Peculiar Periodicals
It turns out there are even more unlikely publications than The Journal of Unlikely Science. Every Thursday, our very own Dr Steer turns his attention to another improbable periodical.
This week: FUZZY SETS AND SYSTEMS
| Name – Oh bless them, it sounds like they wanted a journal for fluffy science but thought that the bigger boys might bully them so went for something a bit more oblique. |  |
) "click to enlarge") Front cover – Dull. Dull, dull, dull. No fuzziness, no fluffiness, not even any Fozzie-ness. Must try harder. |
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| Off-the-wallness – Fuzzy sets are actually mathematical sets where, instead of something either being in a set or not in a set, it can sit on the fence and not commit itself to anything. Which is a pleasing novelty for most numbers. |  |
| Usefulness – You might think that a branch of science that spends its time not really being able to decide whether it was something or not wouldn't be very useful, but evidently engineers love it. | |
| Impressiveness – Every article title contains the word fuzzy - that's impressive in itself. I especially like 'A new unsupervised approach for fuzzy clustering' - who even knew that fuzzy clustering could be supervised? | |
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| Overall – A little bit here and a little bit there. A little bit all over the place to be honest. |  |
Impact factor: Not so much hits you as weighs you down like a bad hangover.
Previously in Peculiar Periodicals:
Fragblast (37)
Deviant Behaviour (36)
The European Journal of Pain (34)
The Journal of Peanut Science (31)
The Journal of Happiness Studies (30)
Biofouling (30)
Gut (26)
Archives of Oral Biology (26)
The Florida Buggist (15)
See all the journals
More journal jocularity to come next Thursday. Until then why not find a phunny phobia?
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