Hello, Vancouver City Council?

I would like to report a serious lack of googly eyes on your streetlight pedestals.

Make your armpit a charmpit oxter a roxstar

I for one am delighted to see this fine old Glasweegee word, long in desuetude except among hardcore Scrabble habitués, making a comeback by way of oncology papermills.

Read the scene where gravity is pulling me around

Join the Science! Travel the world, meet exotic people, ask them to rate schematic drawings of lady-lumps according to attractiveness and apparent age!

H/t Neuroskeptic

There cannot be many cultures left in the world where evo-psych researchers have not descended with their schematic drawings of breast ptosis, in their search for fertility-driven cross-cultural universals, asking questions of the local males like "How attractive do you rate this schematic outline?" and "What is the age of this schematic outline?" Part of their motivation is the chance to use the word "perky" in scholastic writing -- an opportunity which otherwise too seldom arises.*

It is very confusing for those of us who laboured under the impression that Ptosis was a minor pharaoh of the 28^th Dynasty. Anyway, it transpires that there are not one but two schematic-outline scales of breast non-perk -- both modified from Regnault's 1976 classification -- because "Bristol Scale" was already taken.

FIGURE 1 The six stages of breast ptosis
based on Kirwan’s classification (2002)

But here at Riddled Research Institute and Sheep-drench Emporium we do not condemn or criticise this evo-psych line of study, for it increases demand for the Riddled Antigravity Ptosis-Reversing Rotary Rejuvenator.

We must warn readers away from the McGravitas Gravity-reversing Magnet -- in a purely disinterested fashion -- for it is untested speculative technology, with side-effects that are known to range from Coxcombitude to Pert Foolishness.

Oddly enough, if you travel the world and meet exotic people and ask them to rate schematic drawings of increasingly pendulous scrotums according to attractiveness and age, they look at you like you're a perverted freak, is this justice? IS IT BOG-ROLL.

* 'Perky' peaked in about 2006. Before that was a prevous Perky peak in 1948, with 'perky' drooping and sagging through the 1960s and 1970s, no-one knows why.

Dear Editors,I never thought this would happen to me, but...

...the barstaff at The Union gave me a free pint of Naked Fox IPA -- "This one's on the house".

It may have helped that I had been scribbling work-related stuff at my end of the bar, occasionally looking up to marvel at the amount of physical exercise that goes into mixing cocktails, and at the supply of cocktail-related fruit and herbs that gave that end of the bar the appearance of a miniature greengrocery. Perhaps the mixologist had mistaken me for a bar reviewer, or a beer-blogger. Either that, or it was my irresistible good looks.

McGravitas

I had already become a fixture at that particular bar; Substance McGravitas and I spent some time there a few nights earlier, working our way through the ales. No doubt we impressed the bar-staff with our banter and witty badinage.

Then this turned up in McGravitas' FaceBukkake Feed: an interview with the mixologist in question. We knew her before she was famous!

Black planet hanging over the highway

There will aggressive drinking and shouting at clouds if those miniature planets do not get out of my face soon, for they are annoying and distracting beyond endurance as they weave around in a complex Douglas-Ouyang dance, as if fooled by the two meanings of 'orbit'.

And are the helpdesk team at IxCorp actually any help? ARE THEY BOGROLL. "Small vision-occluding planets are not covered by the warranty of Tleilaxu artificial eyes, for the feature is mentioned in the small print of the documentation and the User License Agreement." I certainly hope that "conversations may be recorded for the purposes of performance evaluation"; so record this!

Miniature planets are more fun when they are a few orders of magnitude larger and you can poke them right in the eye of the hurricane. HUR HUR your storm is a goatse!

Bottles of blackness, the blacker the spare

When you visit Riddled Alternative Health Clinic and Noxious Weed Extirpation Specialists, our trained clinicians will select the personalised, color-coded medication specific to your condition.

Do not be alarmed if consumption of Christmas Ale Personalised Medication causes beach towels and blank speech bubbles to fall out of an empty sky. This is a common side-effect and perfectly benign.

