Friday, April 25, 2014
Not the worst by a long shot
Cute article by Tom Pierson in National Post. He wrote what he calls the "worst science article ever", and submitted it to lots of journals. Many of them accepted, claiming to have peer-reviewed it. Not surprising. Science is totally corrupt. All of Parkinson's Laws have run up to an extreme that Parkinson couldn't have imagined.
But I'd strongly argue with his description of the article as Worst Ever. The worst articles are intentionally evil, like the "Global Warming" shit from alien monsters like Michael Mann or Phil Jones. They are written with the specific intention of motivating governments to kill the poor and enrich the rich.
Pierson's article is completely harmless, and could even be valuable. Here's his account of how he put it together:
I copied and pasted one phrase from a geology paper online, and the rest from a medical one, on hematology. I wrote the whole paper that way, copying and pasting from soil, then blood, then soil again, and so on. There are a couple of graphs from a paper about Mars. They had squiggly lines and looked cool, so I threw them in. Footnotes came largely from a paper on wine chemistry. The finished product is completely meaningless. The university where I claim to work doesn’t exist. Nor do the Nepean Desert or my co-author. Software that catches plagiarism identified 67% of my paper as stolen (and that’s missing some). And geology and blood work don’t mix, even with my invention of seismic platelets.Pierson clearly worked very hard to create nearly perfect nonsense, but he failed. Seismic platelets. Think about that for a minute. What would happen if you slightly magnetized the iron in platelets then put a focused induction coil over a vessel that's jammed with plaque or fat? Would the seismic platelets break up the fat? Would they stir up some action in a clogged kidney or liver? Seems like it would be worth trying. Alternatively, what if you replaced the iron with something heavier, then did some exercise? Would the increased inertia act seismically on clogs? Plagiarism is NOT the worst thing. It can be a very good thing if it carries a good idea or good writing to people who wouldn't have read it otherwise. EVIL is the worst thing, and too many "scientific" fields are packed with genuine and fully intentional EVIL. ¶ 1:05 PM
