When you are a student at MIT and you are in the mood to play a trick on someone, you can’t just Vaseline their doorknob or fiddle with the settings on their spell checker. People expect a little higher grade of tomfoolery from future code writers. So, when these two MIT chums got more bored than usual they decided to play a hoax on the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics! No, seriously!
They sat down and wrote this nifty program that randomly generates scientific research papers, including charts and diagrams and tech-speak so jargon-bloated and convoluted that it’s difficult to distinguish from REAL scientific gibberish (I learned a little of this kind of thing myself, when I took a seminar in Grant Writing) and their paper was accepted for presentation at the conference!
They are now trying to raise money to travel to the conference and give a randomly generated talk on their paper. The event organizers aren’t too excited about that, though, and may not let them in. The paper is hilarious to read because you know it’s fake, and the story also has a link you can follow to randomly generate your own scientific treatise!
This is reminiscent of another famous “hack” from here where a group of students set up a cafeteria tray place setting in a modern art exhibit, left out the knife, and called the display “Sans Knife”– it had a little description card like the rest of the legit pieces describing the absence of the knife as reflective of the artist’s angst or something or other. Anyway, being how modern art is, everyone thought it was part of the exhibit for quite some time. Quite funny.
Don’t tell anybody, but since last Friday I’ve been working on a Papal Critique-O-Matic web page that randomly writes a pope article. Nowhere near as complex as these MIT guys, but I haven’t done any programming in years so my abilities are quite limited. I figure it’ll shake up the cliches, and serve as a fun reference to give trolling attackers.
This is too rich!! The last famous MIT prank that I was aware of (being an alumnus) was during the old Star Trek series days (the original Nimoy, Shatner one) when the network was threatening to cancel the show. A bunch of MIT people went down to New York, slipped into the parking garage at the network headquarters and put “Save Star Trek” bumper stickers on all the executive limosines.
The last MIT trick I remember being covered by the local news outlets here in Boston was the time the students assembled a mock-up campus police cruiser on the dome of one of the campus buildings. The did such a good job with the mock-up that the campus cops were trying to locate a crane tall and strong enough to left a car down.
You mean you have never seen the Post-Modernism Generator? http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern
Scott