you know law journals may have ruined your mind forever if…

Posted on by Luis Villa

A paper you’re editing has a not-very-useful citation for ‘the internet is faster than snail mail’. Do you:

(1) say ‘really? we need to have a citation for that at all?’ and delete the cite, because, really, ‘the internet is faster than snail mail’ needs citation only slightly more than ‘humans breath air’.

(2) spend hours (well, maybe 30 minutes) trying to find a better cite.

(3) spend hours (well, maybe 30 minutes) trying to find a better cite- while option #1 never even crosses your mind.

If you answer ‘2’, you May Be A Journal Editor. If you answer ‘3’, you are definitely a journal editor. Damn this has messed with my mind..

Published by Luis Villa

6 thoughts on “you know law journals may have ruined your mind forever if…”

  1. Actually, snail mail, for large amounts of data, over large distances, is still faster.

    Imagine if you will, sending about 48 terabyte hard drives via “snail mail” (fedex next day?) and you’ll get an effective transfer rate of 24 TB/day. or 50.9Gbps. (if my math is correct)..? anyway, the point is you can send very large amounts of data over snail mail which you cannot with the internet :)

    I don’t think there is anything on the internet to which we have access that is faster.. Not withstanding research of course :)

  2. Haha. True. Of course, the data in question in the paper are contracts, which are not (yet) of sneaker-net size ;)

  3. I would of course answer #4: find a better citation, and formulate a good reason to add a second citation to a paper (any paper) from your own research group and mention how, incidentally, this group’s neuromodelling work should also be highly applicable to legal document-transfer efficiency analysis.

    Which of course means you’ve been a post-doc for too long, and really should be opening your own ramen-stand instead.

  4. Luis,

    Hint: if the cite was really important it would be surrounded by an anchor tag.

    –Rob

  5. Luis, I think you definitely need a better cite. You don’t need a journal editor’s brain to realize, just the brain of a corrupt Alaskan senator. “If you don’t understand, these tubes can be filled with massive amounts of information…. My staff sent me an Internet last Tuesday, I just got it yesterday!” If they’d just used SNAIL…..

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