My current ideological stance is that all knowledge is the Great Perhaps, as Francois Rabelais called it (actually his stance was laying, on his deathbed, before he departed to study the Great Perhaps in its finest detail). Fascinating, isn't it

But this topic is something else... all the scam from ex-top-scientific journals (Nature, Science, etc.) goes here. Let them perish in the flames of our critical reviews! Let's square the referee circles!

The last week they threw the desert sand in our eyes:
Human origins in a southern African palaeo-wetland and first migrations
or in a more accessible form regurgitated by journalists who read only the first few paragraphs:
Where was Eden? Perhaps in a sun-baked salt plain in Botswana

This research is the fallout of the story of a woman accused of being the most prolific serial killer (misandrist and infanticide at once) in the history of human kind. "Mitochondrial Eve", the alleged mother of all living people, who - in order to achieve this status - had to kill all her sons and pass to all her female descendants the same murderous instincts. In this way she multiplied her chances of being the big fakamata from (47+71*n)/2^n, where n is the number of generations from now back to 200,000 years ago (ca 8000?) and 47 and 71 are magic numbers from The Great Egg Cookbook by Momma Nature, to 1.
Now the researchers identified the location of her hole in the ground, "Eden"*.

[*]with (47+71*n)/2^n probability.

I apologise for this very bad stream of consciousness. I had to release it.

Reminded me of the George Colbert's Nomadic Museum I've been trying to track down for years.
His "Ashes and Snow" exhibition about human and animal bonding.








I think these are Khoisan people.

Eden is for the mortals. Africa is the cradle of timeless souls.

I think I've found the culprit: Novelist Cormac McCarthy’s tips on how to write a great science paper

For the past two decades, Cormac McCarthy — whose ten novels include The Road, No Country for Old Men and Blood Meridian — has provided extensive editing to numerous faculty members and postdocs at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) in New Mexico. He has helped to edit works by scientists such as Harvard University’s first tenured female theoretical physicist, Lisa Randall, and physicist Geoffrey West, who authored the popular-science book Scale.

Here's a piece of his advice:

Inject questions and less-formal language to break up tone and maintain a friendly feeling. Colloquial expressions can be good for this, but they shouldn’t be too narrowly tied to a region. Similarly, use a personal tone because it can help to engage a reader. Impersonal, passive text doesn’t fool anyone into thinking you’re being objective: “Earth is the centre of this Solar System” isn’t any more objective or factual than “We are at the centre of our Solar System.”

“Earth is the centre of this Solar System” is a false scientific statement.
“We are at the centre of our Solar System.” is a sentence which can mean different things depending on the context and is may be true when talking about NASA probes sent to the Sun.
He clearly doesn't understand scientific writing, with its universal standards and required precision and economy.

And why doesn't he practise what he preaches?

At least he spells "centre" correctly.

Avoid placing equations in the middle of sentences. Mathematics is not the same as English, and we shouldn’t pretend it is. To separate equations from text, you can use line breaks, white space, supplementary sections, intuitive notation and clear explanations of how to translate from assumptions to equations and back to results.

aka layout

Inject questions and less-formal language to break up tone and maintain a friendly feeling. Colloquial expressions can be good for this, but they shouldn’t be too narrowly tied to a region. Similarly, use a personal tone because it can help to engage a reader. Impersonal, passive text doesn’t fool anyone into thinking you’re being objective: “Earth is the centre of this Solar System” isn’t any more objective or factual than “We are at the centre of our Solar System.”

A bit ragged at the edges?

A Physicist Has Calculated That Life Really Could Exist in a 2D Universe

... a so-called Griffiths phase[31], a ‘stretching’ of the critical point into a region (see [32] and references therein).

Following Mr McCormac's advice I tried to stretch my imagination to understand the scientific metaphor about stretching a (critical) point.

I know what's a Griffiths phase - the name sounds oriental, but the phenomenon is common in nature. In particular, they appear in disordered systems, where the disorder is not due to something or someone making a mess, but is their natural feature - it's quenched (there can be temporal Gp, whose physics is pretty much the same if you don't mind swapping the spatial and temporal dimension, but let's not complicate it). A common example is spin glass - a lattice of spins permanently pointing in specific - but random - directions. Imagine a very simple spin glass, the spins interact by two different mechanisms, e.g. one favours their parallel alignment, and the other favours anti-parallel alignment. Consequently the spins look a bit "frustrated". Let's assume that the first interaction is weaker than the second. When you increase the temperature, the first (weaker) interaction gives in to the thermal fluctuations at temperature T1 - that's one critical point/phase transition. You continue to increase the temperature until the second mechanism is overcome at T2 (that's another critical point/transition). The region between T1 and T2, i.e. between two critical transitions, is the Griffiths phase. In short, Griffiths phase is  simply a phase between two (or more) critical transitions. Describing it as stretching a critical point is a serious overstretch if you ask me.

BTW, I scanned this paper and I think that the maths is true, but only at absolute zero temperature. A funny thing about the mathematical model of 2D systems is that already at infinitesimally higher temperatures their physics dramatically changes. (They now cheated a bit by engineering extra forces which make this higher-temperature regime imitate the - desired for various reasons, vide graphene - behaviour at 0K, but, as they say, even if you teach a dog meow and it's still just a dog.)

American police isn't racist, what?
Subtitle: how much harm can be done by idiots using statistics (not that you don't know it in finance)

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use a higher-degree polynomial?