Ellipsix Informatics

arXiv Fool's Day 2025 (Taylor's Version)

2025-04-08T23:18:00-07:00

(this post is late due to some real-life stuff, my apologies!)

Academia, you have outdone yourselves. This year I’m adding 21 new entries to my “asymptotically comprehensive” list of April 1 arXiv joke papers, just edging out last year’s record of 20.

Two of this year’s papers investigated cosmological symbology in the music of Taylor Swift. We learned from Sophie Newman and Ana Sainz de Murieta that Taylor (or at least her music) promotes astrophysics in her albums and is evidently a particular fan of multimessenger astronomy. And Jane Bright has revealed a surprising connection between The Eras Tour and cosmological eras, even suggesting that Taylor may have the ultimate fate of the universe in her hands, through her subsequent (13th) album. Maybe it’s time to become a Swiftie…

The (cosmological) Eras Tour: figure 1 from "The Eras Tour: Mapping the Eras of Taylor Swift to the Cosmological Eras of the Universe" by Jane Bright, used with permission

We also had another pair of topically linked papers about cats. One from Viktor Toth observes the ability of cats to apparently, defy gravity, and proposes a theoretical explanation. Fully compliant with general relativity! And perhaps also suggesting a link to quantum field theory. You have to love anything that includes the phrase “cat stress-energy-momentum tensor”. In the other, Harman Deep Kaur, Mariagrazia Trapanese, and Kirill Zatrimaylov reported on a coherent macroscopic superposition of cat states: Lola (the nice one) and Mola (the… other one), which oscillate into each other on roughly a 12-hour timescale.

Prolific Acta Prima Aprilia contributor and ~~friend~~ maybe occasional reader of the blog, Mike Lund, has definitively proved that astronomers are getting less creative over time by tracking the change in complexity of constellation names throughout eras of history.

It’s not often I see joke papers in the math categories, but we’ve got a good one this year: Emily Pottebaum posted an empirical study of which numbers are funniest. Spoiler alert: it’s apparently zero, followed closely by 83. Maybe 1 wouldn’t be so lonely if it’d talk to its neighbors.

That conclusion gets put to the test in the discovery of Jacquetium by Emmanuel Jacquet: a new element with atomic number zero, and definitively the last cisuranic element to ever be discovered.

Lu Li and Zhengyi Shao posted a study with a surprising conclusion: nearby open star clusters appear to have their longest axes aligned toward the solar system. But the key word is “appear”, as they explained in a disclaimer: there’s more uncertainty in distance measurements than direction measurements, which tends to stretch the maximum likelihood estimation of the cluster region along the line of sight. I love papers like this that are joking but actually make an important point about something real studies should watch out for!

Another paper that makes a good point about real science, Chun Huang (also occasional reader of the blog) studied pulse profile modeling for neutron stars. A pulse profile represents how the intensity of radiation coming from the pulsar varies by the direction in which it’s emitted, and astrophysicists like to fit pulse profile models to the data and use that to draw conclusions about the structure of the star and its magnetic field. Chun’s paper questions how much we can really trust our assumptions about the pulse profile shape by using a candidate pulse profile based on Mike Wazowski’s face (from Monsters Inc.). This figure captures the spirit of arXiv Fool’s perfectly.

The Mike Wazowski pulse profile: figure 3 from "The Cosmic One-Eyed Smile: Revealing the Hidden Face of Mike Wazowski" by Chun Huang, used with permission

Another result along the same lines that I found quite impressive was this formula for the area of a triangle from Connor Hainje and David W. Hogg:

\begin{equation} \Delta^2 = \frac{3}{4} \biggl(\sum_{i=1}^{3} x_i^2\biggr) \biggl(\sum_{i=1}^{3} y_i^2\biggr) - \frac{3}{4} \biggl(\sum_{i=1}^{3} x_i y_i\biggr)^2 + \frac{2}{4} \biggl(\sum_{i=1}^{3} x_i y_i\biggr) \biggl(\sum_{i=1}^{3} x_i\biggr)\biggl(\sum_{i=1}^{3} y_i\biggr) - \frac{1}{4} \biggl(\sum_{i=1}^{3} x_i^2\biggr) \biggl(\sum_{i=1}^{3} y_i\biggr)^2 - \frac{1}{4} \biggl(\sum_{i=1}^{3} y_i^2\biggr) \biggl(\sum_{i=1}^{3} x_i\biggr)^2 \end{equation}

On one hand, how cool is it that you can still publish a paper for finding a new formula for the area of a triangle? On the other hand, as the authors say, “no insights of any kind were gained from these results”.

