Line of “least bad” fit

That guy was Jared, the Subway spokesperson. That episode aged poorly, or really presciently, depending on your perspective.

Fun fact: fiestaware plates (this was the company that made the uraranium glazed ceramics) are commonly used by radiation safety folks as check sources and for teaching how to use survey meters. This is because they usually aren’t considered a radioisotope source, so there’s less paperwork to keep them around.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who had that thought haha

Yeah, I was hoping that maybe back then the term was meant to refer more to the “human race”, so a concern about population growth.

But some quick googling indicates the eugenics-meaning version of the term was coined around 1900. Honestly not a good look for Everett.

Hah! Come to think of it, Everett has that “blue shell” vibe. Coming out of nowhere to absolutely flatten someone

That was a result of the Hayes Code which was voluntary self-censorship guidelines by the Motion Picture Association. Hayes Code was enforced 1934-1968, so this comic predates it. Its actually pretty wild watching films from the late 20s and early 30s that are from before Hayes; they’re surprisingly racy and boundary-pushing at times.

This got me curious as to when thought bubbles were first used. This website claims they were invented by Dirks. The example they give of his use of a thought bubble is from 1909, a year after this Everett True comic. So while this certainly predates common usage of though bubbles, it potentially also predates the first instance of one!

What a terrible day to be literate

When will scientists just self-publish?

It’s commonplace in my field (nuclear physics) to share the preprint version of your article, typically on arxiv.org. You can update the article as you respond to peer reviewers too. The only difference between this and the paywalls publisher version is that version will have additional formatting edits by the journal.

If you search for articles on google scholar, it groups the preprint and published versions together so it’s easy to find the non-paywalled copy. The standard journals I publish in even sort of encourage this; you can submit the latex documents and figures by just putting the url to an arxiv manuscript.

The US Department of Energy now requires any research they fund be made publicly available. So any article I publish is also automatically posted to osti.gov 1 year after its initial publication. This version is also grouped into the google scholar search results.

It’s an imperfect system, but it’s getting much better than it was even just a decade ago.

Source is Department of Mind-Blowing Theories by Tom Gauld. I skimmed through some other comics from the book and it’s a goldmine of content for this community. It’s also absolutely something my SO and I would enjoy, so I ordered a copy.

Thanks for sharing!

Carol never wore her safety goggles

That’s wild. I’ve always sent people copies when they reach out. It’s especially easy to do so with ResearchGate, but that does require the requester make an account there.

Another option is to ask a librarian to find that specific article, rather than getting them to subscribe to the journal. I had to do this once in grad school for an article in a discontinued journal from the 70s. The librarian found another library that had it and they faxed a copy.

The full article PDF warning has even more chicken chicken chicken.

Interestingly, the journal editors have released an expression of concern earlier this year for this article and others by the same author.

SAGE Publishing has been made aware of scientific concerns regarding the work of Dr. Nicholas Guéguen. Multiple concerns have been raised regarding the integrity of the research including but not limited to concerns around data fidelity, replicability of findings, and ethical consent and oversight for studies involving human participants. SAGE Publishing’s Research Integrity Team, in cooperation with this journal’s editors, are currently conducting an investigation into these articles.

This expression of concern will remain in place until the investigation is completed and any further needs for appropriate action have been taken.

I agree that anything generated by an LLM will need human verification for accuracy, but scientific abstracts are one of the few areas where LLMs can be immediately useful. I’ve played with having ChatGPT create abstracts in subjects that I’m familiar with and it’s been surprisingly good. It even respects word limits. If you have a block of text that needs to be condensed, ChatGPT can probably get you most of the way there.

For example, I had chatGPT summarize your comment in 5 words:

“Summarizing scientific articles demands precision.”

Holy shit it’s real! That’s amazing.