Tales from the ArXiv: The Power Law OF DEATH

First I saw a researcher (Geoff West) claim that there is The Power Law of DOOM! (That's my name for it — not theirs.) At some point, I thought I had that in a blog post, but now I think it was only verbal snarky remarks and a Facebook entry. It started with a talk that he gave years at Oxford in which Geoff started off by saying that he was only going to have very modest conclusions in his seminar, but by the end of the talk, he was predicting the imminent decline of civilization.

And on the heels of The Power Law OF DOOM, we now have claims of The Power Law OF DEATH in a new arXiv paper called "Statistical study of time intervals between murders for serial killers".

In both cases (and as is common), the claims of a power law are unlikely to be justified statistically.

See also The Small-World Network OF LUST, this old blog entry, and this old blog entry.

"Detecting Sarcasm with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks"

I think they found it.

Detecting Sarcasm with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks https://t.co/C05UdMjCoe pic.twitter.com/q50x9QqXhD

— KDnuggets (@kdnuggets) June 24, 2018

(Tip of the cap to Peter Rothman.)

"Title of a Paper"

I’ll soon be giving what amounts to a tutorial for my UCLA Ph.D. students, who will be embarking on writing papers, and — as I was thinking about what materials to prepare — my mind went to a dark, sarcastic place.

(Inspiration from "Title of the Song" by Da Vinci's Notebook.) pic.twitter.com/N1n3xSY6xr

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) March 15, 2018

Update: It turns out that I did this so quickly that I mixed my Oxford and UCLA affiliations. Oops.

Mathematical Haiku

My mathematical haiku are part of a collection of haiku published in Journal of Humanistic Mathematics in January 2018: https://t.co/ZbG0JEBgL6

(Yes, even my haiku sometimes include sarcasm.) pic.twitter.com/ogPXYmmR9W

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) February 22, 2018

(Thanks to Paul Glendinning for the Twitter 'mention', from which I learned that my haiku made it into the article.)
‏

How Not to Write a Mathematics Paper: Snarky Edition

Here are some brilliant tips for aspiring mathematics authors!

I don't think I've ever encountered this page before. It's hard to find a favorite. There's also lots of great snark in the explanatory notes.

Here is one bit of snark: "One practical criticism applies to this book as well as a large part of contemporary mathematical production: the various statements are called by different names, such as Lemma, Theorem, Proposition, Corollary; the first three are numbered independently of each other, while the numbers assigned to corollaries are functions of several variables; in addition, numbered formulae have their own separate numeration. The strain placed on the reader by this partial ordering is obvious, but apparently readers seek vengeance on other readers when they turn into authors."

(Tip of the cap to @mathematicsprof.)

Super Geniuses :)

This is one of the most brilliant political cartoons of all time. pic.twitter.com/6FG4Wsg5pb

— David Moser (@david__moser) July 28, 2017

(Tip of the cap to Melanie Mitchell.)

Headline: North Korea Bans Sarcasm

Damnit. Now I'm going to have to change my travel plans.

(Tip of the cap to Kevin Hickerson.)

"Complexity: A Story of Love and 'Power Laws'"

Apparently, somebody at Oxford is supposed to take complex systems and turn it into a work of fiction (taking inspiration from Alice in Wonderland, etc.)

"Complexity: A Story of Love and 'Power Laws'"@cgershen @SimonDeDeo @TahaYasseri

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) December 16, 2015

Ranking Scientists According to Sarcasm

"Instead of using citations, I think we should rank scientists from most sarcastic to least."

Naturally, I was accused of using my own CV after I proposed that criterion for measuring quality.

Maybe I should call this metric the "p-index"? We could call it the "s-index", if you prefer, but then I wouldn't be naming it after myself.

Is Sarcasm the Highest Form of Intelligence?

According to a new study in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, it may well be.

The study, called "The highest form of intelligence: Sarcasm increases creativity for both expressers and recipients", was published by Li Huang, Francesca Gino, and Adam Galinksy.

