Stolen from lj:telophase

[solarbird]

Okay, for those who don't know, doing original research science also means means doing literature searches. At first this is informative, but after a couple of weeks, I gotta tell you, every fucking paper you read looks exactly like this.

Exactly.

(Also, please enjoy the presentation.)

Comments

[elfs.livejournal.com]

You ain't just whistlin' Dixie.

[sistawendy.livejournal.com]

I'm laying a square egg.

Actually, they started looking like that to me in much less than two weeks.

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

oh, not at all. from figure 1 it is brutally clear that they're trying to use a db model, and therefore the paper is ALL KINDS OF WR0GN.

[403.livejournal.com]

Yes.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Gives, ah say, gives a whole new meaning to "chicken scratching" :)

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

My ex-housemate who lived with me through my thesis crazy bought me a t-shirt from Texts From Last Night (http://www.textsfromlastnight.com/Text-Replies-7669.html) with this on it:

(215): yeah seriously, fuck school. I'm changing my master's thesis question from "what are the neuropsychological correlates of antisocial personality" to "will my cat drink this beer"

[foibos.livejournal.com]

I saved this under a non-descript name (not Mr. Sanders) in a crowded directory. Hopefully, when I see it again, I will have forgotten about it and open it to see what it's about.

[solarbird]

lulz Sanders

[foibos.livejournal.com]

Oh! Was it the Col. Sanders allusion? Because I didn't even think of that.

I'm not funny or anything, just confused.

[maellenkleth]

Jeez, can I ever identify right now.

His would-be co-author (who dropped out) was a real turkey, though.

[jonathankorman.livejournal.com]

See, now you made me look up my favourite scientific paper, on electron band structure in Germanium. (http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html)

[solarbird]

ah, the classics. ^_^

[kodi]

It's so ridiculously difficult to share this comic. It's from The Parking Lot is Full, published March 15, 1996, copyright Jack McLaren and Pat Spacek, but there's no way to link directly to the image where it is legitimately hosted. Anyway, it's thematically very closely related to the paper in question.

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

You get the same effect with technical abstracts and software manuals. Just a different word. For each. In fact, you could write a dissertation on what word each type of boring document brings to mind. :-)

[tereshkova2001.livejournal.com]

heh. :)

[anna-copperowl.livejournal.com]

Yes.

I am contracting at an organization that (among other things) publishes peer-reviewed papers on quite esoteric scientific subjects. I should slip that paper into my mix of test data. I wonder if anyone would notice? Most of my current test data involves cats. Really. Did I mention these fine folks think I'm half-a-bubble off level?

[oh6.livejournal.com]

I guess I don't read enough technical documents. Or perhaps man pages don't really qualify.

[solarbird]

It's not technical documents, for me. It's just research papers. That scatter plot, those footnotes, that graph with all the exponential curves - it's like they're requirements of the form.