Et al.

Recently stumbled upon the works by a research engineer at GTRI (Georgia Tech Research Institute). I am glad I found the book and decided to make this post to give it a bit more visibility. It’s definitely not a one-read book and more of a table-stand free-time book. It contains a list of 30? “fictional science” articles that are written to satirize scientific articles by using the same argumentative structures on an entirely absurd topic.

What makes it good, in my opinion, is how the article writers weave in technical concepts of their specific domain, to the point where it puts the reader in an IYKYK situation in judging the factuality of the article. In reading it, I’ve realized I need to dust off some of my mathematical knowledge because I could not evaluate if the discussion on cow-based planetoids supporting methane atmospheres fell into the realm of possible, kind of feasible, or absurd. Because within that article it contained discussions on escape velocity, Maxwell-Boltzmann distributions, ODEs, and Laplace transformations (I skipped the engineering degree route) and other conceptual ideas that I had no way of judging if it was accurate.

It’s like watching an XQCD What-If, but also not being able to trust that What-If is being put out in a scientifically accurate way.

I’ll leave the foreward to the book because it basically sums up what you will further experience yourself: 1

“Instead of world building different planets, we world build a treasure trove of other fictional research papers, journals, and competing authors who may have beef with each other or an ulterior motive. In this fictional science genre, we not only world build the science but the sub- text around the authors of these papers. What are their motivations besides citing all of their previous papers in their own article? We can play on the bias, point of view, and motivation of each author solving a problem only they care about or comically interpret data in a one-sided way to support their results as a publishable success. Some people may think it’s irresponsible to make such nonsense look like published research. Yes, it probably is. However, if someone confuses these papers with real science, I think they’re already confusing Facebook memes with science too and may be beyond helping. I’ve worked my hardest to discredit these works with terrible MS Paint drawn graphs, grossly informal language, and made-up author names, but not everyone picks up on that.”

JABDE

The precursor to Et al. is the main site the author works on. It is similar to the renowned “The Onion,” except JABDE is focused on putting out more scientifically sounding realities than the sometimes often begrudgingly correct articles that the Onion puts out. Oh, and JABDE stands for “Journal of Astrological Big Data Ecology,” which is a cool journal name to be fair. Not much to say without parroting what I already wrote on et al., so go check out their articles like the one titled “Caphetamine: When Coffee and Adderall Just Don’t Cut It.” In a world where misinformation is already running rampant, I’m glad there is someone out there dedicated to combating it with better misinformation.


  1. Has empty pages saying: [this page was left blank because I get paid by the page] ↩