Doctors S. Clyde and A. Kiwi have the best qualifications money can buy, and many years of experience in staring at bottles of murky totally-non-cactus-based fluids.

While you await your turn in our busy but well-appointed waiting rooms,our intern and part-time beggar-of-the-month Little Tim will ensure that your pet snakes are fed and entertained.

Observe the contrast with MacGravitas Laboratories, where the dispensing staff and bottle-starers feel obliged to conceal their identities behind a Scramble Suit. Does this instil confidence in their training and trustworthiness? DOES IT BOGROLL.

Speaking of Bad Moons Rising

Some cheeky researchers snuck this eye-opening diagram into a highly-respected journal,* as Figure 4 in their paper on mitochondrial function and regulation:

H/t to Paul Brooks, commenting at RetractionWatch

It should separate the sheep from the goats, eh. I refuse to believe that Substance McGravitas was not in some way involved.

* First published in 1947 as the beginning of Elsevier's rise to Evil Empire.

Insect Human

The Van Dusen Meditation Garden was closed when I was there (or so it seemed) due to the distractions and the phantasmic eidolons of Samsāra.

OK, Phantasmic eidolons. And the veils of Māyā. And fire ants.

The truth is that the fire ants only wanted to chill out and practice their Ānāpānasati breath mindfulness but the management lost their shit and over-reacted.

First-world Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius Problems

Problem #74: Academic Journal Identity Theft.
Imagine the disappointment here at the Riddled High-Energy Library. We had thought to see the light of a new Renaissance dawning across the scientific world; a new generation of polymaths, transcending the boundaries of nations and traditional turf-conscious disciplines. The harbingers of this transformation include a cell biologist in Moscow, who boasts of publishing in the botanical journals Bothalia (South African) and Wulfenia (Austrian) and the wine-and-fruit-specialising Mitteilungen Klosterneuburg and the Polish arboriculture journal Sylwan...

Sylwan's logo: Pirated
portrait of Another Kiwi

a Taiwanese mathematician who has published a proof in Bothalia, Wulfenia, Mitt. Klost. and the Icelandic glaciology / geology journal Jökull...

a Brazilian entomologist whose outlets include Sylwan, Bothalia, Mitt.Klost. and Pensée (French politics) and Ciência e técnica vitivinícola (Portugal, grapes & wine)...

an Iranian surgeon reporting in Wulfenia and Emergencias (Spanish, emergency & trauma medicine) and Vitae (Colombian, pharmaceutical chemistry) and Nautilus (mollusc-research-related activities)...

It transpires, alas, that although the websites hosting these articles claim ISSN numbers and eminent Editorial Panels, they are not the venerable obscure journals they purport to be, with the select readership and the rigorous standards and all. They are all shiny new websites of the bog-standard 'Open Access' template, that announce an extension of the original subject area to include "anything an author might care to blather about" while instructing contributors to chip in a few hundred Euros to cover the expenses of posting a PDF -- but promising an expedited peer-review process in return, i.e. 'however long it takes for the cheque to clear'.

They are all fake. They are irruptions from a secondary, irreal world, straight out of a Philip Dick nightmare. A shadow ecology of fictions, trying to displace the familiar world of academic standards. It is like that scene in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep where Deckard visits a publishing house police station but it turns out to be set up and managed by replicants.

Printery run by poorly-maintained replicants

Information purist Jeffrey Beall has started listing identity-stolen titles in the hope of slowing their corrosive effect. In Iran, Dr. Mehrdad Jalalian maintains a second independent list. The authors themselves must be aware that these journals are a scam, but evidently they fill a need. When promotions and tenure rest on publications, people grow desperate to find outlets for third-rate essays on The Chemical Properties and Phenomological Significance of that Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in my Left Armpit; so scam journals provide a chance to piss away one's university's publication budget, and to pad out one's CV. In fact you can pay to display the same essay in several places without having to worry that the editors will retract it for self-plagiarism.*

I wouldn't be surprised if authors are checking Beall's list for ideas on where to send the manuscript next. One way to discover new cases of journal-jacking requires no sophisticated detection, just the Google; you look up the name of some random contributor to Stolen Title #1 to see where else they have published.

