Disturbing... Yet Funny

In one sense, this article in The New Scientist is profoundly disturbing. That papers should be published, thus tacitly endorsed as scientific and accurate, that are complete gibberish is worrisome. As is the trend of charging authors to publish their work-- as noted in the article, the very definition of vanity publishing, and it certainly does not reflect well on the potential validity of such "science".

But the actual submission is really amusing. I think my favorite line from the "paper" is this one: "On a similar note, we show a novel application for the study of semaphores in Figure 1." Semaphores, you say? Wow, that actually sounds a lot like Terry Pratchett's satirizing of the World Wide Web in recent Discworld books. Gotta love a good semaphore.

The whole thing is a hoot. Another high point is the opening to the Implementation portion of the paper:

Our implementation of our methodology is pseudorandom, wearable, and collaborative. We have not yet implemented the centralized logging facility, as
this is the least private component of our method.

Absolutely love a wearable implementation. It's an experiment and a stylish, yet comfy garment! What more could you ask for?