As with all other recent papers in journals by world-renowned publisher Elsevier, the study has five self-reported highlights:

(1) Sarcasm is an instigator of conflict but also a catalyst for creativity.

(2) General forms of sarcasm promote creativity through abstract thinking for both expressers and recipients.

(3) Expressing sarcasm to or receiving sarcasm from trusted others increases creativity without elevating conflict.

(4) We manipulated sarcasm via a simulated conversation task and a recall task.

(5) We employed three different creativity measures and a well-established measure of abstract thinking.


I feel like this study has justified the last 39 years of my existence.

Note: Absolutely no sarcasm was employed in the writing of this blog entry.

(Tip of the cap to Taha Yasseri.)

Update: A modified version of this post is now on the Improbable Research blog.

Update: Hmmm... I have pondered a bit, and I am now wondering if there are Elsevier journals --- such as ones that publish review articles? --- in which the five self-reported highlights are not required? It is possible that it should technically be "most other" or "almost all other" rather than "all other". I will leave an exhaustive check, or a search for a counterexample, as an exercise for the diligent reader. (My best guess is that it is policy for all research article, but I am not sure if it is also true for review articles, so "all research articles" is another potentially viable tweak to the phrasing.)

Update: Here is a blurb about the research in The Harvard Gazette. (I found this link via Francesca Gino's Twitter account.)

Calling People Out: The All-Male Panel "Congratulations" Tumblr

I approve of this all-male panel tumblr that offers sarcastic congratulations. (And I am very much in favor of calling people out to try to encourage improving the situation on such matters.)

The David Hasselhoff picture is an added bonus.

(Tip of the cap to NetSci Backstage.)

Elevator Action

The elevator problems in Oxford's new Mathematical Institute have gotten so severe that one of the building's denizens has tried to come up with a helpful mathematical model of the problem... according to rumor, while actually stuck in the elevator...

We moved into the building at the boundary of August/September 2013. Is this really that hard to solve? I wonder what Arrowsmith would say about this problem?

(Tip of the cap to Philip Maini.)

Reducing the P-value One Submission to Nature at a Time

I really dig this doodle from Twisted Doodles.

Curiously, this is suspiciously close to my policy on submitting my papers to Nature. I'm just trying to reduce the p-value. Isn't that what all the good scientists do?

(Tip of the cap to I Fucking Love Science.)

If You Didn't Communicate It, Then You Didn't Do it.

If you didn't write it down or tell anybody or communicate it in some other way, then you didn't do it. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

I proved cold fusion. I just didn't bother to tell anybody or show it to anybody or ever even mention it really, but I still deserve credit and a citation if you do it later (because that's when I'll bring it up). And a Nobel Prize. Give me one of those beauties, too. You're just going to have to take my word about my notes that I never showed to anybody.

That is now twice this summer that I have run into so-called "scholars" who apparently believe crap like this --- not cold fusion, but the notion that their idea that has never been communicated in public means that they don't have to give proper credit or (in the more extreme case) that of course they did it but they didn't bother to mention it at all in their paper, so you can't get credit for doing it and don't insult them by stating that those calculations hadn't been done in the literature. And these people are ok with stepping on other people in the process. And one of these people seemed to be ok with screwing over their own student! WTF?

Back to the Future

It's good to know that we have a few spare blank 3.5 inch 'floppy' disks under lock and key in our filing cabinet (in Dartington House) in case we ever need them.

Sarcasm Emoticon

Here is an article about sarcasm getting its own emoticon, but surely the entire article is meant sarcastically?

I love the phrasing of the 'fun fact' at the end of the article: "Sarcasm" comes from the Latin sarcasmos, which means "to tear flesh." How bad-ass is that?

(Tip of the cap to Sharam Shokrian.)