Making one of the most important points of all, Sophie Rosu posted a study of the optimal crispiness and softness of cookies, inspired by an earlier paper (discussed on this blog) about Jaffa cakes. It has long been suspected (by me), if not proven, that cookie quality leads directly to enhancements in research quality, so this is an area where followup work is most welcome. Fortunately the author has plans!

We had another food-themed (ish) paper from Frederic V. Hessman, Andrew Collier Cameron, and Keith Horne, reporting on the detection of whiskey on the extrasolar planet GJ 1132 b. Clearly this means there are aliens there, and they are very drunk, or at least have a superhuman tolerance for alcohol.

Dominick M. Rowan and John D. Roberts posted a brilliant proposal (with disturbing implications) to use the empty space in figures for brand promotion. With sample code! Everyone else seems to be getting sponsorships these days; why not scientists? The authors suggest this could cover open access fees for way more people, and if it’s really successful, maybe some impoverished grad students could start buying themselves food.

I didn’t even manage to fully read all the papers, much less write about them, but a quick skim of the abstracts will tell you there are even more great ones waiting for your perusal. Check out the full list! And we can look forward to even more of the same next year… although, if Joanne Tan is right that the arXiverse may be entering its “big crunch” phase, we might have reason to be concerned. Submit more papers, everyone, and let’s keep the arXiv Fool’s tradition strong!

arXiv Fool's Day 2024

2024-04-05T00:30:00-07:00

I have been a bit of a slacker for the past year, but April is here, which means it’s time for another update to my “asymptotically comprehensive” list of April 1 arXiv joke papers!

This year I found 20 new papers, which the biggest addition yet. On one hand, congratulations researchers! On the other hand, that means a lot of work for me to look over them all — and I can’t even slack off because so many of them are really good.

Feynman diagram for dark matter-scat interaction: figure 1 from "Scatalogical Dark Matter" by Jim Cline, used with permission

I couldn’t resist starting with the figure on the right, from Scatophobic Dark Matter brought to my attention by Jim Cline. I mean, look at that cute little pile of poo, so innocent and honest. Unfortunately the paper says we’re going to have a hard time finding experimental confirmation: “…no direct detection signals will be observed before the demise of civilization.” And probably also because it’s stinky, although maybe the experimentalists are used to that. (I kid, I kid)

Explanations for dark matter are a perennial topic of speculation, though, and the scatophobic theory has competition this year: a proposal that dark matter might be made of souls. Souls have long been known to be nearly undetectable, after all, and this proposal even has some preliminary phenomenological support from a study exactly one year earlier (funny timing, that). I commend the authors for heading off criticism based on the anthropic principle by not limiting their analysis to human souls. Though, food for thought… if subatomic particles have souls, but all electrons are the same, do they get into heaven?

Personally I’m still partial to prior work suggesting that dark matter is made of poo. But I’m glad, this means the dark matter debate is far from over. I wonder what will be proposed as a candidate next?

Dark matter also makes an appearance in Multi-Messenger Astrology, but here the spotlight is on other better-understood phonomena: gamma rays, cosmic rays, neutrinos, and gravitational ways. Did you know the presence of GRBs in your astrological sign might make you prone to anger? I mean, who’s to say they’re not? Meanwhile, dark matter indicates people who rarely interact with others, which clearly explains why I’m sitting here writing this post at 2 AM instead of having a life. Check out the paper for more surprising revelations about what previously invisible secrets might be in your horoscope!

