Stockpiles of Stupid were running low again so we crowdsourced funds to allow completion of the Riddled Quantum Idiocy Generator, which extracts Stupid de novo from zero-point quantum fluctuations in virtual moron / anti-moron particle pairs of the Mental Vacuum ground state

The Riddled Life-Raft Founderation should not be confused or indeed bumfuzzled with the Lifeboat Foundation. True, both exist to plan and prepare for Existential Threats to Human Survival. The latter, however, restricts itself to Threats that are old-hat and passé, like asteroid strikes, inimical aliens, rogue AIs, runaway nanotechnology and catastrophic global cooling... as befits an institute that was founded by a tech tycoon and now panders to old-school SF authors in the hope of donations. They have no time for the more conceptual, post-modern menaces that concern us here at the Life-Raft Founderation [meets every third Thursday at the Old Entomologist]:

1. Mass transformation into rhinoceri.
2. Wetware-hacking imagery -- the Langford Basilisk scenario.
3. CODE NIGHTMARE GREEN when the stars align.
4. Jaguars falling from the sky.
5. The Thyxxolqus / Pontypool scenario when grammar is fled and language falls apart into echolalic jargon.*

Whoever chose the name for that other foundation was somehow unaware that whereever there is a 'lifeboat' or even just an 'ark', there is that one passenger with a malign agenda and an evil ideology secretly undermining the communal mission of survival... this always happens, it must be a tradition, or an old charter or something.



That is why we opted for the 'life-raft' name, which is not freighted with negative traditions, unless you count the occasional survival cannibalism.

Toulouse-Lautrec prepares to paint"The Life-Raft of the Medusa"

Anyways, a central issue of concern to the Life-Raft team is of course CODE TLÖN UQBAR, when a constructed fantasy irreality gains such a momentum of circumstantial detail and willed repetition that it breaks through the barrier from the fictive realm and intrudes upon or even subsumes the collective hallucination that we have agreed to call 'reality'. These "Fiddler's Green" wish-fulfillment experiential bubbles are a subject of concern for major intelligence agencies -- the GCHQ centre was built beside one in Cheltenham so as to study it -- so the silence from the Lifeboat Foundation is suspicious.

Not making this up

Doubly suspicious because a notable fictional example of the Fiddler's Green phenomenon (which is to say, a particularly real example) arose in a lifeboat-related situation.

"God is spread pretty thin at 18 south 82 east."

This is what brings Professor Dr Mr Alireza Heidari to our attention, along with his self-glorifying fabulated accomplishments. If his chosen reality is not one that the rest of us wish to inhabit, an intervention may be necessary, possibly involving a targeted asteroid strike or rogue nanotechnology.

Someone of that name is credited with co-authoring a couple of minor papers in theoretical physics, a decade ago, with an Iranian affiliation. Evidently that scholarly contribution was not enough for Heidari, and he is now Scholar.Researcher.Scientist@gmail.com, author of countless 115 199 little mash-ups of cancer-cure nanotech bafflegab. Sometimes co-authored with sock-puppets, sometimes adorned with the trappings of theoretical physics, and largely serving as an excuse to self-cite his previous emissions. We also find Heidari on the Editorial Boards of a clown-car-cavalcade of journal-shaped jizz-mops in which these emissions occurred... not just the familiar suspects of parasitical publishing at OMICS and SCIRP and MedCrave, but all manner of 3rd- and 4th-tier wannabee-scavengers, all the way down through the bottoms of sequentially lower barrels to Peertechz and Crimson and Lupine Publishers (these last two being dual instantiations of a single grifter, for a single suck of the moneyteat is never enough). He must be quite an accomplished scholar of the predatory-publishing industry just to have sniffed out and signed onto so many smorgasbords of scam. Mr Heidari's affiliation during this churn of endeavoursome activity -- the imprimatur of his academic status -- is with "California South University", hence his second e-address on these article-shaped extrusions (alternating with the gmail.com identity), Alireza.Heidari@calsu.us.

Predatory publisher

As well as providing Heidari with his qualifications and tenure, "California South University" can boast of a storied past and a list of distinguished alumni, both of them copy-pasted from the University of Alberta. Like the U.Alberta, CSU possesses a grand "Butterdome" sports pavilion, which is not as obvious to the denizens of Irvine as one might expect. In short, it is an entity of the Fictive Realm, and its overlap with Consensus Reality is restricted to a single domicile, that of A. Heidari.

Fortunately (in light of its absence from Goofle Maps), one does not have to attend CSU in one's corporeal manifestation in order to graduate there, with its diplomas available by mail. Though it appears to pre-date Heidari's entry into the dumpster-fire publishing eco-system, already selling diplomas while he was still in Iran, and linked to the name of Zahid Yazdanie. But be that as it may... William Grover speculates that the reason for maintaining the quasi-existence of CSU comes back to those editorial-board positions ... for not only does the Onerous Editorial Responsibility exempt one from paying the usual Author Publishing Charges for having one's writings hosted and homed, it also earns one a slice of the APCs paid by less well-networked suckers. So Mr Heidari occupies a niche and an undoubtedly valued role.

