Seriously, who is the intended audience of this headline? People who only read the headline and think "Woweee science is amazing!" before scrolling down? Anybody who reads the article will roll their eyes at the headline, and the publisher isn't even getting ad revenue from this shit. Why are they pandering to the most base idiots like this?
That's a bigger fraction of the population than we might like to think...and probably the majority of the eventual readers of that headline (as it trickles through to other publications). I'd bet your sarcasm is actually correct there.
When I worked at a research lab, the communications folks would often ask me, can we call it AI? They were almost begging to put that label on it, I suppose they new that would be high quality bait. But no, sorry it's just statistics and computational methods.
It is currently (4:50 PM EST) "GRAVITATIONAL WAVE RESEARCHERS CAST NEW LIGHT ON ANTIKYTHERA MECHANISM MYSTERY" both in the article, and on the HN item.
If it didn't change, I guess my confusions stems from this is an extremely straightforward way to state it.
Two gravitational wave researchers wrote the paper, and the paper gave us more certainty about whether the Antikythera mechanism represents 354 or 365 days.
I can't envision how to make it less sensationalist.
Poking around this:
I have a test for myself before I rant about science journalism: "would it be confusing without the thing my rant is angry about?"
Answer here is yes, I'm very familiar with this sort of thing from the astrophysics people in my physics department 18 years ago (monte carlo, bayesian), but it would be bizarre from archaeologists.
Poking around this, again:
If that isn't convincing: the unwashed masses who we are worried being betrayed by clickbait don't know what "gravitational waves" are, there's no reason for them to be unduly attracted to it.
It's not technically lying but it will nonetheless induce people to think something which isn't true. If this confuses you, consider this article/example:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171114-the-disturbing-a...
> "A classic example might be if your mum asks if you've finished your homework and you respond: "I've written an essay on Tennessee Williams for my English class." This may be true, but it doesn't actually answer the question about whether your homework was done. That essay could have been written long ago and you have misled your poor mother with a truthful statement. You might not have even started your homework yet."
When you say something which is true but say it in a way or context which you know will cause somebody else to believe something which isn't true, that's a form of lying.
You believe that it is narrowly true gravitational wave researchers did this, like a kid saying they "wrote their essay" in response to whether they "did [completed] their homework"
I believe it is wholly true.
I believe we agree on the narrow truth that they are gravitational wave researchers.
I believe we disagree on the wider truth.
I believe you believe its a wider lie, in that it indicates they used gravitational wave-style techniques in this endeavor.
I believe it is widely true, because they're using the specific techniques that I saw astrophysicists use in grad school.
Is it possible you saw "Bayesian", assumed that was the extent of their expertise applied, then noted that it has no relation to their expertise, since that's entry-level stats, not physics?
From The ELements of Style, Strunk and White, omit needless words. Dropping "Gravitational waves" from the title conveys the same information.
The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White: Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
It doesn't really matter. The work is not exceptional, it doesn't shed new light on anything, and really only got the coverage it did due to clever use of key words and hype by the press release authors. In other words, like 90% of popular science.
I believe the author of the title deliberately crafted a title that would be misconstrued by his target audience into believing something false, even though it was technically true.
I believe this isn't lying, but I also believe it's not meaningfully distinct from lying.
"Techniques developed to analyse the ripples in spacetime detected by one of the 21st century’s most sensitive pieces of scientific equipment have helped cast new light on the function of the oldest known analogue computer."
it elaborates further down: "Professor Woan used a technique called Bayesian analysis, which uses probability to quantify uncertainty based on incomplete data, to calculate the likely number of holes in the mechanism using the positions of the surviving holes and the placement of the ring’s surviving six fragments."
Bayesian analysis has nothing to do with gravitational waves, it's a statistics paradigm. It was not "developed to analyse the ripples in spacetime". The whole gravitational angle is totally superfluous and is only there to get more clicks.
They are physicists who are in practice data scientists. They are both male, presumably have experienced no amputations, and look like they were born in the 20th century. Their “day job” is in gravitation. They both likely speak English.
The only part of which which has even the slightest bearing on their work is that they are of late de facto data scientists, among their (presumable) other skills.
Unfortunately, this is the state of media today. It would be very helpful if the admins of HN could implement a way that users with enough karma could identify and vote to delete articles that have disingenuous headlines. Yes, we can flag articles, but maybe if we could choose WHY we're flagging to make others aware of what the problem is. If we don't protect the integrity of this site as an elevated place to have intellectual discourse, we will eventually lose it to the tidal wave of garbage content that seems to be getting worse by the day.
The headline seems fine to me. You might mean the synopsis after it?
In USA biology, there is a similar problem- it's known as the "Make Senators Believe Your Funding Will Cure Their Disease Problem" whereby even the simplest basic discoveries get pumped up to sound like they've cured cancer to induce future funding.
Seriously, who is the intended audience of this headline?
University science-by-press-release drives me crazy, too. My guess has been that the intended audience is alums that might be enticed to donate more.
That doesn't seem as likely to grab the attention of people who watched Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
The antikythera mechanism is a (bad) predictor of planetary locations. People have recreated it in its entirety using legos. There isn't much mystery about what it does.
However, a new high resolution X-ray of the device inspired some scientists to do some neat math on it. I read the paper, it's good work. I'd love to a chance to get an article published about one of my papers, even more if regular people had even the slightest chance to understand it.
Besides that, things like the number of holes in the calendar ring matter.
Check out Clickspring on youtube, he's one of the people who narrowed the hole count down to 2 numbers, and this paper argues hard for one of those.
He's building a replica of the mechanism using period tools, and it's amazingly precise so far.