Solar eclipses are referenced from a couple papers, unsurprisingly because of the upcoming North American total eclipse. (That’s real, by the way!) Vulcan: Retreading a Tired Hypothesis with the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse calls back to the hypothetical (or is it?) planet Vulcan. There were a few reported observations of something that might have been Vulcan up to the 1870s, and then… nothing. What happened? Could it have been destroyed? Find out in summer 2009)… oh wait. In this case the paper proposes that Vulcan might have landed on a highly inclined orbit, and the upcoming eclipse would be the perfect opportunity to search for it. Just make sure to squint really hard.

Continuing on the eclipse theme, Species Syzygy: Which Animal Has Seen the Most Total Solar Eclipses? addresses exactly the question you’d expect from the title: in the entire course of its existence on Earth, how many times has any solar eclipse been experienced by members of a given species? The analysis in this one is actually quite well done, I was impressed. 4 stars, would approve for publication. It turns out that horseshoe crabs have a commanding lead over humans, but we might be able to catch up in less than 10 million years (yay).

Meanwhile, we also have another paper citing Star Trek which analyzes the effect of the starship Voyager on planetary rings. Voyager really seems to like orbiting planets with rings. But it turns out parking a starship near a ring system can wreak havoc on it, sending little rocks flying about and causing the ring to puff up to as much as double its original thickness, which could easily be noticed on the planet. This sets the stage for some severe violations of the Prime Directive, definitely never mentioned in the show, but you know where they are mentioned? This paper.

In a callback to last year’s post, one of this year’s papers announces a new Python package called exo-puppies. The paper may be a joke, but the package is very real, and so are the puppy plots! On top of that, much respect to the paper’s goal of calling attention to mental health issues and abuse of power in academic environments. There’s a nice non-jokey summary of these issues in the last section of the paper; go have a look!

And speaking of callbacks: did you know that the very first two arXiv joke papers (on my list, at least) came from two groups of the University of Arizona’s astronomy department throwing shade at each other? If you read another one of this year’s joke papers, On the Superiority of the University of Arizona’s Physics Club, you will! Watch your back astro, the physicists are coming. (shh don’t tell the biologists)

If you like what you see here, there are more; check out the whole list! I haven’t even gotten to go through all the good ones (like this one by Winter, Winter, Winter, and Winter… one guess what it’s about). May these bring much enjoyment at any time of the year. And as usual, please let me know of any papers I’ve missed.

arXiv Fool's Day 2023, now with more chickens

2023-04-03T21:30:00-07:00

I had a feeling I’d be writing this post. Last week I only found six joke papers to add to my list, but today’s arXiv feed delivered a very strong update, with eight more, bringing the 2023 total to fourteen, tying last year’s record.

I did not, however, have a feeling I’d be reading the phrase “large overdensity in the overall distribution of chickens”. One of the highlights of today’s feed is this extremely well-researched survey of bounds on the chicken density function (CDF) of the universe. While a lower bound is well established, the paper makes the first case for an upper bound as well, $10^{23}$ chickens per cubic parsec. Fortunately (for the chickens, if perhaps not for science), that probably falls short of the gravitational binding threshold for small animals, but if the density fluctuations are large enough, who knows. I definitely want to see followup studies on this one.

(Loosely) speaking of birds, we also have the creatively titled “ChatGPT scores a bad birdie in counting gravitational-wave chirps”, which pretty firmly establishes that ChatGPT is not as good as actual scientists at counting gravitational wave events. (With some neat visualizations, too!) However, ChatGPT may be good at other things… for instance, is it any better at writing astrophysics papers than counting? We find that topic explored in “Can AI Put Gamma-Ray Astrophysicists Out of a Job?”, which is actually really well put together: it shows a series of prompts structured to produce the sections of a paper, along with their responses from ChatGPT and commentary by the authors. The AI does quite a good approximation of sounding like a scientist (including recognizing the importance of beer), but the authors conclude that their jobs are probably safe for a while.

Another paper suggests a more sobering perspective, though. It tackles the difficult problem of why, despite the thousands of exoplanet observations, no exomoons have been observed. Following up on recent work by Emmerich et al, we have to consider the credible hypothesis that the moons have been deorbited into their host planets by out-of-control AIs. It may only be a matter of time....

