Monday, April 10, 2017

vixra watch: April fools

arxiv sees a few joke papers on April 1st every year. vixra was created as a repository for papers blocked from arxiv. We may now have the first parody paper posted to vixra because it wouldn't survive on arxiv. It's a proposal for an "Un-collider", that not only mocks numerous aspects of contemporary physics culture, but also today's political and geopolitical situation. The authors are "Snowden" and "Ellsberg" (the latter promoted it at "Not Even Wrong"), and it has all the professionalism of a proper arxiv parody paper.

There was another parody uploaded at the same time, on "gauge theology", but it's merely clever, and doesn't have the sting of the Un-collider.

Finally (for now), yet another paper has appeared, promising "a Hodge-theoretic analysis of reinforcement learning". I thought that one might be real - making such a connection is not beyond the reach of vixra authors, or of arxiv authors, or even of reality. But the paper merely reproduces the abstract, which says "we begin with a diagram" illustrating the connections. That there is no diagram, is perhaps a way of saying that there is no connection. Then talk of inducing entropy in an economy makes it sound fake, and the final straw is that it's classified as "Relativity and Cosmology". So, another joke paper; perhaps someone testing the vixra submission procedure.

No comments:

Post a Comment