. That is just awesome. Now you can imagine your attempt to find directions just like back in the day on the NES.

(Tip of the cap to Louis Wang.)

Celebrating April 1st

This year's April 1st celebrations weren't as good as last year's.

Google introduced TiSP, which had its moments (especially the 'file not found' page, which took an amusing stab at a certain class of physicists). Google.uk introduced GMail Motion. (This does remind me, though, that Google announced GMail for real on a previous April 1st.) Do any of you know whether Google did anything in other countries?

Tor introduced new fantasy game, and I gave a talk on "Synchronization of Cows" (several people needed to be assured that that is in fact real).

(Tip of the cap to Puck Rombach and Justin Howell.)

Update (4/2/11): CNN.com has an article with some pranking highlights of April 1st.

Some Baseball-Related April Fools Stories

Rob Neyer has collected them and generally phrased things pretty well on his blog. The reference to Sidd Finch, a fictional baseball player in one of the best April Fools jokes ever, is much appreciated.

Way too many blog entries for me the last couple of days...

Tales from the arXiv: April 1st Edition (Part II)

There is at least one more fake arXiv paper.

Title: Orthographic Correlations in Astrophysics

Authors: Joe Zuntz, Thomas G. Zlosnik, Caroline Zunckel, Jonathan T. L. Zwart

Abstract: We analyze correlations between the first letter of the name of an author and the number of citations their papers receive. We look at simple mean counts, numbers of highly-cited papers, and normalized h-indices, by letter. To our surprise, we conclude that orthographically senior authors produce a better body of work than their colleagues, despite some evidence of discrimination against them.

Note: I very much appreciate the author names on this one.

Choice quote from the article: "We also follow usual practice and use a number of different estimators, continuing until we find one that can demonstrate the correct hypothesis to be true."

Another one: "Unlike real doctors, scientists are forgiven their worst work and judged on their best."

(Tip of the cap to Joe Antognini.)

Google is now called "Topeka"

In honor of the city of Topeka, Kansas temporarily naming themselves "Google", Google has decided to rename themselves "Topeka". I approve!

(In other news, Google.uk is offering animal translation capabilities. Now I wonder if past April Fools pranks by Google have differed in different countries. They must have, but it was only the obviously US-centric version of today's prank on google.com that compelled to think about this and look up what google.uk did.)

Update (4/01/10): There is a vowel outage on Gmail, but people writing in Hebrew thankfully aren't affected by it.

Update (4/01/10): Google is expressing its search times in (pseudo)randomly-chosen units for each search.

Tales from the arXiv: April 1st Edition

I saw Zombieland last night (I hadn't cried so much since Titanic), and I have zombies on my mind. So let's talk about zombies.

Like in this new article just posted on the arXiv that was co-authored by George Romero (well, not really):

Title: "How many zombies do you know?" Using indirect survey methods to measure alien attacks and outbreaks of the undead

Author: Andrew Gelman (and possibly George Romero)

Abstract: The zombie menace has so far been studied only qualitatively or through the use of mathematical models without empirical content. We propose to use a new tool in survey research to allow zombies to be studied indirectly without risk to the interviewers.

I love April 1st...

Google's 2009 April Fools joke (and other, much better, ones)

While I appreciate the subject matter of Google's April Fools joke this year, I just don't think their implementation is particularly amusing. Sorry, Google, but you've let me down this year. The idea was good, but this just didn't do it for me.

This year, I was lame and didn't do anything, so it's not like I have any foundation to back up the above comments. :)

Update: On the other hand, Expedia's $99 flights to Mars are a big win. Here is CNN's summary of April Fools jokes. (It would be really awesome if some of the ones they are reporting aren't actually jokes that anyone has pulled.) The Guardian has some fake stories on their website. The one I like best is about their impending conversion to Twitter format. Now that is awesome!

Update 2: Ah yes, and Rob Neyer in his blog has reminded me about the best. April Fools. joke. ever.

Prank alert: The California Tech visits MIT

Well, this isn't much of an alert because the prank actually occurred on Friday. I'm just getting around to posting this entry now.

For April 1st, The California Tech decided to have a few fake pages in the style of MIT's school newspaper. There were some April Fools articles in the issue, but the plans expanded to writing an entire fake issue of the MIT paper and flying over to Boston to deliver it on their Campus Preview Weekend (what they call prefrosh weekend) in lieu of their regular paper. I approve!

I have only glanced through the actual articles -- one can find copies of the paper all over campus -- and they don't seem particularly funny (although a couple of things are amusing). However, the writing per se is far less important than the prank itself, which is awesome! (Autumn and I are definitely planning to have a story about this prank in Legends IV.)

One thing I don't know is whether our upcoming book helped motivate this prank. (An article about the book is going to be appearing in the next issue of The Tech, so such things had been stirring in the air around The Tech for a while now.) Naturally, one of the big motivations of the book is to encourage pranks, so hopefully that will happen. There have certainly been several encouraging signs over the past couple of years and some amount of money from each copy of our book that's sold will be going towards a prank fund, so there will be some money available for this stuff.

Google TiSP

Today, Google released the beta version of their new TiSP service. I was especially amused by the 'TiSP for Enterprise' under Advanced TiSP options. Anyway, this one was very funny, but I liked Google Romance better (because love is, after all, just another search problem).


Because of my current trip, research, upcoming book, Zelda, and general hanging out, I didn't have a chance to do an April Fools joke this year. (Additionally, doing lots of writing with the book also made me less inclined to spend time writing polished stuff in other arenas at the moment.) However, here are links to some of my past handiwork:

2006

2005

2003