Nothing is random, you know. Not even randomness: computers are pretty good at generating random numbers, but in fact, the computer uses rules to generate random numbers. Once you understand how that works, you can get pretty good at detecting patterns in random computer things.

Like Cyril Labbé, a French researcher, who began to suspect something was up when he began noticing pseudorandom patterns in—ready?—scientific papers. Since computers are also very good at detecting patterns, Labbé wrote a computer program to sniff out pseudorandom patterns in hundreds of published scientific papers.

So far, his program has found hundreds of published, and presumably peer-reviewed, scientific or research papers.

Let us put that another way: Labbé has proved that hundreds of scientific and research papers are nothing more than computer-generated gibberish. Here’s a sample:

Now for the climactic analysis of the first two experiments. Note that B-trees have less discretized complexity curves than do exokernelized agents. Note that digital-to-analog converters have smoother effective floppy disk throughput curves than do autonomous hierarchical databases. Note how emulating wide-area networks rather than emulating them in software produce less jagged, more reproducible results.

GorT talks like this all the time.

The program that generates the gibberish (SCIgen) is well-known and available on the internet. We of course have Ghettoputer to produce our gibberish, but you can try it and have fun. Anyway, Labbé’s program is able to identify papers written with the algorithm. Henceforth, the embarrassed publishers of these papers have pulled them down out of circulation.

The authors of these papers can be just about anybody, but some legitimate researchers are not pleased to find themselves falsely credited as the original authors. Labbé himself criticizes the hypercompetitive world of scientific research as the culprit: peer reviewers recognize a name and basically skim over the content without actually reading it.

Labbé goes further, and suspects the real perpetrators are not college kids out for a lark, but real researchers looking to pad their own research, create false bibliographies, and even increase their list of published papers. Why? Money—it fuels research better than anything.

Once again, we are sad to report that those crazy right wing crackpots—who claim that global climate change is a scam, filled with fake research solely to siphon off government research grants from legitimate science—might, um, be correct.

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.