Interesting titles on scientific publications

LW

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L
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A couple of days ago I mentioned in The Everlasting Mathematical Thread about the textbook named Applied Abstract Algebra. I've always liked the title because on first reading it sounds like an oxymoron.

When cleaning my table I came across a paper by two Japanese logicians, C. Sakama and K. Inoue, who selected the title Negation as failure in the head for their article published in the Journal of Logic Programming in 1998. I always get a small chucle when reading the title since it is so natural to parse it the wrong way as the word "failure" is really attached to "negation as failure" not to "in the head". [BTW, it is a good paper and there are cases where having the possibility of expressing things like "if A and B are true, then C does not have to be true" helps a lot in formulating concise encoding of a problem.]

Has anyone else come across scientific material with interesting titles?
 
The use of "Non-destructive" brings a smile, almost implying that the default method of testing is destructive.

For instance - Trends in Optical Non-Destructive testing and inspection by Rastogi.
 
The folks over at Annals of Improbable Research at experts at digging up strange scientific publications. Here's a sample from one isse:

"Pharmacological Aspects of Ipecac Syrup (TJN-119)-Induced Emesis in Ferrets," T. Endo, et al., Research Communications in Molecular Pathology and Pharmacology, vol. 108, nos. 3-4, 2000, pp. 187-200. (*This one was the impetus for AIR's first and last annual FERRET TOSS LIMERICK COMPETITION)

"Operating Principles in Repetitive Babbling: A Cognitive Continuity Approach," L. Elbers, Cognition, vol. 12, no. 1, July 1982, pp. 45-63. (*Inspiration for the first and last annual COGNO-BABBLE LIMERICK COMPETITION)

"Southern Hybridization in Shampoo," B.P. May, Biotechniques, vol. 25, no. 4, 1998, p. 582.

"Cadaverine as a Putative Component of Oral Malodor," S. Goldberg et al., Journal of Dental Research, vol. 73, no. 6, June 1994, pp. 1168-72.

"Sicarius (Six-Eyed Crab Spider): A Homeopathic Treatment for Ebola Haemorrhagic Fever and Disseminated Intravascular Coagulation?" C. Richardson-Boedler. British Homoeopathic Journal, vol. 88, no. 1, January 1999, pp. 24-7. (* Oh...never mind. You are looking for scientific material.)

"Influence of Temperature Shifts on Survival, Growth, and Toxin Production by Psychrotrophic and Mesophilic Strains of Bacillus cereus in Potatoes and Chicken Gravy," W. Mahakarnchanakul and L.R. Beuchat, International Journal of Food Microbiology, vol. 47, no. 3, March 1999, pp. 179-87. (*Yummy!)
 
How about:

Black Holes Really are Black

Garcia, M. R.; Murray, S. S.; McClintock, J. E.; Narayan, R.
American Astronomical Society, 197th AAS Meeting, #118.04; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 32, p.1604
 
How about "Black holes have no hair" which IIRC is the title of a Hawking and Ellis paper..

I tried to title a paper "Gambling on the quantum internet" but the editors nixed that to "Quantum protocol for cheat-sensitive weak coin flipping". That pissed me off. Moreover, the editors removed the very last sentence of the paper, which was "The ordering of the authors on this paper was chosen by a coin flip implemented via a trusted third party. TR lost" This sentence was actually a perfect illustration of both the status of experiments in the field, and the fact that knowing the known author ordering would not automatically imply who had won the flip - an observation related to something important within the paper...

I have "Dressing dressed states"as the title of a published paper - originally I tried for "Over-dressed atoms" or "Over-dressed states" but they didnt allow it.

Its stough to get things past those damn editors.

In a preprint I do have "Violation of conservation of trouble" in the title.
 
Robin Fox and Lionel Tiger collaborated on a book called The Imperial Animal
 
This is not really an odd title, but rather an odd set of authors. Famous too.

I'm of course referring to the Alpher-Bethe-Gamow Theory. The theory was authored by George Gamow and Ralph Alpher, but Gamow invited Hans Bethe to put his name to it as well. The reason? A play on words, i.e "alpha, beta and gamma".
 
Just this very moment, I was browsing a journal and read the following intriguing title, 'Visualizing Cereal World'. Imagine my disappointment when the first line of the abstract read "We discuss the basic theory of price indices..."

Then I thought of this thread and thought I'd mention it here. I'm beginning to think I might be a bit sad.
 
zakur said:
The folks over at Annals of Improbable Research at experts at digging up strange scientific publications.
Click to expand...

Oooh. How could I have forgotten AIR. My all-time favorite scientific article is Advances in Artificial Intelligence that is featured on the book Best of the Annals of Improbable Research. I can't remember who wrote it and couldn't find the author data with google, but the whole article contains only the title, the authors, and an empty page.

[Edited to add full bibliographic data: ]

The article in question is:

Grumme, A., Schmelzeisen, F., and Helmke, H, Advances in Artificial Intelligence, AIR 1:3, May/June 1995.
 
The first influential history of the science of psychology was written by E. G. Boring. Thus the spine read: "History of Psychology: Boring".
 
Tez said:
Moreover, the editors removed the very last sentence of the paper, which was "The ordering of the authors on this paper was chosen by a coin flip implemented via a trusted third party. TR lost"
Click to expand...
The copy of your paper located at http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/0202/0202118.pdf , as well as a couple others I found on Google, all leave the last sentence intact.

Maybe the editor decided he liked it after all? :D
 
Nah Cecil - thats the preprint version, which I have control over, the actual journal version

Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 227901 (2001).

is different. For that reason I never updated the preprint version to the actual finally published one...
 
DanishDynamite said:
This is not really an odd title, but rather an odd set of authors. Famous too.

I'm of course referring to the Alpher-Bethe-Gamow Theory. The theory was authored by George Gamow and Ralph Alpher, but Gamow invited Hans Bethe to put his name to it as well. The reason? A play on words, i.e "alpha, beta and gamma".
Click to expand...

Danny Greenburger, a somewhat eccentric deep thinker in quantum shmantum mechanics, wrote a paper with Grrenberg. He then searched around for a third author - the result:

O.W. Greenberg, D.M. Greenberger and T.V. Greenbergest, in Quantum Coherence andReality, eds. J.S. Anandan and J.L. Safko, (World Scientific, Singapore, 1994), p. 301.
 
In Penn & Teller's humorous culinary-related magic trick book, How to Play With your Food, they mention that if you hook up a pickle to an electric current correctly, it will glow yellow.

The thing is, Jeffrey Appling of Clemson University apparently wrote a scientific article about the phenomenon. It was titled, "Sodium D Line Emission from Pickles".
 
There's a group of long-leggedy beasties called Pantopoda, marine arthropods distantly related to spiders. They seem to consist of nothing but legs, because for some (blissfully unknown) reason they have found it advantegeous to shunt most internal organs into the legs and correspondingly reduce the body. Therefore, they are called "Nobodies" in zoologyspeak. I can't name a specific article, but I remember coming across a variety of papers with enchanting names like "The Eyes of Nobody" or "Genetic Differences between Horse-Shoe Crabs and Nobody" :D


cheers
floyt
 
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