the brook

At the end of April 1st, I guess the score is 1-1.

One that didn’t fool me was an SMS that was going around saying “Call me. Urgent” on the first page and only when you scrolled down did you read the joke. This one didn’t fool me – mostly because someone else had told me about it. Nothing murders an April Fools joke like inside information.

One that did fool me though, was like a special. A friend of mine in the US – with whom I’ve been working on some research – tells me on IM:

Hey, Prof. X wrote this to me out of the blue today about our algo – “Your algorithm results are totally wrong. I ran your data through my library and got completely different results. I would assume one should be more rigorous in a graduate level project and sure about results.“

So it was (is) 2 AM, technically April 2nd, so I actually did get mildly surprised. Not worked up, this is a side project, but still surprised. I wondered why would a renowned researcher rant at us like this, or why he would bother to run data from a couple of grad students through his library. But I just didn’t connect all of it to April 1st!

To play a good, satisfying prank on someone on April Fools – make sure the prank is about something personal to that person, and leave no chance that the prank may be known to him or her. Something to remember for next year!