Et al.
Recently, I stumbled upon the work of a research engineer at GTRI (“Georgia Tech Research Institute”). It’s not a one-read book and more of a table-stand book.
It contains a set of 30 “fictional science” articles. Each was written to satirize scientific articles and their format1. What makes it good is how the article writers weave in technical concepts used towards absurd research programs.
It’s like watching an XQCD What-If.
I’ll leave off with the foreword to the book:
“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.”
Et al.
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Has empty pages saying: “this page was left blank because I get paid by the page”. ↩