Best case scenario:

• The initial submission didn’t cite the crappy Gabor paper, and peer reviewers said that it should.
• The peer editor, summarizing feedback, said that the submission was accepted as long as it took into account the peer reviewer suggested revisions.
• The submitters don’t really care about the paper quality, all they need is the citation. So they assigned the revisions to the lowliest grad student.
• The lowliest grad student knows their advisor hates that crapmaster Gabor, so when they sent it to their advisor they asked whether they should cite that paper, thinking they might prefer to passive-aggressively “forget” to do so
• The advisor doesn’t care about the paper quality (see above) so they just skimmed it and saw the word “Gabor”. (alternate hypothesis: they thought this was a great opportunity to troll that crap-merchant Gabor, as well as those useless middlemen thieves at Wiley.)
• The peer editor: same as the advisor, they’re just doing this for a line-item on their CV.
• The Wiley “editor” doesn’t even read the paper, they just forward it to the typesetter subcontractors and demand that the submitters pay up.
• The typesetter subcontractors don’t care, it’s all just text to them.
• And so it becomes Science, and the writer of crappy papers Gabor is enshrined in the pantheon along with Ea-Nasir and William “I’m something of a scientist myself” Dafoe. Immortality, of a sorts.

it’s Happy Fun Ball !

I kinda like this one. it’s got a “hidden step” in which if humans are created by gods, we are robots to those gods.

Yeah, there’s electricity in the brain, for example.

“the answer’s on the information superhighway!”

I always imagined that ADHD was just our minds tuned to being hunter-gatherer survivors, and thus not suited for a sedentary office environment.

“if the sun went out we wouldn’t know for about 8 minutes.”

you might like the first chapter of Iron Sunrise. it’s a SF book that begins with someone destroying a civilized planet by causing their sun to explode. not a rare trope, but they describe it in a realistic-sounding way. (the rest of the book is mid, unfortunately)

The gif was made by those students.

Very interesting, thanks. It’s kind of funny how as I grow older, I become more interested in conflict termination.

Interesting. Is there a definitive reference for this, that you have handy? I just did some literature searches but most cites were over 20 years old.

I dunno. My aunt adopted a cat who had been rescued from an abusive evironment. Non-humans can be pretty messed up too.

I’ve heard that his autobiography is pretty good too…

You’re probably familiar with the argument that Japan’s surrender was in direct response to the Soviet invasion of Manchuria (and the southern Sakhalin Island)…