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Information Does Not Exist?
Anonymous Junkie writes "Here is a piece of academic research publised in this month's 'Journal of Knowledge Research' claiming that Information Does Not Exist. The abstract is available freely online. The wording is a little too scholarly for me but it looks like a worthwhile read. I wonder what this new revelation holds for librarians and IT folks."
Information not found.
Well, at least I tried.
It was today, or never
Yup.
there is no spoon
/. is not to be used by individuals with high blood pressure or a history of heart attacks
Non-existance wants to be free.
Nothing to see here, please move along.
Must....kill...slashdot....editors...
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We get it!!..shall we move on?..
haha
There is no spoon.
Commander Taco is going a bit crazy... there are still 7 articles in the Myterious Future... There are more articles than post now... Singal to noise ration going way way way low.
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
Seriously, this is getting rediculous. Last year, there were jokes, but they weren't every 3 minutes...
Sometimes you've gotta roll the hard six.
Anyone who has tried to read slashdot today can see that there is no information at all.
I am trolling
What wants to be free?
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
Thank God!
not on slashdot today anyway
It would appear that the mad trend toward embiggening words as one can has reached even the hallowed halls of tk421.net...
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/01/171521 8&tid=119
The one article you wouldn't have thought was possible to dupe...
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I had a hard time pulling up the article, here is what came up after 5 minutes. I want my time back. Abstract We proffer an epistemological, ontological, and ecumenical analysis of the informatics zeitgeist surrounding librarians and so-called information scientists. A fuzzy systems tautomerism and transformative hermeneutic lexiae with stemming metadata shows that behind an axiometric normalization of mutually reinforcing moieties, institutionalized metaphors, and naïve liturgical dogmas lies nothing more than gormandized aphorisms and pseudoscientific quanta. This endemic helix permeates the koans of nacirema determinates and quidditative paradigms alike. The operationalized gestalt is collapsed, as with its photonic counterpart, via an interaction among the cromulent a priori of epiphenomenal knowledge management and the parsimonious lorem ipsum of atomistic artificial intelligence and its ilk. Neither the nascent yet positivist hyperliteracy movement nor the transactive pedagogical convergence of jingoistic multiliteracies possess the constituent wherewithal for explicating the existence of information per se or affirming the verstehende of contemporary librarianship; you can't eat your cake and have it too. Ramifications for string theory and consciousness studies are also addressed.
mnewberg.com
http://slashdot.org/articles/05/04/01/1715218.shtm l?tid=119
Well, maybe on Slashdot anyway.
Ba-dum-bum-tshhhh!!
Stop complaining, we get this nonsense once a year :D
I just hope they make as much of an effort on Talk Like a Pirate Day
You can't take the sky from me...
I mean c'mon, it already April 2nd in Europe...
I think /. broke my RSS feed. It's never been seven stories behind before. Stupid   hack.
clearly supported by one of today's Slashdot stories: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/01/171521 8&tid=119
Distributed proteome folding @ WorldCommunityGrid.org
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Not just SOME kind of joke, an April Fools kind of joke. Get with it
If you forget about the future, the future will forget about you.
Of course I haven't read TFA, but the concept of "Information" is pretty nebulous, as there is no absolute measure of being informed - it's purely subjective. However, "Data" does exist, and knowledge is power.. so there.
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
...then the article itself does not exist. Sounds like Epimenides is making trouble again!
...dupe the "French Response to Google is Microsoft" thing? It's indistinguishable from an actual April Fools.... joke.
o.O
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
mirrordot doesn't seem to have it either.
that I get to go home early and play PS2?
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
I also enjoy eating lint while singing. Infact I'm doing it right now. It's pretty hard to type while doing it actually. Oh hello mr. Orange. No I don't think we'll be having the porrige in the flowerpot sandstorms lightbulb magnets with salt apricots in the windows my god what is the clock doing in that man's helium?
Still, not as good and subtle as the Sokal Affair, aka the "Social Text Affair" (in 1996), see http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 120 chars)
I, for one, clicked "Add to Cart" for the full text, and am quite satisfied that I did.
....
...
Well, not that I got anything, information not existing and all, but just like religion and time, I prefer living by the old fallacies
PS: Lord Helmet?? Is that you? It's been a long time
--Wuzoe
I'm a nice person. People like me.
the phone number listed at the bottom of the page is "The White House". Jokes on them .;)
As funny as the block of nonsense text in the abstract is, don't neglect to look at the authors: "Jack Napier, Corresponding Author Contact Information, E-mail The Corresponding Author, Seto Kaiba and Yuffie Kisaragi."
Seto Kaiba is from YuGiOh and Yuffie Kisaragi is from the venerable Final Fantasy VII (one of the highlights of my adolescence). I did a Google search on Jack Napier and it returned some highly questionable results. IMDB http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0621023/ confirms that he is a porn star.
Either information exists or it doesn't.
Say that we have evidence that information does not exist. Then, it can only be expressed through information.
However, if there is evidence that information doesn't exist, then the only real explanation is that we lack the proper language to express that information. Thus, with no proper language to adequately express itself, information appears to not exist.
This reminds me of an anecdote about the famous mathematician G. H. Hardy (it's been credited to others as well):
Hardy once said that he could prove anything if it given a contradiction to begin with. McTaggart denied the consequence: "if 2+2=5, how can you prove that I am the pope?" Hardy replied: "if 2+2=5, 4=5; subtract 3; then 1=2; but McTaggart and the pope are two; therefore McTaggart and the pope are one."
In other words, Hardy argued, and most philosophers would agree, given one false idea or inconsistency you can prove anything.
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
is also the real name of "The Joker" in Batman.
that's so obvious. The things people get away with publishing these days...
Cannot find intelligence. http://www.somethingawful.com/nointelligence/index .htm
Jack Napier-Pornstar Seto Kaiba-Yugi-Oh Character Yuffie Kisaragi-FF7 Character I thought that was clever, the rest was lame.
Anyone notice that you can buy the whole article for the curious price of $42?
The abstract is not only false, it is exceptionally information dense, with many rather esoteric references. For example, it uses the word nacirema, an apparent nonsense word that is actually american spelled backwards. /. firmly in the Guiness book next year. I was very pleased to be able to demonstrate mathematically that this record was a theoretical maximum and will thus stand forever, although the proof is too long to be contained in this post.
This likely comes from a classic parody scientific article "Body Ritual among the Nacirema" from American Anthropologist 58:3, June 1956, Reprinted in "A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown". Here we have an April Fool that refers to other April Fools.
I have counted 147 such references in this one abstract alone, which is over twice the old world record for an abstract based April Fool and will place
Who is John Cabal?
They use the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_defence chewbacca defence this does not make sense.
Its one damn thing before another. (Dick Bird 1999)
Wow that's a lot -- I can only see a few dozen, and I wrote it. A few are mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but I doubt anyone has caught them all. I'd list them all in the margin here but there's not enough room.
364 days a year I send out a Library Link of the Day, but like CmdrTaco here, on 4/1 I have a bit of fun.
When I looked yesterday the joke appeared to be the rather weak gag that an article titled "information does not exist" gave a blank page or 404. I think that was just server failure.
The gag itself is back up now. And it concludes with:
The full text article is available for purchase
$41.62
It's worth clicking on the "Add to cart" button.