{"id":13112,"date":"2025-01-21T03:03:39","date_gmt":"2025-01-21T08:03:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=13112"},"modified":"2025-01-21T03:03:39","modified_gmt":"2025-01-21T08:03:39","slug":"pumping-elephant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=13112","title":{"rendered":"Pumping elephant"},"content":{"rendered":"

I cannot stop laughing.<\/p>\n

Earlier today, I came across one of the weirdest papers yet that I’ve ever come across in the scientific literature.<\/p>\n

I admit that my first thought was that it was a joke paper in a predatory journal. But no. It was a serious publication, in a serious journal, published under the Springer Nature label, no less.<\/p>\n

And like all proper scientific publications, it had a title, an abstract, and… No, wait. It did not have an abstract. What it had instead was…<\/p>\n

A pumping elephant.<\/p>\n

Seriously. A pumping elephant.<\/p>\n

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But if it was not a joke paper, then what was it? Having noticed that the paper’s authors were all Chinese, it occurred to me that perhaps it’s a mistranslation. The AI Claude quickly confirmed my suspicion. Apparently, the authors mistranslated “Abstract” as “\u62bd\u8c61” (ch\u014duxi\u00e0ng) in Chinese, which does mean “abstract” but in the sense of “abstract concept” rather than “summary of a paper”. They then literally translated \u62bd (ch\u014du), which can mean “to pump” and \u8c61 (xi\u00e0ng), which can mean “elephant”.<\/p>\n

So perhaps it was an embarrassing but ultimately innocent mistake by the paper’s authors.<\/p>\n

The same cannot be said about the journal’s editorial staff. That such a glaring piece of nonsense made it to the pages of a reputable journal signals a complete\u00a0lack of copy-editing and editorial supervision.<\/p>\n

To their credit, the paper was ultimately retracted. And it only took about three and a half years…<\/p>\n

I asked Midjourney to create for me a pumping elephant. Clearly inspired by Verne’s famous novel, The Steam House<\/a>, Midjourney produced some wonderful steampunk pumping elephants. This is my favorite so far.<\/p>\n

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Incidentally, there are also YouTube videos of bona fide pumping elephants: Elephants that learned to use a water pump.<\/p>\n