Re: Dragons

"Golden State Poppy" <GoldenStatePoppy@xxxxxxx> wrote in
news:1143908558.099285.276760@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

Happy April Fool's Day to you, too, Earl.



The thing about so many of the well written articles is that
they actually seem real.

You get them in science, economics and politics.

and of course there is the classic scientific article

"The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline"

Thiotimoline is a fictitious chemical compound conceived by
science fiction author Isaac Asimov and described in a spoof
scientific paper entitled "The Endochronic Properties of
Resublimated Thiotimoline" in 1948.

In Asimov's writing, thiotimoline is notable for the fact that
when it is dropped in water, the chemical dissolves before it
hits the water. In the "thiotimoline" molecule, there is at
least one carbon atom such that, while two of the carbon's four
chemical bonds lie in normal space and time, but one projects
into the future and one into the past.

The story of the genesis of this spoof was one of Asimov's
favourite personal anecdotes and he retold it a number of times
in print. At the time, Asimov was engaged in doctoral research
in chemistry and, as part of his experimental procedure, he
needed to dissolve catechol in water. As he observed the
crystals dissolve as soon as they hit the water's surface, it
occurred to him that if catechol were any more soluble, then it
would dissolve before it encountered the water.

By that time Asimov had been writing professionally for nine
years and was shortly to face the challenge of writing up his
research as a doctoral dissertation. He feared that the
experience of writing readable prose for publication might have
impaired his ability to write the prose typical of academic
discourse, and decided to practice with a spoof article
(including fake citations) describing experiments on a compound,
thiotimoline, that was so soluble that it dissolved in water up
to 1.3 seconds before the water was added.


.

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