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!
