Wikipedia Page for "Crackpot Index"

I was inspired by a recent e-mail sent to me (and, apparently, many other Oxford academics) to look up the Wikipedia page for Crackpot Index. Under its "See also" section is a link to the Wikipedia page for List of amateur mathematicians. That's not nice!

Violent Origins of the Crackpot Session at the APS March Meeting

Wow. The 'crackpot session' at the American Physical Society apparently started in the afternoon of a shooting by an enraged physicist whose abstract was rejected. See this BBC article for a discussion about this.

Those wacky physicists!

(Tip of the cap to whoever does Facebook posts for Physics Today.)

Classic Word of the Day: Psychoceramics

Today's word is one of the all-time classics:

Psychoceramicist [n]: someone who studies crackpottery. (And, of course, "psychoceramics" is a synonym for "crackpottery".)

(This word is based on longstanding discussions with Arcane Gazebo, who as far as I can tell is the inventor of the word. He doesn't practice psychoceramics, though. He's got a physics PhD and works in finance. Oh wait... :P)

Update: I have a Facebook comment from the Gazebo that reminds me about his blog post about psychoceramics, which explains how he found out about the word. I also have an e-mail from Cosma Shalizi with two websites that I assume either are or have the origins of the word contained therein. This one is an old blog post of his, and this one is an entire archive about pyschoceramics. So, no, the Gazebo did not invent the word. By the way, this brings back memories that the Gazebo used to (or maybe still does?) read Cosma's blog, which perhaps brings things back full circle?

Tales from the ArXiv: The d12 Gaming System

Apparently, this person wants to invent the d12 gaming system. Sadly, I became much less intrigued with the article (called "Dodecahedral Bowling") after looking at its content.

Tales from the ArXiv: Sleeping Well with Quantum Mechanics

When writing a paper in the field of psychoceramics, it becomes conceivable to end one's conclusions with the sentence "What is sure is that the author, with his new HAT, sleeps much better now!"

(Actually, I ought to find a way to have that kind of conclusion in one of my papers---or at least to find a way to sleep better!)

Early contender for best talk title: Accelerated Evolution in the Death Galaxy

Here is my opening contender for best talk title at the APS March Meeting: "A27.00002: Accelerated Evolution in the Death Galaxy"

Note that this talk is not in the psychoceramics session. I'm not going to see it, as it conflicts with a 'human mobility' session (which is a complex systems session), and I'll also need to use part of that session to set up my posters.

Oh, and here is a poster on psychoceramics. And another one. Um, do you think this person is generating these abstracts algorithmically? Why were these abstracts accepted? Does anybody read the submissions? (By the way, check out the first authors for these three posters---they include variants of familiar names---of at least one person who has been dead for several years---and allusions to mathematical formulas.)

P.S. Happy Pi Day!

Jackpot!

I think for this one the simplest thing to do is just to repost my newest Facebook status update word-for-word:

Mason Porter just received a letter by snail mail, sent personally to him (not a mail merge), addressed to "Sr. Prof. Mason A. Porter". Somewhat intrigued, he opened the letter. Inside were the secrets to nuclear fusion, and apparently his recent expository article on the history of the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam problem was the final piece to the puzzle.

There's nothing else that needs to be said.

Best. Journal. Ever.

Courtesy Mariano Beguerisse Diaz, here is the best scientific journal ever.

It's called Rejecta Mathematica, and it only publishes papers that have been rejected by another journal. (Granted, one can already post the paper on the arXiv, but this is still bloody awesome!)

I think it's worth giving some of the content of their home page here. The aims of the journal are:

"Rejecta Mathematica is a new, open access, online journal that publishes only papers that have been rejected from peer-reviewed journals (or conferences with comparable review standards) in the mathematical sciences. We are currently seeking submissions for our inaugural issue."

