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Comment by bokchoi | Hacker News Reader

"An Inquiry into the Probable Parallax, and Magnitude of the Fixed Stars, from the Quantity of Light Which They Afford us, and the Particular Circumstances of Their Situation."

Paper titles were pretty awesome back in the day.

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I studied extensively historical scientific original documents for several years and I tend to find my self writing very much in that style when I do anything that requires significant exposition.

Even if it's something boring like remediation of a building structural issue.

Not to menion lacking any pretention. It states the subject precisely. An honest straightforwardness with nothing to hide.

A massive proportion of all titles were this way. Take a look at fictional novels or political pamphlets some time. They're just three sentence long summaries and they're all delightful.

"Tribological behavior and wear mechanism of Ti/MoS2 films deposited on plasma nitrided CF170 steel sliding against different mating materials"

"Which Milky Way masses are consistent with the slightly declining 5-25 kpc rotation curve?"

"Characterization of systematic error in Advanced LIGO calibration in the second half of O3"

Randomly found on arXiv and ADS. I'm not seeing a lot of pretention, dishonesty or imprecision.

Drift into machine learning and you'll soon find content-free meme titles like "Building Rome in a day" or "YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger".

Snowclones are all you need!

Heh, in Spanish, someone Spaniard did an astrophysics paper called "no LIGO, MACHO", which can be literally translated to I don't get LAID, DUDE.

https://francis.naukas.com/2017/12/07/42781/

Ok, the peer reviewers didn't allow him to set that title on the paper, anyway.

It is easy to when there are fewer academics around. Higher education was a privilege, tenureship was not yet much of a thing.

I think the exact opposite, its unnecessarily embellished and ornate. Makes the whole thing sound so whimsical as to not be worth reading. I don't need a fairytale title to be interested in the content.

"Who Turned Out the Lights?: Probable Parallax and the Magnitude of the Fixed Stars"

This is the typical title a computer scientist would create.

I'm going to title my next hack as Lightsout! See lightsout.com.

Gravity Considered Harmful

I don't think paper titles are usually pretentious, they're just dense with jargon to be terse. They're impenetrable if you don't know the jargon, but I don't agree that makes it pretentious. I don't think it's possible for a journal paper in an established field to be simultaneously precise, accessible, and unprecedented enough to be worth publishing.

Try read Robinson Crusoe. The chapters titles are like "A ship comes to the rescue - X, Y and Z also happens".

E.g.

"Chapter XXVI Robinson Discovers Himself to the English Captain--Assists Him in Reducing His Mutinous Crew, Who Submit to Him"

LMAO spoilers in the chapter title.

This was a standard convention in 17th/18th century novels -- it's not just Defoe. A lot of authors played with this convention by describing chapters in a technically accurate but misleading fashion.

What do you think about "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies"?

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