Monday 21 November 2022

I Have Today Only Just Heard Of The Word Citogenesis,

so I will try to explain what it means,


above is a page of Wikipedia, crediting the invention of a toaster to the brilliant Scotsman Alan MacMasters in the late 1800s, indeed if you attended elementary school in Scotland during the past ten years, you almost surely learned that it was a fact, one Scottish primary school organised a day of activities in his memory - children were invited to write journal entries about MacMasters, paint slices of toast, and build pretend toasters out of building blocks, Edinburgh-based chef Scott Smith also created an elaborate dessert in his honour while taking part in Great British Menu, the BBC cookery show, Smith says MacMasters' name was suggested to him by the producers, but, this past summer a teenager raised the question of the authenticity of MacMasters' photograph that accompanied the Wikipedia article, that when the dominos started to fall. The entire thing was a hoax launched in 2012, there really is an Alan MacMasters, and that picture of him is real, but he is a 30-year-old aerospace engineer in London. The citations in the Wikipedia entry are an example of circular citing, or citogenesis, as Randall Munroe called it, as it happen the story got totally out of control, you can read about it here at the BBC, so now I know what citogenesis means! as an aside, I wonder who started the hoax?


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