There's a certain beauty in an entire field losing coherency.
I feel like this quote could be about javascript libraries too. For instance http://vanilla-js.com/ has all the right jargon and could be mistaken for a serious project.
That's hilarious. I like the counter showing the size as you add features: "0 bytes uncompressed, 25 bytes gzipped"
https://twitter.com/dorfsmay/status/779682343611011072
PS: Today I learned that Godwin introduced Godwin's law in 1990 as an experiment in memetics!
I would be interested in finding out the proportion of HN threads that end up having 'javascript' mentioned when the original discussion was not remotely related.
Still, I find the Bogdanoff fascinating. I don't think they are imposters. They just have their very own confused way of understanding science. And I have to admit they're quite entertaining and likable. I used to watch them on TV when I was a kid more than 30 years ago. They hosted some kind of sci-fi show.
To be fair, Woit is hardly a neutral commenter on physical matters related to string theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Woit#Criticism_of_string... . Of course, that doesn't make him wrong.
For discussion of this whole issue, I feel more comfortable trusting Baez than Wiki. He seems to reach much the same conclusions: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bogdanov.html . (There's enough similarity in language that I don't know that he wasn't involved in writing the Wiki article, though a casual look at the history (and the fact that I don't know his Wikipedia username …) doesn't show it.)
<rant> I wish employers would take this serious during interviews, every time I say that I know vanilla JavaScript they cringe as if knowing the core features of a language instead of a popular framework was a bad thing. I understand that SPA grew to become a standard among JavaScript developers but it really doesn't provides much innovation so to me learning a framework is like incentivizing the proliferation of these type of projects. JavaScript developers are obsessed with JSON and want to JSONify everything, the only thing that I like about modern frameworks is MVVM but most of the other things are just over-complicated solutions.
There are a lot of semi-coherent proofs for famous conjectures that appear from time to time on the arxiv, with absolutely unknown quality. P ?= NP is a popular topic.