The cat that sired a paper

I swear this is exactly how papers get published in IEEE! If you can't convince 'em, confuse 'em! [via JD]

That's no funnier than the true story of the cat that co-authored a paper in the prestigious Physical Review Letters:

“I had prepared the paper, now called Hetherington and Willard, and was rather proud of the work, considering it suitable for rapid publication in Phys. Rev. Lett. Before I submitted it I asked a colleague to read it over and he said “It’s a fine paper but they will send it right back”. He explained that this is because of the Editor’s rule that the word “we” should not be used in a paper with only a single author. Changing the paper to the impersonal seemed to difficult now that it was all written and typed; therefore, after an evening’s thought I simply asked the secretary to change the title page to include the name of the family cat, a Siamese called Chester, sired one summer by Willard (one of the few unfixed male Siamese cats in Aspen, Colorado). I added the initials F D in front of the name to stand for Felix Domesticus and thus created F D C Willard” (Weber, Robert. Droll Science, p.110).

That should teach me not to gloat when my paper finally makes it through the painful peer-review process at PRL. Even cats have done it!

Tags: humor, research