It’s a Christmas miracle! Dearly departed Springfield schoolmarm Edna Krabappel has returned, and she’s writing scientific studies with her colleagues Margaret “Maggie” Simpson and Kim Jong Fun.
The trio’s latest study, about a “new methodology for forward-error correction,” has been accepted for publication into two real-world scientific journals.
Unfortunately, it’s all a cruel hoax, as Vox explains:
Of course, none of these fictional characters actually wrote the paper, titled “Fuzzy, Homogeneous Configurations.” Rather, it’s a nonsensical text, submitted by engineer Alex Smolyanitsky in an effort to expose a pair of scientific journals — the Journal of Computational Intelligence and Electronic Systems and the comic sans-loving Aperito Journal of NanoScience Technology.
Yes, Smolyanitsky’s intentions were good, but did he really have to drag a beloved dead woman into his twisted scheme and give us false hope that she might still be out there, somewhere???
While this incident certainly doesn’t bode well for Krabappel’s future in academia, we can only hope she continues to send more cryptic messages from the great unknown.
[Vox via The Washington Post]