Scientists confess to sneaking Bob Dylan lyrics into their work for the past 17 years

[n2doc]

By Rachel Feltman

While writing an article about intestinal gasses 17 years ago, Karolinska Institute researchers John Lundberg and Eddie Weitzberg couldn't resist a punny title: "Nitric Oxide and inflammation: The answer is blowing in the wind".

Thus began their descent down the slippery slope of Bob Dylan call-outs. While the two men never put lyrics into their peer-reviewed studies, The Local Sweden reports, they started a personal tradition of getting as many Dylan quotes as possible into everything else they wrote -- articles about other peoples' work, editorials, book introductions, and so on.

Soon, the pun ring doubled in size. After another two researchers (also at Karolinska, where Dylan is apparently a big thing) published an article called "Blood on the tracks: a simple twist of fate," a librarian connected the foursome. A fifth scientist joined the group when his article "Tangled up in blue: Molecular cardiology in the postmolecular era" hit the stands.

Now, the researchers say, they have a running bet: Whoever can sneak in the most references before retirement will get treated to lunch.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2014/09/26/scientists-confess-to-sneaking-bob-dylan-lyrics-into-their-work-for-the-past-17-years/

[AlbertCat]

1. Scientists confess to sneaking Bob Dylan lyrics into their work for the past 17 years

I would have preferred Richard Wilbur lyrics.

[Warpy]

2. I would sneak Douglas Adams into my papers

To each his own, I guess.

I'm just grateful no one out there seems to be sneaking Rod McKuen into scholarly work, at least not in the hard sciences.

Maybe old Rod is making an appearance in social sciences.

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. There's an economics paper here to be written on Adams' Shoe Event Horizon:

"It's Shoe Love, Pumping Up Sales
Spending Looking Up as Women Look Down"
Nov 19, 2005: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x5409917

I posted, pointing out the similarity of "women love footwear, and they use it for a psychological boost" to the Shoe Event Horizon, which ends in "famine, collapse, and ruin". And, a couple of years later, we found out we had been in a bubble, after all.

[Left coast liberal]

3. Love this! who says scientists don't have a sense of humor! LOL!

[dickthegrouch]

4. It's not Dylan, but

There's a lot of "double-entendres" in the Unix (TM) source code, functions, and commands, too.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

6. Not to mention the puns and denials of reality in the programs....

A good example is the Microsoft Windows emulator called WINE which stands for: Wine Is Not an Emulator when it IS.

[tazkcmo]

5. Hilarious!

The best things in life are free. Good for them!

[RufusTFirefly]

7. I once managed to sneak two 1957 movie titles onto the front cover of a national magazine

(The magazine had nothing to do with movies.)

And I added my girlfriend's name as an acrostic in the lede of a newspaper article I wrote.

I'll stop here for fear of blowing my cover (!!), but I'm certain that I wasn't the only person in publishing who did this. The key is to add it so it still makes sense even if you don't pick up the hidden message.

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

9. In the 1980s, I was writing a manual for a computer text editor

When revising an existing file, up to a certain point, the user easily could go back to the unrevised file. After he or she had saved the changes, one could not (well, actually, they could, but it was considerably more work.) I quoted Fitzgerald's translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

My boss read what I had written, circled it in red ink and wrote a large red NO POETRY next to it.

I revised it to "the old text will softly and suddenly vanish away, and never be met with again". My boss did not object, apparently being unfamiliar with the closing line of Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark.