In a victory for pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a bunch of computer-generated gibberish masquerading as an academic paper has been accepted at a scientific conference.

Jeremy Stribling said Thursday that he and two fellow MIT graduate students questioned the standards of some academic conferences, so they wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with “context-free grammar,” charts and diagrams.

The trio submitted two of the randomly assembled papers to the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida.

To their surprise, one of the papers — “Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy” — was accepted for presentation.

Want to try? Make your own here.

Although I stopped believing in what you represent a long time ago, you were a good and honest human being.

R.I.P. John Paul II.

Wingdings are those funny looking fonts in Microsoft Word, the ones with symbols and pictures instead of letters. Each symbol corresponds to a different letter.

In the early 90s there was a big stink because some people claimed that there were anti-semitic messages coded into wingdings. The cause of these allegations was the fact that if you typed the letters NYC using wingdings, this is what you got:

A skull and crossbones, a star of David, and a thumbs up symbol. It seemed obvious to some that Microsoft programmers had deliberately designed this into the font as a way of urging people to kill New York City Jews. Microsoft, of course, completely denied these allegations.

This whole controversy came roaring back with a vengeance after 9/11 when an email began to circulate claiming that wingdings had predicted or forewarned of the attack on the World Trade Center. Type Q33NY (supposedly the flight number of one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center) into wingdings and you get this:

A plane flying towards two building towers followed by a skull and crossbones and the star of David. Definitely creepy!

Except that Q33NY wasn’t the flight number of one of the hijacked planes. Their flight numbers were 11 and 175. Q33NY, in fact, doesn’t correspond to anything. It’s completely meaningless. It’s simply what you have to type to get a plane and two buildings to appear in wingdings.

Because of all the fuss about secret messages appearing in wingdings, when Microsoft designed the successor to wingdings in the late 90s, Webdings, they deliberately ensured that a happy message would appear when the letters NYC were typed. Try it out yourself if you have a copy of Word. This is what you get:

Obviously it sometimes pays off to moan a bit..

Here’s the temperature as displayed on my car’s onboard computer this afternoon:

Yeah!! Thanks winter: it was nice knowing you; now bugger off, willya?

Thank God for that!!

IBM Germany?

Yoush heardsh schthe man, eh??

Just in case.. You know, Alzheimers and all that….