Here is the first part of their 'about' section:

At Rejecta Mathematica, we believe that many previously rejected papers can nonetheless have a very real value to the academic community. This value may take many forms:

"mapping the blind alleys of science": papers containing negative results can warn others against futile directions;

"reinventing the wheel": papers accidentally rederiving a known result may contain new insight or ideas;

"squaring the circle": papers discovered to contain a serious technical flaw may nevertheless contain information or ideas of interest;

"applications of cold fusion": papers based on a controversial premise may contain ideas applicable in more traditional settings;

"misunderstood genius": other papers may simply have no natural home among existing journals.


Finally, the 'General Physics' section of the March Meeting will lead to some publications! Just don't get rejected from this journal... (I wonder if the authors of the web site buried the official revelation of the joke anywhere. I still can't find it and can only thank them for putting the time to create this web site. I approve!)

How to get high impact factors

I'm a little bit late to the game of finding out about this one, but it's pretty "awesome" and it's in my home discipline, so I'll report it now.

There is a nonlinear dynamics journal called Chaos, Solitons, and Fractals which is (shall we say) craptacular that for some reason seems to have abnormally high impact factors when compared to the other, significantly better, journals in the field. If I consider specialized journals only (so I'm throwing out anything like Nature or even PRL), there are easily half a dozen and most likely more than a dozen such journals in this area to which I would submit my stuff before I would send it to CSF. It's not even on my radar as somewhere I would bother to send it, so I always found it strange that its impact factor was so high. Everybody in the field knew it was crap, so who was citing its articles?

While of course this could have been discovered earlier (which begs the question: Why wasn't it?), it turns out that the excessive impact factor comes from a metric fuck ton of self-citations by the Editor-in-Chief, who was using this journal as a venue to publish more than 300 single-authored papers during the last 15 years. Now the Editor-in-Chief is being forced to retire. There are apparently also significant questions about his academic credentials. D'oh!

The wheels of justice may turn excruciating slowly, but they often turn nonetheless...

Finally, whoever is policing this stuff might also want to check out a few other journals that come to mind...

(Tip of the hat to Radek Erban.)


Quick Update: Here is a an entire blog that devotes itself to compiling some of the self-promotion coming from the "retiring" Editor-in-Chief. At a glance it looks pretty comical, so now I'm going to read it a bit more closely...

Tales from the arXiv: Quantum Robot edition

\\
arXiv:0812.4614
Date: Thu, 25 Dec 2008 16:31:05 GMT (161kb)

Title: I, Quantum Robot
Authors: Paola Zizzi
Categories: quant-ph
Comments: 12 pages
\\
Quantum robots, defined as mobile quantum systems with an on-board quantum computer and any needed ancillary systems, interact with other quantum systems which are part of the environment. The logic which describes quantum robots is not orthodox quantum logic, but a deductive calculus which reproduces the quantum tasks (computational processes, and actions) taking into account quantum superposition and quantum entanglement. The logical object-language cannot be viewed as the reflection of the usual classical metalanguage: a quantum metalanguage is needed. Quantum robots can, in principle, become aware of the environment, take decisions, and make experiments. In principle, quantum robots can become intelligent machines. In this case, it is believed they might learn much faster than classical machines, because of quantum speed-up. Then, quantum robots, once they will be built, might result to be those hyper-intelligent machines which will lead to the so-called technological singularity. Such a singularity might be dangerous if quantum robots become self-aware and take advantage on humans. To avoid such a problem, it would be useful to adopt a quantum metalanguage to control quantum robots in a dialectic way, that is, without lowering their capabilities by quantum measurements. A physical implementation of a quantum metalanguage might be the use of coherent states in brain signals. In this way the external agent virtually acts as he
was in a composite quantum system together with the quantum robot. This is the quantum version of non-invasive BCI (Brain-Computer Interface). In this case the observer can be considered internal by the use of a quantum metalanguage, resulting in an obviously conscious Quantum Brain-Computer.

\\ ( http://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4614 , 161kb)


Or maybe this should be called the spooooooky robot edition? (Actually, some of the papers by this author that he cited in the bibliography seem legitimate even though this paper seems strange.)