SnarXiv
| Web address | http://snarXiv.org/ |
|---|---|
| Commercial? | No |
| Type of site | Humor |
| Available language(s) | English |
| Created by | David Simmons-Duffin |
| Launched | March 2010 |
| Current status | Online |
snarXiv is a website spoofing the high-energy physics section (hep-th) of the popular electronic scientific paper repository arXiv. It was created in March 2010 by David Simmons-Duffin, a 3rd year Ph.D. student at Harvard University studying theoretical high-energy physics. The name snarXiv is a contraction of the words "snark" and "arXiv."
Description
| “ | The snarXiv is a random high-energy theory paper generator incorporating all the latest trends, entropic reasoning, and exciting moduli spaces. The arXiv is similar, but occasionally less random.[1] | ” |
The titles and abstracts of fake papers are generated using a context-free grammar. The implementation uses Perl and OCaml, with source files posted on the website itself. Visitors are encouraged to play the game of arXiv vs. snarXiv: they are presented with a series of plausible-sounding pairs of titles and need to determine which of them is real. The program keeps the score, making snarky comments ranging from "Nobel Prize winner" for 100% success rate to "Crackpot", "9th year grad student" and "Worse than a monkey" for being wrong most of the time.
See also
Notes
- ↑ The snarXiv — 10 March 2010, at David Simmons-Duffin's blog
References
- Jargon or Gibberish? (in Random Samples) Science, 18 June 2010: 1461 doi: 10.1126/science.328.5985.1461-b