[HN Gopher] The term "vegetative electron microscopy" keeps show...
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The term "vegetative electron microscopy" keeps showing up in
scientific papers
Author : SCEtoAux
Score : 105 points
Date : 2025-05-01 15:06 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sciencealert.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencealert.com)
| rendall wrote:
| _Vegetative Electron Microscopy_ is now the name of my new
| Psychedelic Darkwave Doom Metal project.
| rjsw wrote:
| To be known as "The Vegs" for short.
| boothby wrote:
| The only thing left to do is pipe the output of a coma patient in
| an fMRI into the controls of an electron microscope.
|
| https://www.wired.com/2009/09/fmrisalmon/
| saltcured wrote:
| Shouldn't they start with dead salmon?
| mattlondon wrote:
| Fascinating that in Farsi "scanning" and "vegetative" differ only
| by a single dot in the word!
|
| Kinda blows my mind, but then I am only really familiar with
| English and basic knowledge of a few other European languages.
|
| Anyone here got any more details on this? To me it seems like its
| as minor as just like missing a dot on an I but totally changes
| the meaning?
| sindriava wrote:
| Think about the difference between "tart" and "fart".
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| fuck luck
|
| cant cunt
| Mistletoe wrote:
| If you are James Joyce, you are interested in both.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| This is a good example - you just flipped the t upside down.
| albrewer wrote:
| I was thinking more like "Ear" and "Car" or "till" and "tilt"
| chimpanzee wrote:
| The presence of the single dot determines how to read the
| grapheme, ie which specific letter of the alphabet it is.
|
| A missing dot over the "i" in the Latin alphabet is
| unambiguously a mistake (depending on the font or script
| style). But if you missed the horizontal crossbar within the
| letter "t", you would read it as an "l". For example, confusing
| "mate" as "male".
| Rygian wrote:
| A missing dot over the "i" in the Latin alphabet is not a
| mistake in Turkish. It's a different letter.
|
| https://haacked.com/archive/2012/07/05/turkish-i-problem-
| and...
| stevenbedrick wrote:
| Ages and ages ago a group of colleagues of mine did a study of
| faxing Arabic-language prescriptions- the low resolution of the
| fax machine, as well as the textured appearance of the forgery-
| resistant paper that prescriptions had to be printed on, meant
| that diacritic marks got smudged in ways that were leading to
| clinically-meaningful confusion on the part of the reader.
| Here's their paper about it:
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22178294/
| moses-palmer wrote:
| I don't speak Farsi, but some Arabic, and the Farsi alphabet is
| related.
|
| The letters are completely different in pronunciation: with one
| dot, it's like the English letter B, and with two it's either
| like Y or the pronunciation of double E.
| kirubakaran wrote:
| "Let's eat, grandma"
|
| vs
|
| "Let's eat grandma"
| peaseagee wrote:
| Great band!
| penguin_booze wrote:
| "The panda, eats, shoots, and leaves"
|
| vs.
|
| "The panda eats shoots and leaves"
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| Or the more vulgar
|
| "I helped my uncle, Jack, off a horse"
|
| vs
|
| "I helped my uncle jack off a horse"
| jerf wrote:
| There are, unsurprisingly, many examples of the same thing
| happening in English in the siblings of my post here.
|
| This is a characteristic of grammatical systems. This contrasts
| non-grammar-based communication systems, such as the ones used
| by many animals, where a sound may indicate "a threat is near",
| and the intensity, duration, or repetition of the sound may
| encode the proximity/relevance of the threat. This is obviously
| a very sensible way to operate, especially for neural-net based
| intelligences, so much so that this still lives inside our
| language usage as well. Think of the progression of calling
| someone's name as you try harder to get their attention; same
| sounds, just louder and longer as you step up the intensity.
|
| However it has problems with the fact that there are only so
| many sounds that can be modulated like that and still be
| distinct. Each individual sound consumes not just its "base"
| representation, but all the possible modulations.
