[glangdale]

There are so many stories like this. My favorite (although this one is very good) is that that a bunch of academics got together and pasted together some absolute nonsense (I assume this is from the era before SciGen) and submitted it to a conference.

When it was accepted they revealed the hoax, and the conference admins claimed that it was because these academics were obviously very good, they figured the paper was just a placeholder and would be fixed up in the final version. The only problem was that the academics in question had used fake names on the submission and the affiliation of "The Austrian Naval Academy".

(amusingly, there historically was an Austrian Naval Academy and an Austrian Navy, back during the Austro-Hungarian Empire period - Capt von Trapp of Sound of Music fame is a famous example of one of their officers)

[drfuchs]

For the geographically-challenged: present-day Austria is land-locked, and thus has no call for a navy, let alone a naval academy.

[gyulai]

Nitpick: A navy doesn't necessarily need a harbour directly at the high seas. Austria has had a navy with patrol vessels on the river danube from which they could theoretically reach the high seas until 2006. Also: Military installations on foreign soil are not all that uncommon (as I'm sure Americans can appreciate). I believe that Austria has had vessels in Trieste, even when Trieste was already part of Italy and Austria was already landlocked.

[have_faith]

Why would that prevent them from having a small navy? Assuming some country is happy for them to pay to have a port somewhere. Although they don't it wouldn't surprise me much to learn that they did have one despite being land-locked.

[michaelt]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navies_of_landlocked_countries

Bolivia has been landlocked since 1904, but has a navy with 5,000 personnel (patrolling the country's many large rivers and lakes) and... a naval academy! Which Peru grants access to the sea.

Of course, you'll note Austria isn't on that list.

[squarefoot]

Many moons ago I reconnected with an old friend who moved to Switzerland years before; just imagine my face when he told me he was working for a Swiss shipowner:).

[aasasd]

Well, Switzerland may not have access to a sea, but it has a haven. A tax haven. A lot of ships are owned by corporations in those.

[wool_gather]

> Assuming some country is happy for them to pay to have a port somewhere.

Because a port that you're only borrowing can quickly become a port that either you're trapped in or not welcome to come back to if either you or your host get involved in a military conflict.

[thrower123]

They did, when they were the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and controlled Venezia and the Dalmatian coast.

[BurnGpuBurn]

This reminded me of the guys who got a chapter of "Mein Kampf" accepted as a paper. [0]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20181003015636/https://www.wsj.c...

[eesmith]

As I recall, that wasn't quite the case. It was a highly edited version of Mein Kampf. Quoting https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_hoax :

> Affilia put out a statement in response, noting, "The article does not espouse racism, anti-Semitism, or any other fascist ideology; the parallels to Mein Kampf were limited exclusively to word choice in the descriptive text." ...

> David Banks compared the article's text to that of the Mein Kampf chapter it was supposedly based on and "couldn’t find a single phrase that matched." He also pointed out that the message of the hoax article was quite different from that of Mein Kampf: "This isn’t an article demanding concentration camps for men, it’s just a pedantic argument about neoliberalism."

[dredmorbius]

Perhaps "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", a/k/a the Sokal Affair?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

Others:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing_s...

[tasogare]

There is a very similar story where researchers submitted bullshit papers to social "science" journals (some having gender for topic) in order to prove that they indeed publish crap. Most paper where accepted.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/new-sokal-...