thiotimoline promotes metastructural pediculosis in lycanthropy by modulating rhodomagnetism

I often find myself reading blogs by various kinds of academics whose subjects are mostly over my head. Partly that's because I'm a nerd; but also, I think if you look at who's still using a blog format these days, it's heavily weighted toward people in fields where they're required to write a ton of prose anyway—so when they feel like blowing off steam, they'll just write a half-ton of prose in a less formal style and the result will be a good read.

Anyway, that's how I happened upon this wild and unintentionally timely investigative piece from January about how a very specialized kind of scientific fraud, motivated by excessive pressure on everyone to look like they're producing results, has taken root in China, with the result that a whole lot of international scientific journal content is basically arbitrary noise produced at least in part by bots. (My favorite part is how two pieces with different randomized content, but the exact same title and the same Photoshopped images, purporting to describe two independent studies, were attributed to two different doctors who were working at the same hospital in the same department. The article drily suggests that they should consider collaborating.)

Despite the unfortunate cartoon at the top of the story that frames this as a Chinese restaurant menu joke, it's not an anti-Chinese piece, doesn't impute sinister motives or incompetence to anyone in the scientific community there, and suggests that there might be a fair amount of that kind of thing going on in other countries that just isn't quite as easy to detect. It's ultimately about how any system that values a somewhat arbitrary measure of competence far above everything else will naturally produce distorted results that waste everyone's time, and will only benefit the parasitic businesses that spring up to work the system—like these paper-bot farms, or for instance the SAT prep industry. In the Chinese case there's a particular bias toward papers that mention herbs associated with traditional Chinese medicine, partly because it's known that the government likes that. In the US, Trump's obsession with hydroxychloroquine, along with the general desperate need to act like progress was being made (both here and over there—it seems pretty clear now that the early positive findings the Chinese government announced for HCQ, that got everyone so excited and were referenced over and over again until people started citing Didier Raoult instead, didn't exactly exist in any sense that a researcher would stand behind, but were announced as real results because the government wanted to show progress and assumed the real results would arrive soon enough), encouraged a spree of HCQ-related bad science and outright scams, and encouraged even the honest researchers to steer their efforts in that direction. China and the US both happen to be extra well positioned to fuck things up for everyone in that regard, just because they're both large and influential countries with a lot of corruption and economic inequality.

flouncing, flapping, and flouting not pictured

A recent and not particularly content-rich CNN story describes how Lord Dampnut's campaign is aware that not everything is coming up roses, yet they also—according to anonymous insiders who were willing to share such amazing secrets only on background—are confident that they can do better. The reporter (or at least a reporter, because it took four people to write this) goes on to say that "while the Trump campaign may be floundering, it's far from flailing."

You might wonder what the difference is. Well, the definitions are long and complicated and hard to understand if you're not a professional journalist, but basically it comes down to this:




That first guy looks happier than those other guys, so there you go.

(Image credits: A from Wilmington Star News [which notes that floundering is becoming more difficult in North Carolina than it used to be], B from Arte De Athletica)