Moons were actually a fairly popular topic this year. For those who celebrate the Lunar New Year but get irritated that it jumps around to different points in the common solar calendar, never fear: you just have to wait 252 million years until the Earth’s rotation aligns with an integer multiple of the moon’s revolution period. Don’t wait to start planning your True New Year parties! Of course, by then, if the new naming scheme suggested by another paper catches on, we might just be calling it “Sun Db”. Or “moonmoon rock star Sun Db” for the pedants. No really. It makes sense.

There are even more where those came from, though! Check out the entire list of joke papers this year, and for previous years. And as usual, please let me know of any papers I’ve missed.

P.S. Even though it appears to be a legitimate project and not a joke, I have to give a shoutout to the Python library ronswanson which builds table models for the astrophysical computer modeling framework 3ML.

From Minecraft to memes: arXiv Fool's Day 2023

2023-04-01T21:30:00-07:00

That’s right, it’s time for this blog’s annual tradition: an update to the list of April 1 arXiv joke papers! It started six years ago on Academia Stack Exchange and since then has grown into the most comprehensive list of joke papers on arXiv that I know of.

WASP-12 as a squar: figure 2 from "A Modest Proposal for the Non-existence of Exoplanets: The Expansion of Stellar Physics to Include Squars" by the WHAC collaboration, used with permission

It’s slim pickings this year, though, with only six joke papers (maybe five) posted so far. Maybe it’s because April 1 is on a Saturday, when arXiv doesn’t update. I’ll be watching the feeds on Monday to see if there are more.

Until then, here’s what we’re looking at: as is typical in the modern era, exoplanets are a hot area of joke research. Or… could it be the lack of exoplanets? There is a brilliant theoretical study of cuboid stars, or squars, showing how they can neatly explain the light curves that have been claimed to provide evidence of exoplanets without the need for any additional celestial bodies, and touting the virtues of Minecraft for astronomical simulation. On the other hand, another group at the same institution has made a counterproposal that everything is exoplanets! (This is the first instance I know of where an April 1 paper actually cites another one from the same year.) Clearly this topic is far from settled, and it’s going to be an exciting source of developments for years to come.

Outside of exoplanets (unless they are, in fact, everything), there’s also a rather poetic pontification about open star clusters and their “tails”, stars that have been pulled away from the cluster by tidal forces. This one actually has a veneer of respectability, though: despite all the flowery language, it seems as if it’s talking about a legitimate astronomical concept. And a paper exploring the correlations between UFO sightings, hot air balloons, and meteor showers makes some fairly insightful statistical points. However I leave it to the reader’s judgement to evaluate the conclusion that “reported UFOs are frequently lighter-than-air craft that use meteor showers as a screen to enter the Earth’s atmosphere and possibly use their host bodies to cloak their approaches towards Earth”.

Moving along the line towards even more legitimate research, I was very pleased to see another meta-study, this one investigating whether using cheeky paper titles gets you more citations. And according to their analysis, it does! You can’t overdo it, though: “Striking the right balance is therefore crucial. May we recommend aiming for a level 4 cheekiness on a scale of 1-5.” Overly cringey meme titles are out. There also appears to be a 15% citation boost from incorporating a colon. I can only hope that this applies to blog posts as well.

Finally, what may be the most legitimate of all: a submission called Finemensch Lectures on the Strong Interactions caught my eye with its submission comment “99 pages, zillions of figures; submitted to Unphys.Rev.D. Any resemblance to actual persons or physics is purely coincidental.” Knowing that Unphysical Review sets a high bar for (something that may or may not be related to) quality, I had high hopes, but on the other hand, nobody writes 99 pages for an April Fool’s Day paper… right? Well, apparently now they do. This paper is actually 99 pages long and it actually appears to outline a lecture series in particle physics, complete with real equations and exercises. Color me confused. (And if you read the paper maybe you can figure out where “confused” fits into SU(3) color space.)

If these don’t whet your appetite for classic arXiv Fools’ Day science, have a look at the the whole list! And as usual, please let me know of any papers I’ve missed.

Automated pushes to PyPI

2023-01-31T20:45:00-08:00

For the last year and a half, I’ve been (co-)maintaining a handy little Python project called pytest-localserver.

