Friday, November 19, 2004

Just in Time for Friday Afternoon

The latest intellectual game from the Volokh Conspiracy:



My colleague Gary Blasi helpfully pointed me to scholar.google.com, which lets you search through "scholarly" sites. Looks potentially useful, though it's hard to tell how good (i.e., suitably broad yet suitably narrow) the search function is.



Special bonus for the sophomorically inclined (this is my idea, not Gary's): The search engine lets you engage in the always amusing prospect of searching scholarly databases for vulgar sexual terms and seeing the latest wisdom from the academy on the subject. (Avoid the Latinate terms, since scholarship that uses the Latinate form tends to be less interesting, though more useful.)



Just for a sample gem, one of my queries yielded, as the quote for the #1 result, "One could make an antinomian claim to validity on behalf of, say, a [you guess the sexual act] in a tearoom." Antinomian claims to validity; wow! I wonder if any acts my friends or I have ever engaged in, in tearooms or outside them, would have antinomian claims to validity. I doubt it — I just don't think we're that well-educated. Avoid the obvious query, incidentally, because poor Reinhardt Adolfo F... (apparently a fairly well-cited scholar) makes it less interesting than it otherwise might be.




He's not joking about that last part, kids. A simple search for the term leads to numerous listings of articles such as 'Ultra-high-temperature metamorphism in Central Brazil: the Barro Alto complex' all attributed to "R.A. F*ck"

It's like a really bad Bart Simpson phone prank.

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