Damn! I keep on getting these invitations to bogus conferences and it never struck me to just send them a spoof paper:

An MIT student has had a paper consisting of computer-generated gibberish accepted by technology conference WMSCI. The pretentious gathering bills itself as “an international forum where researchers and practitioners examine Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics key issues”

Comp sci undergraduate Jeremy Stribling told us that he didn’t single out WMSCI because of its subject matter, although it’s easy to see how it made a tempting target.

“A Metaphor,” the organizers explain. “We are trying to relate the analytic thinking required in focused conference sessions, to the synthetic thinking, required for analogies generation, which calls for multi-focus domain and divergent thinking. We are trying to promote a synergic relation between analytically and synthetically oriented minds, as it is found between left and right brain hemispheres, by means of the corpus callosum.”

But the conference organizers’ two minds didn’t meet in time to catch the hoax, which fell right through WMSCI’s supposedly rigorous review procedures.

…etc; more at [www.theregister.co.uk] .

All that said, I suspect I am too far too busy to be a truly effective hoaxter, not to mention probably too grounded. Observationally it does seem true that computer security geeks fall mostly into either attacker or defender sub-species, and I am definitely one of the latter.

However I do still cherish the memory of a certain Sun Distinguished Engineer once handing me a printout of Alan Sokal’s “Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” – of which I spent five minutes and a rather nice espresso in fully parsing the first full four paragraphs, of which here is a taster:

There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in “eternal” physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the “objective” procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.

[…]

Here my aim is to carry these deep analyses one step farther, by taking account of recent developments in quantum gravity: the emerging branch of physics in which Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics and Einstein’s general relativity are at once synthesized and superseded. In quantum gravity, as we shall see, the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective physical reality; geometry becomes relational and contextual; and the foundational conceptual categories of prior science — among them, existence itself — become problematized and relativized. This conceptual revolution, I will argue, has profound implications for the content of a future postmodern and liberatory science.

…before I said of the paper “it’s bullshit.” and tossed it back to him. That it was a hoax was not revealed for a few weeks afterwards; he was surprised, but then he was a CompSci major.

Perhaps I was inoculated by my participation in the far less serious (and never published) On Gödelian Incompleteness and the Number Theoretical Implications of Algebraic Uncertainty – in which we prove that a watched pot never boils in proportion to the number of observers, by means of hallucinatory numbers.