What is doubly disappointing is that Riddled didn't think of it first.

The usual pop-up vanity-press 'on-line journals' -- the ones styling themselves as International Journal for Scholars Who Can't Write Good but Wanna Publish Stuff -- must deal with the problem that Volume 1, Issue 1 of the IJSWCWGWPS lacks a certain gravitas and loses its appeal to all but the most desperate of contributors.** Hijacking an established reputation finesses the whole problem. Unfortunately there seems to be no long-extant Stercoria / the Journal of Bullshit Studies for us to appropriate, so it's back to Plan B in which we invite submissions to the Intergalactic Journal of Polymathematics.

* Gratifying though it is to imagine a cross-over between Beall's Index of Hijacked Journals and Retraction Watch.

* Some ingenious scoundrels have constructed years of fictitious back-issues for their on-line suppositories depositories, filling up the Table of Contents with lorem ipsum by stealing published papers and making up others with JanusNode, but that requires breaking a sweat.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that INVITATIONS TO SUBMIT ARTICLES have only just turned up in the spam tray, one from the hacked Mitt. Klost. site and one from the hacked Sylwan. YAY ME! Recognition at last!

Mecha-Castro Macho

Over in a LGM thread, a cut-&-paste troll listed the objectives of World Communism according to Cleon Skousen.* As a narrative the items are bald and unconvincing. Skousen is clearly a frustrated haiku poet and leans toward an aphoristic style:

*Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.

This is where we encounter the collegial nature of the Interducts where all is cooperation and comity. Substance McGravitas stepped in with the corroborative detail and the artistic verisimilitude and such as:

October 18, 2013 at 1:29 pm

*Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.

Well YEAH. The communist apparatus is giant and made of iron, belches black smoke and CRUSHES EVERYTHING IN ITS PATH.
How cool is that?

But did he provide the appropriate illustration? Did he bogroll.

I don't know where you people would be without Riddled to pick up your toys after you.

"Needs more smoke," Another Kiwi vouchsafed. "Black smoke was mentioned."

"I'll just add another all-crushing Communist Apparatus and update the title," I said. "No-one will ever notice."

---------------------

* Described, in the finest euphemisms available to the Whackyweedia collective, as a "faith-based political theorist".

In which Web searches intended for the House of Substance are somehow redirected to Riddled

It is nice that we receive so much traffic even in the absence of regular posting.

Are you telling me that it's illegal to imitate the Skyclad monks of Jainism?

Apparently it is contrary to Catholicism for men to wear gowns or robes:*

Before the show began, Luzon stood outside the building in which the theater is located, and where several San Diego news station cameras rolled. He donned a cherry-red kimono-styled dress and Asian-inspired make-up and laughed and chatted with students.

[...]

“A drag show is not consistent with Catholic teaching,” student protestor and sophomore Ailsa Tirado, 20, said in an interview with The College Fix. “Why call yourself a Catholic school? It’s in direct contradiction with explicit Catholic moral teaching.”

As is so often the case, a passage comes to mind from Gravity's Rainbow. In this case, Pynchon's thundering denunciation of Cross-dressing transsectuals:

... a transsectite, a Lutheran named Mausmacher who likes to dress up in Roman regalia. This Mausmacher, not content with standing in front of his own mirror making papal crosses, thinks it will be a really bizarre kick to go out to the Zeppelin field to a Nazi torchlight rally in full drag, and walk around blessing people at random. Green torches flaring, red swastikas, twinkling brasses and Father Mausmacher, checking out tits 'n' asses, waistlines 'n' baskets, humming a clerical little tune, some Bach riff, smiling as he moves through the Sieg Heils and choruses of "Die Fahne Hoch."

One can only call it a blessing in disguise.

* H/t a more substantial blog.

