Surt's Journal: sig

Recently I got asked for an explanation of my sig.

For anyone who doesn't recognize who Steven Hawking is, he is a fairly famous physicist. Pretty much as famous as you can get as a physicist without being Albert Einstein. He has written a number of bestselling books about physics. And he has accomplished all that he has while confined to a wheel chair, speaking with the aid of a computer voice synthesizer.

His quote refers to a situation in which he stole a physics idea from an associate. When the associate complained that in all fairness the idea was his, Steven Hawking replied with the quote from my sig:

"Who is The Journal Of Quantum Physics going to believe?"

Of course, the quote is taken grossly out of context, and is in fact from an animated humor television program called Futurama. However, Steven Hawking did in fact portray (a perhaps more evil version of) himself, and did in fact actually speak those words, so the quote is factually accurate on its face. And who knows, maybe Steven Hawking actually does steal (as most Ph.Ds do) ideas from associates and claim them as his own.

I like the quote because it emphasizes one of my favorite pet peeves: an (in my opinion) excessive trust in our society of authority. I think the quote is particularly relevant to slashdot, where seemingly 87% of all the postings are from people claiming to have knowledge and authority on a subject that they do not actually have. Worse, responsive postings seem to suggest that many people are taking this 'information' as a factual resource. To help combat this problem, I deliberately include gross misinformation in about 1 in 5 of my posts.

Anyway, that's the explanation of my sig.

A small update to this: after a recent flamewar over a post that was actually just intended to be factual, I realized it might help to clarify that I only post misinformation that can be easily falsified by google search, and pretty much exclusively on political topics (in other words, not in games.slashdot.org).