Awesome School Answering Machine

Unfortunately, this is a video that was directly uploaded to Facebook, so that is the only link to this video that I can put here. (I don't have time to look right now, but if somebody finds a link on YouTube, please send me the url.)

The important part of the video is the audio, which apparently has an actual answering machine message at a school in Australia. It's a lovingly sarcastic message that has things like, 'If you want to lie about why your child is absent from school, please press '1'.) I approve!

(Tip of the cap to Jeffrey Porter.)

Particle collisions for fun and proft

Mini-AIR points out the following awesome article.

Title: The expected frequency of collisions of small meteorites with cars and aircraft

Abstract: The cumulative distribution cf2>Ncf1>(cf2>dcf1>) of diameters of Earth-Crossing Asteroids (ECAs) derived by Poveda et al. (Poveda et al., 1998, submitted) is used to estimate the frequency of collisions of meteoroids with cars and with aircraft. The expected frequency of collisions of a car with a meteorite larger than 10 cm in diameter turns out to be one impact every 16 years. This frequency is consistent with the known incidence of such events (Lewis, 1996).The expected frequency of collisions of a cruising airplane with a meteorite larger than 1 cm in diameter turns out to be one impact every 30 years. Such an impactor hitting an airplane at a velocity of several hundreds of meters per second could cause a serious accident.


Comment: Wow! Now that's what I call "awesome".

Comment on "Bifurcation Analysis of Parametrically Excited Bipolar Disorder Model"

A while back, I blogged about a letter to the editor a collaborator and I wrote regarding a paper that was suspiciously similar to our work. Here is the published version of that letter. Notice the snarkiness at the end. Here is my old blog entry.

By the way, I don't remember if I blogged about this previously, but the ending ended up being a happy one: Because of this whole business, the previously-unpublished article by my collaborators and me (which had been on the arXiv preprint server since 2003) has now been accepted by the very same journal that published the article that raised our ire.

How to Interact with Airport Security

\begin{rant}

I think I am being uncontroversial in claiming that the following should be obvious: When at an airport (or dropping someone off at the airport), don't pick a fight with airport security. I'm not saying not to be annoyed with (or angered at, insulting by, etc.) some of the bullshit or to calmly ask for appropriate clarifications. I'm just saying that one shouldn't pick a fight when one isn't provoked. Simple.

OK, so one of my family members was dropping me off at the airport on Tuesday and our car was magically chosen for a very quick inspection (to open the trunk for a very brief look to make sure that we didn't have any dead bodies or counterfeit drugs in there). Fine. My reaction would be to have preferred not to be chosen but to take it in stride. The officer asked something like "Can I took a look in the trunk?" Notice the phrasing. It wasn't quite accurate because although he phrased it as a question, there wasn't really a choice involved (unless, of course, we were willing to just leave without my being dropped off). Now there are situations in which I might be anal if somebody phrased things this way (although in conversations I really only care whether I correctly understand the intended meaning), but this would not be one of them. My relative, on the other hand, decided to (a) try to answer no, (b) ask for a clarification and---in an extremely pissy manner---comment about the illusion of choice when there isn't any because of the inaccurate phrasing, and (c) be generally obnoxious. The officer asked very politely initially, so there wasn't any provocation with attitude, etc. (I have occasionally had interactions with rather insulting border patrol people, but my standard procedure even then is to suck it up and just do whatever action I think will get me through fastest. For such things, I am always attempting to do whatever optimizes how fast I get through---so not starting fights when they don't already exist is a good example of something I might do.) After the extreme pissiness, however, the officer was justifiably annoyed and was much less kind about things. We got through, and the look at the trunk took maybe 1/20th the amount of time as the unnecessary argument. Also, if one is going to express displeasure at such stuff (which I can understand), one can do it without picking a fight! Is it really so hard to be calm and polite when something doesn't quite go one's way? Sigh...

One of these days when I am at my parents' home, I swear I'm going to find the adoption papers that they've been hiding from me all these years...

\end{rant}