Cicadas and Amusing Lab Hijinks

I am amused!

A few weeks ago I left a cicada shell on my colleague’s desk to scare her. Today I came in to find this on my desk - our full lab reconstructed in terrifying detail. There’s an Irish one wearing glasses READING MY REVIEW PAPER. I’m simultaneously traumatised and dying of laughter pic.twitter.com/NzF25pBpYe

— Dr Grace Hallinan (@GraceHallinan) August 16, 2019

(Tip of the cap to Lindsey N. Walker.)

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.)

Encouragement for Oxford pranksters

My friend Danny (who I've known since I was 4) was visiting me from Friday until this morning, so between hanging out (in both London and Oxford) and trying desperately to get some work done, I haven't had a chance to do as much blogging during the past week. (I'll eventually be posting pictures from the past week, including one of me in my new role as Achilles.)

So, in order to cover the gap (so to speak), I am going to dig into the archives and tell the Oxford folks a bit about my sordid past. In the process, I hope to encourage some local shenanigans. (I apologize in advance to the others in my audience who have heard all this before.)

Let me start with something that will be new for everybody -- namely, what made me think of this? Well, I heard about a local drunken prank that I think is hilarious but for which the students seem to be have a fine heading in their direction. Namely, a rosemary bush was "borrowed" from a local restaurant (which I won't name) and, after much deliberation, planted in a toilet in a women's restroom so that it could grow big and strong. That's funny enough, but apparently our CCTV cameras (the ones that seem to be used predominantly for spying on students... actually, I ought to blog about that at some point; I'm finding a couple of things to be a bit Big Brotherish for my tastes, but I'll save that one for later) caught most of this on tape, so one can apparently see a fairly long discussion with deliberations. My reservations about the methodology of obtaining the videos aside, I hereby request that the Somerville porters post that video on YouTube or -- at the very least -- give me a chance to see it because I really want to take a look at it!

(Oh the other thing I found out is that I already have a rep among the Somerville students for dressing very differently from the others on High Table. Of course, only a small subset of them know that I have a charming personality as well.) But anyway, everybody seems to already know who I am even though I've only been here 7 weeks and change. I'm already making my mark! (Perhaps Oxford has met its match? As one of my friends said, it has been around 800 years but it hasn't got a chance to survive me.)

OK, so back to the archives...

Most of my Oxford peeps may not know this, but I coauthored a book about Caltech pranks and other shenanigans. For several months after its May 2007 debut, it was the number 1 selling item in Caltech's bookstore. It currently appears to be #3 among books.

I have been involved in a few pranks of my own. For example, I was the author and architect of this fake Caltech press release (it can be really useful to know people in your university's PR department!). I have a copy of the book with me if anybody is interested in seeing it, though as some might say, "Buy my book!" :)

So, I hope that you Oxford folks reading this blog entry will take this as a challenge and find something creative to do.