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Dave Bacon is a theoretical ski bum who is also a pseudo 
Many of you know I'm a big fan of funny/creative paper titles. What with journal editors squashing every last ounce of humanity our of scientific papers, it always makes me happy to see someone else fighting the editorial machine. Today a friend sends me "Heavy Ion Collisions at the LHC - Last Call for Predictions," by S. Abreu et al arXiv:0711.0974 (scirate here.) which cracks me up.
I'm not sure why it cracks me up, but probably because it makes me think of an overloaded boat leaving the dock with a bunch of crazy haired theoretical physicists flinging themselves at the boat at the last moment. Supersymmetric dudes holding onto the rails, string theorists examining the knots the sailors made, and phenomenologists of all kinds kicking back with a beer and a stack of the backs of envelopes. Yeah, I guess "best title ever," is definitely in the eye of the beholder.
If anyone spots good new titles out in the wild, I'd love if you sent them my direction. I've just made a full category just for "best title ever"s (you have to say that phrase just like the Simpson's comic book guy.)
Physical Science
Comments
We should start taking bets on achievable fidelities for the various QC architectures over the coming year.
Posted by: mick | November 8, 2007 7:58 PM
Last call? No way! They haven't even turned the machine on yet!
Posted by: Kea | November 8, 2007 8:19 PM
How about Redfield, R. J., 1988. Evolution of bacterial transformation: is sex with dead cells ever better than no sex at all? Genetics 119: 213-221 The contents of the paper were very dry, but the title was juicy.
Posted by: Rosie Redfield | November 8, 2007 8:22 PM
Ha, nice Rosie!
Posted by: Dave Bacon | November 9, 2007 12:10 PM
May I submit:
Julian Besag, "On the Statistical Analysis of Dirty Pictures", Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B (Methodological) 48 (1986): 259-302 [JSTOR].
I think you really need to combine the paper's title with the full journal title for the proper effect.
Posted by: Cosma | November 10, 2007 8:49 PM