I'll bookmark both those papers - and I rarely bookmark anything (instead relying on Google and the eternal onslaught of ever newer links and issues).
That paper is real fun to read, an excerpt:
> How would we begin? First, we would secure funds to obtain a large supply of identical functioning radios in order to dissect and compare them to the one that is broken. We would eventually find how to open the radios and will find objects of various shape, color, and size (Figure 2). We would describe and classify them into families according to their appearance. We would describe a family of square metal objects, a family of round brightly colored objects with two legs, round-shaped objects with three legs and so on. Because the objects would vary in color, we would investigate whether changing the colors affects the radio's performance. Although changing the colors would have only attenuating effects (the music is still playing but a trained ear of some can discern some distortion) this approach will produce many publications and result in a lively debate.
If you need a real good laugh, do read it now, it gets even more funny after the quoted paragraph! It's almost as good as that (much shorter) paper on PubMed where they examined the sterility of farts in operating rooms (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1121900/).
One night I had a dream a biologist not knowing what a computer is would spend hours describing that mysterious non uniform squarelet mater engraved with latin letters. What a curious organ.
Laugh all you want, but if ever an UFO crashes on Earth and we find a mysterious alien computer, we will need people with that mindset to reverse-engineer it... ;).
http://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/fulltext/S1535-6108(02)00133...
I'll bookmark both those papers - and I rarely bookmark anything (instead relying on Google and the eternal onslaught of ever newer links and issues).
That paper is real fun to read, an excerpt:
> How would we begin? First, we would secure funds to obtain a large supply of identical functioning radios in order to dissect and compare them to the one that is broken. We would eventually find how to open the radios and will find objects of various shape, color, and size (Figure 2). We would describe and classify them into families according to their appearance. We would describe a family of square metal objects, a family of round brightly colored objects with two legs, round-shaped objects with three legs and so on. Because the objects would vary in color, we would investigate whether changing the colors affects the radio's performance. Although changing the colors would have only attenuating effects (the music is still playing but a trained ear of some can discern some distortion) this approach will produce many publications and result in a lively debate.
If you need a real good laugh, do read it now, it gets even more funny after the quoted paragraph! It's almost as good as that (much shorter) paper on PubMed where they examined the sterility of farts in operating rooms (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1121900/).