Naturally, I completely neglected to mention this on the blog. (Surprise!)

Anyway… I just released a new version which has a nifty feature that I’ve been looking forward to for a while: the ability to build packages and upload them to PyPI as part of our automated build and test pipeline. That means we can release a new version by clicking buttons in GitHub’s web UI rather than manually running twine and other commands.

Hooray, automatic deployment works!

Normally I’m all for running things on the command line rather than clicking buttons, but when you’re maintaining a piece of software, repeatability and consistency are key. You don’t want some quirk of your local environment corrupting a build or sneaking some sensitive information into the package that’s going to be distributed to thousands (or let’s be honest, dozens) of people. During my time at SoundHound I developed a bunch of internal Python packages, some of which were shared outside the company, and leaking confidential info was always something to be very careful about.

Plus, with months between releases, a deployment procedure isn’t something you’re necessarily going to remember off the top of your head. And while Python infrastructure has come a long way in making deployments simpler and more standard (mostly just run pyproject-build and twine), it’s still not trivial to be sure you’re getting it exactly right. Here’s the procedure we used to use:

Ensure that the CHANGES file is up to date with the latest changes.

Create a tag whose name is the PEP 440-compliant version number prefixed by v, making sure to include at least three version number components (e.g. v0.6.0).

Make sure that all tests pass on the tagged version.

Push the tag to Github.

Make a fresh clone of the repository, and in the root directory of the new clone, run pyproject-build (from the build package). This will create source and wheel packages under dist/.

Upload the source and wheel to PyPI using twine upload (see twine).

Using the new release form on Github, prepare notes for the new release following the pattern of previous releases. The “Auto-generate release notes” button will be useful in summarizing the changes since the last release.

Each package has its own quirks like this — how to handle tagging, what tests to run and when, and so on. And if one person is maintaining multiple packages (as I did at SoundHound) or multiple people are co-maintaining a single package, it gets that much more complicated to keep things straight. At this point, hiding as much of that procedure as you can behind one UI button starts to look really nice.

If you’re curious, you can check out the changes I made to enable automatic deployment. This is actually just the first step; I’m hoping to integrate testing as well, so GitHub will build the package, test it, and upload it all in one. But that’s a pull request for another day!

Goodbye SoundHound

2023-01-26T13:45:00-08:00

Unfortunately my first post for 2023 is a bit of a downer. My five-and-a-half year journey with SoundHound has come to an abrupt end, as I was among nearly half the company affected by a massive layoff and restructuring earlier this month. Honestly, though, I don’t feel too bad about this (at least not for myself) — stick around and I’ll tell you why.

To be clear, working at SoundHound was an amazing experience, and my coworkers there are, I’m convinced, the best a person could possibly ask for. From day one I felt welcomed as part of a community who are extremely talented while also being humble, kind, and collaborative. Whether I was engaging with other developers, language specialists, IT/ops support, the talent acquisition team, data engineers, the office managers and front desk staff, or even the executive team, I consistently felt appreciated, supported, challenged, and enabled to do my best work. And a lot of those coworkers are my closest friends. There’s a reason why many of us still hang out together, even people who have moved on to other workplaces years ago.

Beyond that, SoundHound was a fantastic place to grow into my role as a software developer and architect. I mean, this is the work I had been doing throughout my time in academia, designing and writing computer programs, but I didn’t have the right “label” or pedigree, and aside from dabbling with a couple open-source projects, I didn’t have the experience of working as part of a large team. Fortunately, the engineering management at SoundHound saw some potential, I guess, and entrusted me with responsibility for one of the key features of the Houndify platform. (Point of interest search, if anyone is curious — it’s the part that handles queries like “show me some good Italian restaurants nearby that are open for dinner tomorrow”.) I got the opportunity to design the infrastructure and lead a small team, to help build up a development workflow and create tools, and to scale our work to over 15 languages and a dozen external data sources. I’m immensely grateful to everyone I worked with who helped me develop that experience, especially my manager Joe and our CEO Keyvan (who wrote the first version of point of interest search).

