I was momentarily unnerved this morning, listening to the Today programme to hear David Cameron, leader of the opposition in the UK parliament, say ‘You might say that; I couldn’t possibly comment.’
The unnerving aspect of this is that it is an approximate quote from the driven (and murderous) Prime Ministerial candidate/Prime Minister Francis Urquart in the drama House of Cards.
It made me wonder which fictional scientists the real ones could quote and to what effect. Richard Dawkins quoting Dr Strangelove, perhaps? Or Martin Rees giving us a touch of Mr Spock.
In fact there’s a good potential game here. It’s not unheard of for scientific papers or books to contain a literary quote (all too often Lewis Carroll), but how about trying to slip a quote from a fictional scientist into a paper without people noticing it?
I saw what must have been a similar exercise a few months ago on TV. For a few seconds the dialogue between two characters in the soap opera Coronation Street was lifted wholesale from a 1940s/50s Hollywood movie. The delightful thing is 9 out 10 people would not have noticed, so for those of us who did there was a frisson of fun and a sense of ‘aren’t I clever?’
We keep hearing moans about papers being too boring – here’s one way to liven them up. The secret quote. (NB, as I’m sure the important people from Nature will point out, this should be from a fictional scientist, as quoting someone else’s paper is rather more… well, plagiarism.)
Heh. There’s a certain group in New Zealand, who shall remain nameless, who play a variation on this game. They are challenged to put certain words into manuscripts.
The best they’ve managed so far is ‘merkin’ (you may do your own research), describing a protein as a ‘sort of molecular merkin’.
The mind boggles.
Many years ago, I edited this paper (the link seems to be in breach of copyright – don’t tell Elsevier). 2D or not 2D, a review of 2D gel elctrophoresis. The authors peppered the manuscript with Shakespearean play names (e.g. thanks to X for ensuring the manuscript is not a comedy of errors). The article is even prefaced by this slightly corny stanza:
Two D, or not two D: that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The streaks and blobs of intractable proteins
Or to take chips against a sea of genes
And by comparing, find them that
hold the bitter taste of disease and death.
We Nature editors would probably notice, and yet leave them in for publication, Brian, in the interests of livening up a dull manuscript. (I love your examples, Matt.)
A group of us here have a running joke over the word “buffeted”. I also managed to get “dialectic” into a population genetics paper – I had just been reading Francis Wheen’s biography of Karl Marx, and it seemed to fit.
And of course there are the famous penguin diagrams.
I have played a rather similar game to Richard’s merkin (so to speak) – in the last four books I have written I have slipped in a reference to Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a sort of running reference.
My second book, which had a piece of short fiction at the end of each chapter, had a final entry in the index:
Zzz Simon liked reading indexes. They were better than sleeping pills.
And I’m sure somewhere I’ve seen paired index entries like
Circular reference – see nested loop
...
Nested loop – see circular reference
Heh. I actually did that in the index of a book I edited a few years ago.
Recursion, simple – see Simple recursion
...
Simple recursion – see Recursion, simple
What a (sorry, Charles) geek, eh?
The England football team did something similar during one of their doomed world cup campaigns. They had to use as many song titles as possible during media interviews. But I like the geeky ones better.
Convergent evolution or lack of imagination. On a recent trip to China I was one of a group allegedly representing the finest centres of Materials science in the UK. Our noble leader would stand up and sing our collective praise at each Chinese Institute we visited. It occurred to the more disreputable, late night beer drinking, contingent that there was no-one in our party from Birmingham University – which is indeed a 5* place. So the challenge was to refer to eorkin Birmingham in each of our individual presentations the following day. Alas only two of us managed the challenge.
Whoops. I am not sure how the eorkin got in in my previous post. Do not fear it is not some form of tufted merkin (see earlier in the thread).