Today’s entries in the Devil’s Dictionary include quantifiction, argument by an algae, etc.
See the complete Devil’s Dictionary of Scientific Words and Phrases here.
all entries in the Devil’s Dictionary copyright 2018 by Russ Hodge
quantifiction to introduce as many fictional devices as needed into a mathematical or statistical procedure to ensure that you get the result you desire – rather than an ugly truth that would force you to give up your lovely model or, God forbid, your behavior. After a long period of incarceration, quantifiction was recently granted a Presidential pardon. It has been restored to the exalted position it held in the Official Canon of Scientific Methods until two centuries ago, and is being widely implemented by the ruling theocracy in the natural sciences, economics, environmental studies, university mathematics departments, epidemiology, taxation, and all the other fields deemed to have been corroded through the corruptive influence of reason. A number of open source tools have been developed to run under the Open Quantifiction suite, including Fudge factor, Xagerate, disCriminate, overSimplify, Nflate, Denyify, reVersify, and JustLie. See the entry for exaggerate for more.
argument by an algae For a long time, certainly more than a century, perhaps as much as a thousand years, maybe even millions for all I know, scientists have been engaged in a fierce debate on the topic of argument by an algae. Some researchers are for. Some are against. The rest are presumably riding the fence. If you make a career in science, be prepared for the day when someone pops the question, “Do you think arguments by an algae have a place in the way scientific conclusions are reached?” Tread carefully in composing your answer. Whatever the reason for interest in this bizarre topic, people tend to get quite worked up about it. To save you a lot of time, don’t try to find an answer on PubMed. I have been looking for years and have not only been unable to find any literature on the topic, but any reasonable etymological source for the term.
Scientifically, I find it difficult to conceive of any mechanism by which an algae (or the absence of an algae, depending on whether you hoped for a positive or a negtive correlation) could validate (or invalidate) a scientific argument that happened to be going on nearby. Unless, of course, the science concerned algae in the first place. Then there might be some sense in going down to the pond, scraping up a bit of the green stuff (or not), and popping it into your magic-angle, solid state NMR machine. Otherwise, I am at a complete loss regarding what an algae is doing in scientific theory.
X-Y graphs and associated terms X-Y graphs, also known as Cartesian coordinate graphs, refer to a type of plot or chart that was invented far back in prehistoric times by males, as the name implies. Some evolutionary psychologists claim that this system was invented because humans were restricted to two-dimensional thought; i.e., they were able to consider two features of an object at a time, but a third was too much to handle. So, for example, they could understand that a rock was black, or that it was heavy, but not that it was both black and heavy (which would have required adding a third dimension to the chart).
An example of an X-Y graph
Custom dictates that all data plotted onto an X-Y graph fall within a shape called a Bell curve. When this proves impossible, a number of terms have been invented to describe data that fail to adhere to the rule:
outliars (sometimes spelled outliers) data points that should be clustered with a group but have wandered far astray, like sheep, to take up positions in very distant reaches of graphs. Their existence is an affront because they skew all of your results in an undesirable way, usually but not necessarily in the direction of the outlier. How much shift occurs depends on the number of dots properly gathered into the cluster. Even dots on paper are made of matter, which means they exert gravitational fields on each other, so if there are an awful lot of them, the outliar will tend to fall into an orbit around the cluster over time. Whether or not the orbit decays, drawing the errant point back to the fold, depends on the direction and velocity of the outliar at the time it was trapped on the paper. And whether there are other graphs lying nearby that might draw it into their gravitational fields instead.
outrightliars – outliers that are even farther away, always on the right side, providing information which simply cannot be true because it does not fit the lovely paradigm you developed; it never occurred to you to look that far away. There may be many even downrighterliars, so far away they are located on someone else’s chart.
dirtyliars – points plotted on a graph that got smudged somehow, perhaps because the dots are so small they fall prey to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, or they are being chased by Schrödinger’s cat, so their exact positions cannot be determined.
altimeter a measuring stick or large ruler, always a few inches longer than a yard, that has been stored in a high place, probably to keep the dog or the children from getting their teeth or paws on it. Contrast with antimeter – a measuring stick used exclusively to measure negative numbers, which is why 0 is found to the far right and the rest of the numbers run in reverse order. (Not to be confused with antimatter, but the reverse polarity of the stick would permit it to be used to measure that as well.)
ion – a particle that is charged, usually with VISA, but MasterCard is accepted in some places; be sure to save the receipt, what with all the identity theft going on these days. Used as the stem for the following additional terms:
anion – means simply “an ion”; the space was omitted through a misprint in a textbook long ago and now people think anion means something other than one ion, but just ignore them because they’re wrong.
cation – a cat that has been loaded with a powerful charge of static electricity by rubbing it against a carpet; the longer you rub, the higher the charge, as measured by the number of scratches on your arms. Released, the cat dashes off to deliver a powerful shock to whatever person or animal it encounters next. This may result in fatalities, depending on the age and overall health of the victim, whether they are wearing a pacemaker, if they have recently undergone an examination using MRI, etc.
If you liked the Devil’s Dictionary, you’ll probably also enjoy:
Searching for Oslo: a non-hypothesis-driven approach
On the publication of “Remote sensing” by the magazine Occulto
Good Science Writing 