The unfortunate thing is, all the work I put into that project over the past five-ish years never actually made it to the public. If you go sign up on Houndify, you can use the original Local Search domain which was developed before I got there, but most of the code I worked on never quite became ready for a public release. I had really been looking forward to the day when I’d be able to open up the app, show it off to someone, and say “here’s what I made”… now I’m not sure if that will ever happen. Not that it’s a waste of effort; this feature helped bring in millions of dollars of revenue for the company. It just would have felt nice to be able to hold on to a piece of what I built.

Anyway, coming back to the reason I don’t feel too bad about this whole thing, there are actually two reasons. First, even though I liked the work I was doing, I had been working on that point of interest search project for a long time, and the progress was often excruciatingly slow and complex. It was pretty stressful moving forward so slowly and having to deliver regular progress reports that amounted to tiny bits of progress. So even though I was disappointed to get the news, I was also about 30% relieved not to have to deal with that anymore.

And second, I am absolutely clear that this isn’t a reflection on my performance. I mean, I know layoffs rarely are, but in this case in particular I’ve gotten a lot of supportive messages from other people at SoundHound — coworkers, managers, even like half the C-suite — saying how much they’re going to miss me and that they would love to keep me around if only the money were there. The whole thing happened because of a massive and unanticipated budget shortfall, so SoundHound had to restructure itself, trimming every possible expense and paring down to the minimum that could take the quickest possible path toward becoming profitable, and my project just wasn’t part of that path. Definitely not my fault.

With all that in mind, while it’s a shame to have to leave my formative developer years behind, I’m looking forward to some new challenge. Fortunately, I’m not in a position where I absolutely must find a new job right away; no visa issues and I have enough savings to last a while. I’ll be looking for the right opportunity to come my way over the next several weeks. In the meantime, I’m enjoying having a bit of time to myself to relax and work on personal projects, which should mean more posts to come on the blog!

Giving Back

2022-12-31T17:15:00-08:00

Yeah, I’m just running with the most cliché possible title for this post.

One of the things I’ve always liked about Stack Overflow is their “Stack Gives Back” program. Each December, they donate some amount of money to open-source software projects that the Stack Exchange sites use, as well as to five or so charities with the allocation chosen by the site moderators. I always thought that was a really nice thing to do: when you benefit from the work of volunteer open-source developers, it’s only fair to support them if you have the means to do so. And back when I was a moderator on Physics Stack Exchange, it was nice to be effectively given the choice of where to donate $100 so I could support organizations that were meaningful to me, especially at times when I couldn’t really justify making a donation from my own money.

So now that I have the means, I’m going to do my own round of “giving back”. In the past few days I’ve made donations to the following projects:

€50 to KDE, the desktop environment that I use every day at home and work and the reason I got into C++ programming in the first place (which allowed me to get this job)
$50 to the Mozilla Foundation, maintainers of the last standing competitor to Google’s web browser engine (and also the Thunderbird email client although I think that might use a separate donation pool)
$99 for a supporting membership to the Python Software Foundation, my favorite quick-and-dirty-but-also-generally-great programming language
$50 to the Wikimedia Foundation in recognition of all the random Wikipedia articles I’ve read while waiting for code to compile over the past year
$50 (plus fees) to the Internet Archive because they’re doing great work to preserve knowledge and maintain accountability
$8.55 CAD to techhub.social, the Mastodon instance I joined when Twitter imploded (more on that to come later) (why $8.55? Exchange rates, basically)

This is all in addition to the Patreon subscriptions and regular donations I’ve been making before. Honestly, I get enough out of all these organizations that they would be worth supporting regularly.

If you can, join me in sending some support to whatever organizations you’ve benefitted from this year as well!

Celebrating arXiv Fool's Day 2022!

2022-04-03T01:40:00-07:00

Academia, sometimes you amaze me. This year produced a record-breaking fourteen new entries to my list of April 1 arXiv joke papers, which I’ve been “diligently compiling” for several years (and “definitely not” just reading and repeating from Twitter and Stack Exchange).