My love is like a red red nose His tail is soft and tawny *

Mark Changizi has some interesting views about human trichromatic colour vision -- namely, that it evolved to facilitate social signalling, so that our ancestors could tell whether one another were blushing; and not (as is widely thought) so that they could detect ripe fruit against a background of foliage [of course one can see how the old incorrect theory came about, what with many historical descriptions of colour blindness involving complaints about "not being able to see fruit", while there are none that it caused "unawareness of everyone else's embarrassment" **].

No red-green vision

It is a theory and it is his. It predicts that other social mammals -- even ones that are not fruit-eaters like our primate ancestors and relatives -- should also have evolved trichromatic colour vision. Especially if, like us, they have a dearth of hair obscuring their skin. Sadly, elephants and dolphins and naked mole rats remain stubbornly dichromatic.

Mark Changizi is a person of interest to the Riddled research laboratory for his contributions to evolutionary psychology, which range from exploring the non-slip function of post-bathing human-fingertip prunyness, to explaining how the human brain co-evolved with Western classical music. Let us skip over his argument that evolution adapted the human nose to hold spectacles in exactly the right place in front of the eyes.

We had hoped that a science-blog scourge of ev-psych such as PZ Myers would already have had a whack at this current piñata of FAIL, but once again it turns out that if you want a job done properly you have to outsource it to a boiler-shop in Bangalore and then claim the credit. The main problem with Changizi's account is that human vision is not actually very good at recognising the signs of increased or decreased blood flow under the skin of the face; or the level of oxygenation of that blood.***

Seeing this as an opportunity rather than an obstacle, Changizi has a patent on rose-tinted "social spectacles", designed to filter the spectrum and enhance the visibility of veins against the skin. In other words, to provide the function that was provided by the evolution of colour vision. He is an exponent of the "making sow's-ears-ade" approach to difficulties.

That means people wearing shades don't need to miss seeing the blush of embarrassment or excitement on the face of a guy or girl on a first date. Similarly, a poker player hiding behind a pair of sunglasses could still spot a red flush creeping up the neck of an opponent ― a telltale sign that could clinch victory as surely as a five-card flush in the game.

But Riddled is not a place for summary rejection of novel ideas just because they are self-serving nonsense... we are all about the fairness and the natural justice and the payola from large corporations. To give Changizi's "subcutaneous vasculature" theory a fair suck of the saveloy we fired up the Riddled Evolvamat, to see if future species of humanity will develop increasingly transparent skin so that fluctuations in blood flow are even more visible to their peers.

The effects on Subject #1 (Greenish Hugh) were in line with expectations, except that his blood also turned transparent, rather missing the point.


Subject #2 sprouted an expressive tail and muscles along her muzzle, all the better to snarl at you with when you don't have the correct change for a pint of Wormwood Warmer.
The effect on Subject #3 was the appearance of an enticingly high forehead. Evidently its functionality is to support spare pairs of spectacles.

----------------------------

* Responding -- four weeks late -- to a request from Substance McGravitas. Alternative title: The Color out of Face.

** There are numerous accounts from colour-blind doctors about the diagnostic difficulties caused by the deficiency. No-one has complained that "Can't tell if patient is embarrassed or choking".

*** Human wavelength discrimination is best at about 500 nm and 600 nm. Rather than a peak at 540-560 nm to match the peak of hemoglobin's light absorption, our wavelength sensitivity is relatively poor there.

Golden Silver Hoarding

Some things should not be saved up in Mason jars. Ultimately it always escapes. It must be a tradition, or an old charter or something.

We have warned Mr McGravitas repeatedly but he pays no heed.

Update!

Dreams of the Rabbit Fiend

Q: What do you call a homicidal lunatic lagomorph wearing a Scramble Suit to conceal its identity while it chases Ann Althouse?
A: Legion Warren

We have no sympathy

Serves you right for buying cut-price sutures and cheap-ass tissue cement from the House of McGravitas. Doesn't look so much like a bargain now, does it?

Source here.

If 'Flaming Carrot" has taught me one thing, it is that the neck is always the weak spot.