The resulting CV of Scholar.Researcher.Scientist is a work of inspired polymathic creativity, and it needs to be recited aloud in a voice that sets out slow and lugubrious and speeds up progressively into a frantic falsetto gabble:

Prof. Dr. Alireza Heidari, Ph.D., D.Sc. is a Full Professor and Academic Tenure of Chemistry at California South University (CSU), Irvine, California, USA. He has got his Ph.D. and D.Sc. degrees from California South University (CSU), Irvine, California, USA. Furthermore, he has double postdocs in Project Management, Oncology, Human Cancer Tissues and Synchrotron Radiation from Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia and also in Nanochemistry and Modern Molecular Electronic–Structure Computations Theory from California South University (CSU), Irvine, California, USA. His research interests include Biophysical Chemistry, Biomolecular Spectroscopy, Quantum Chemistry, Nanochemistry, Modern Electronic Structure Computations, Theoretical Chemistry, Mathematical Chemistry, Computational Chemistry, Vibrational Spectroscopy, Molecular Modelling, Ab initio & Density Functional Methods, Molecular Structure, Biochemistry, Molecular Simulation, Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Medicinal Chemistry, Oncology, Synchrotron Radiation, LASER, Anti–Cancer Nano Drugs, Nano Drugs Delivery, ATR–FTIR Spectroscopy, Raman Spectroscopy, Intelligent Molecules, Molecular Dynamics, Biosensors, Biomarkers, Molecular Diagnostics, Numerical Chemistry, Nucleic Acids, DNA/RNA Monitoring, DNA/RNA Hypermethylation & Hypomethylation, Human Cancer Tissues, Human Cancer Cells, Tumors, Cancer Tissues, Cancer Cells, etc. He has participated at more than three hundreds reputed international conferences, seminars, congresses, symposiums and forums around the world as yet. Also, he possesses many published articles in Science Citation Index (SCI)/International Scientific Indexing (ISI) Journals. It should be noted that he has visited many universities or scientific and academic research institutes in different countries such as United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Scotland, Ireland, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Russia, Estonia, Turkey, France, Swiss, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Italy, Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, South Africa, Egypt, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, China, India, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, etc. as research fellow, sabbatical and volunteer researcher or visitor and so on heretofore. He has a history of several years of teaching for college students and various disciplines and trends in different universities. Moreover, he has been a senior advisor in various industry and factories. He is expert in many computer programs and programming languages. Hitherto, he has authored more than twenty books and book chapters in different fields of Chemistry. Syne, he has been awarded more than nine hundreds reputed international awards, prizes, scholarships and honors. Heretofore, he has multiple editorial duties in many reputed international journals, books and publishers. Hitherward, he is a member of more than three hundreds reputed international academic–scientific–research institutes around the world. It should be noted that he is currently the President of American International Standards Institute (AISI), Irvine, California, USA and also Director of the BioSpectroscopy Core Research Laboratory at California South University (CSU), Irvine, California, USA.***

Hitherto? Syne? Heretofore? Hitherward? His conversation coach is rubbish.

"President of American International Standards Institute (AISI), Irvine, California, USA"?

Ah yes. AISI proves to have a website, most of its contents copy-pasted from the ISO website. 16 national Standards Agencies are affiliated to the AISI and work under its auspices, though none of the listed people seem to have traceable identities or individual nation-specific addresses, being contactable only through the AISI.

I am not sure of the business-plan details of the intended scam, but presumably it involves displacing and subsuming the actual ISO.

Definitely time for an intervention. Warm up the Low-Orbit Ion Cannon!

Going back to lifeboats... Another relevant tradition or old charter is their tendency to attract tentacled polypoid horrors from the abyss. Yet the Lifeboat Foundation people make no attempt to prepare for this contingency so I am forced to question the sincerity of their mission.

*************************************

The New Accelerator

* 'The objective of the High-Energy Jargon Accelerator is to accelerate parts of speech and bang them together at high enough velocity to recreate the conditions of the Big Babel, and restore the broken symmetry between strong and weak verbs in a veritable neologasm of fresh verbal coinage... all harmless enough... but if you listen to those sky-is-falling alarmists, you'd think that our search for the God Participle runs the risk of destroying the meanings of words altogether. To which I reply "Calenture fritillary omicron flange." '

Right: Jargon

Left: Not jargon

** The Lifeboat Foundation's advisory-board memberships are noted for their inclusive nature, which makes it hard to pick out who the saboteur might be. Or the non-saboteur, as the case may be... According to the tech-dude behind the Foundation, he meant it to be a Trojan-horse Endarkenment scheme to foster distrust of knowledge and rationality, and restore the cultural balance so that Reason and Irrationality can compete on a level playing-field.

Our inquiries reveal that Marco Ruggiero - an old friend of Riddled - has recently joined the Life-Extension and Biotech boards, all the better to advertise his discoveries of time-dilation at the genetic level related to the consumption of insanely-priced food supplements.

Also on the Lifeboat Life Extension Board, we find Mari Konovalenko, Russian futurist and transhumanist who is intent on proving that Russian transhumanists are even less reality-based than the American-born variety. She holds strong opinions on the brilliance of Paolo Macchiarini, the Italian fraudster and failed organ-regeneration / transplant surgeon, which could become a Footnote or Coda if I can be arsed. Her contributions to the sum total of human nescience were what drew me into this topic in the first place.