|
| Grammar-based systems pack a lot more meaning into a much
| tighter encoding, but basically by the pigeon-hole principle,
| you can't help but end up with radically different meanings
| next to each other. We still only have so many sounds we can
| make. In fact such systems kind of want that outcome; per
| sindriava's example, it is generally _good_ that "fart" and
| "tart" are fairly close to each other. They will not generally
| be truly confused for each other, so packing them close
| together is cheap. Similarly for packing "scanning" and
| "vegetative" together; no native Farsi speaker would do much
| more than momentarily blink at such a change, and maybe get a
| chuckle out of it. Things like "can" versus "can't" cause us
| much more real-life problems, where they are diametrically
| opposed to each other but distinguished only by a couple
| hundred milliseconds of sound between them, and by their
| grammatical nature, are almost always legal sentences when
| interchanged. (Maybe it's "always" but you learn to be careful
| about claiming "always" about any language issue. If anyone can
| come up with one have fun, though bear in mind you need to be
| using the correct meanings; "tin can" versus "tin can't" is
| something else entirely, that "can" is a different word for the
| purposes of this conversation.)
|
| One of the general lessons that I think comes up in learning
| other languages is that there aren't _that_ many features that
| are truly _unique_ to a given language. Ratios vary. Sometimes
| one language will make heavy use of a feature, like Chinese and
| tonality, and another will make very, very weak usage of it...
| but there are English words that are spelled the same and when
| spoken, are distinguished by tone. By no means is English a
| "tonal language", tone in English is _mostly_ reserved for
| emoting, but it 's not _quite_ absent. 50 years ago I 'd have
| said ideographs were certainly isolated to certain East Asian
| languages but now English has some rudimentary ideographs in
| it, perhaps most notably the eggplant and peach emoji which
| have widely (albeit not universally) understood meanings now
| largely severed from their original graphical representations
| in a very similar manner to ideograms. Much of the time
| whatever "weird" things you see in a language that it uses
| widely are still present in your own, just used much, much
| less.
| floxy wrote:
| >As of today, "vegetative electron microscopy" appears in 22
| papers, according to Google Scholar.
|
| Is there any reason that journals shouldn't retract those 22
| papers? I suppose those are probably pretty suspect journals in
| the first place.
| jszymborski wrote:
| So i just chose two at random now and they don't appear to be
| predatory journals, just journals with Impact Factors lower
| than 1.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Imagine to retract automaticaly all papers that confuse "then"
| and "than".
|
| My English pronunciation is so bad that I'd never confuse them,
| but I see that mistake quite often.
| floxy wrote:
| This isn't a mistake though, right? These papers were
| authored by a chat bot, so why would anyone assume that any
| of the conclusions are legitimate?
| zahlman wrote:
| Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43022628
| perihelions wrote:
| Some related past threads,
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43759130 ( _" A weird phrase
| is plaguing scientific papers (theconversation.com)"_ -- 38
| comments)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35423290 ( _" Chemist Rafael
| Luque suspended without pay for thirteen years (elpais.com)"_ --
| 120 comments)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42759862 ( _" Tomatoes
| roaming the fields and canaries in the coalmine
| (deevybee.blogspot.com)"_ -- 33 comments)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28107614 ( _" Tortured
| phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
| (nature.com)_" -- 259 comments)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28137980 ( _" A dubious
| writing style emerging in science (arxiv.org)"_ -- 40 comments)
| nancyminusone wrote:
| Given how often I've heard this story over the last few months,
| I'd half expect the total number of papers to increase with
| research about this topic itself.
| recursive wrote:
| This was seemingly unintentional, but I bet there are "trap
| streets" already in the models that use this principle.
| gamescr wrote:
| Vibe microscopy is here
| Matthyze wrote:
| This illustrates to me how amazing LLMs are at 'remembering'
| _extremely_ obscure information. Somehow LLMs can repeat mistakes
| made a couple times looooooong ago.
| walter87 wrote:
| This seems like another example of the 'tortured phrases' [1],
| where AI-generated or machine-translated gibberish slips into
| papers. It's worrying how often these nonsensical phrases bypass
| peer review scrutiny.
|
| [1] https://dbrech.irit.fr/pls/apex/f?p=9999:5::::::
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