Direct imaging of exop(lan)ets: figure 9 from "First Detections of Exop(lan)ets: Observations and Follow-Ups of the Floofiest Transits on Zoom" by the Astrobites collaboration, used with permission

As usual, astro-ph carries the pack, accounting for twelve of the papers (though several are also cross-listed in other categories). Exoplanets continue to be a hot area of research, both on the experimental side, with a flurry of new exop(lan)et detections, and on the theoretical side, with a startlingly precise prediction of when exoplanets will be discoverable inside our own solar system. The latter paper smartly raises some concern about runaway growth in the exoplanet discovery rate and proposes the solution of sending astronomers to the exoplanets for further study. Fortunately, science has covered the need for parking lots. Cosmology is also well represented, with an inspired new measurement of the Hubble constant and a proposal for the nature of warm dark matter.

Of course, more terrestrial matters are also well represented. I think we’ve all been waiting for the definitive answer to whether a hot dog is a sandwich. And there’s an extremely enlightening triple case study of peer review that presents some surprising revelations about the motivations of the authors and reviewer.

I was also quite pleased to see a couple papers that I’m convinced are at least 20% legitimate, despite all claims to the contrary. This proposal for dark mode journals comes highly recommended as bedtime reading, and there’s also an attempt to improve upon the much-maligned h-index. I also have to give an honorable mention to “Undecidable problems in quantum field theory” which actually makes a legitimate physical argument but nevertheless ends with the following story:

One day, while preparing the table for the supper, he told his wife that he finally finished an article for April Fools’ day, to which his wife exclaimed: “We can work only half as usual, because one of us needs to take care of the kids while the other is working, and then you were using that precious time to write an article for April Fools’ day?!?“

To top it all off, for the first time we have peer review of the April Fool’s Day papers, courtesy of Astrobites!

If you like these, go check out the the whole list! And as usual, please let me know of any papers I’ve missed.

Happy arXiv Fool's Day!

2021-04-02T13:30:00-07:00

When scientists the world over turn their attention to the floofy objects on their keyboards and Taylor Swift’s emotional state, that means only one thing: time to make an update to the list of arXiv joke papers! That’s right, it’s April Fool’s Day 2021, academia style. Here’s my wrapup.

Longitudinal coordinates of floofy objects: figure 2 from "Detection of Rotational Variability in Floofy Objects at Optical Wavelengths", used with permission

This time, with some help from Twitter, I found eleven submissions covering a wide range of fields. Representing the stalwart astro-ph, we have the aforementioned floofy object rotation paper and an infectious model of dark matter. From high energy theory, we have a prediction of when publication of conjectures is going to bring on the heat death of the universe. In the category of popular physics, there’s an investigation of curious behavior involving a laster pointer — with one of the best paper titles of all time — and a very practical study of how certain tasks always take longer than we think (and why I never finish writing blog posts). There are also two excellent artificial intelligence studies that definitively settle whether Jaffa cakes are cakes and tell you which Taylor Swift song you should be listening to. Taking an interesting “meta” perspective on arXiv Fool’s Day is a historical review of humor in science (which includes its own list of joke papers on arXiv). And finally, but possibly my favorite, “The Swapland”, a science newsletter chock full of, well, nonsense — I can’t possibly do it justice with a summary, you’ll just have to see for yourself.

If you like these, there’s plenty more to offer some welcome amusement. Check out the the whole list!

Let me know of any papers I’ve missed that should be added.

My thanks to Laura C. Mayorga for kindly granting permission to use the floofy object rotation figure in this blog post.

Hope Is Born Again by Jim Brickman and Point Of Grace

2020-12-25T00:00:00-08:00

For the coveted final spot on my list, I’ve made a choice that surprised even me when I first considered it. Hope Is Born Again combines the exquisite piano ornamentation of Jim Brickman with an uplifiting melody sung by Point Of Grace. And to top it off, the string and percussion accompaniment beautifully complement the piano and vocals, all parts blending together without overwhelming each other. No other piece of music better captures the idealism of the holiday, making this the perfect song for Christmas Day itself.

May you all find something that brings you hope this holiday season. Merry Christmas and happy holidays!

You can now get the entire series of songs as a Spotify playlist.