18 thoughts on “More neutrinos”

  2. Just read this somewhere ..

    “Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana”

    Don’t ask .. I just felt like posting it here.

  3. This reminds me of Dennis Upper’s paper in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, “The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of ‘Writer’s Block’.” full text (pdf)

  4. For sheer self-referentiality, almost as good as the Alpher, Bethe, Gamow paper (αβγ).
    Judging by the number of hits, it has already a cult following on the web.

    1. Updates:
      1. Googling for ‘best abstract ever’ will immediately hit upon the present Berry et al. paper.

      2. Improbable Research notes that the distinguished lead author, Michael Berry, was already awarded the 2000 IgNobel Prize in physics for using magnets to levitate a frog.
      http://www.improbable.com/2011/10/14/ig-nobel-winner-writes-best-abstract-ever/

      3. Improbable Research also highlights two previous ‘best abstracts ever’:
      http://www.improbable.com/2011/10/14/an-earlier-best-abstract-ever/
      John C. Doyle, IEEE Transactions on Automa — C Control, Vol. vol. 23, no. 4, August 1978, pp. 756-7.

      Title: “Guaranteed Margins for LQG Regulators”
      ABSTRACT: There are none.

      and

      http://www.improbable.com/2011/10/15/another-best-abstract-ever-economics/
      Lawrence J. Christiano, Martin Eichenbaum, NBER Working Paper No. 3130, October 1989.

      Title: “Unit Roots in Real GNP: Do We Know, and Do We Care?”
      ABSTRACT: No, and maybe not.

  7. Also brought to you from the Indian Institute of Technology School of Abstract Writing (pun strongly intended):

    Title: Primes is in P
    Abstract: We present an unconditional deterministic polynomial-time algorithm that determines whether an input number is prime or composite.

    I come from a field (Theoretical CS) where writing abstracts completely incomprehensible to even somebody in a subfield just slightly outside of that of the paper is almost the norm. Attempts such as the above are therefore rather refreshing.

  8. Incidentally, the typesetting is so ugly that it makes me want to gauge my eyes out… Is that written in Word or something?

    1. This wish to “gauge my eyes out”, is that what they call “for good measure”?

  10. LOLabstracts.

    That reminds me of other papers that are cleverly amusing. Like the one I became aware of the other week on the physics of tunneling universes.*

    Apparently string theory invented a method to study such systems a few years ago, naming the absence of spacetime “nothing”. This paper cleverly names the approximating systems”next-to-nothing”. (In effect, disappearing bubble universes.)

    The paper is “On nothing“. And they finish thusly:

    “There’s so much we don’t understand – […] – that most likely we don’t yet even possess the vocabulary to ask a well-posed question. One thing seems clear though: to truly understand everything, we must understand nothing.”

    [My bold]

    ————————-
    * Really interesting if it bears up. Perhaps the tunneling of universes from “pre-space” proposed by Hawking and others, and often mentioned in relation to creationism and their “something from nothing”, is forbidden.

    Then universes may actually be backwards eternal, as multiverse inflation can have it.

    Or we don’t understand nothing.

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