Scientists Hoard Spare Hypotheses As Global Paper Rationing Plunges Campuses Into Chaos

UPPER BOFFIN, Researchers at the Institute of Pointless Inquiry are buying and selling raw data in the campus car park. The central scientific authority imposed strict monthly rationing on new discoveries this week. The Global Registry of Papers announced yesterday that scientists will only be permitted to submit two thoughts per month. You can’t even get a footnote through the system. The drastic measure arrived after an automated writing contraption submitted six million papers on the structural integrity of soup, which just kept going until somebody unplugged the machine from the wall.

The soup disaster ruined the academic economy. Desperate professors are hoarding their remaining allocations in Maxwell House tins and burying them under the laboratory linoleum. Dr. Barnaby Plinth is a senior researcher in applied uselessness. He traded a working centrifuge and jars of pickled frogs just to secure a publishing slot for his paper on the aerodynamics of falling toast. “I have a family to feed with prestige, and I cannot survive on just two breakthroughs a month,” Plinth shouted at a passing student.

Plinth isn’t the only one out of coupons. Under the new rationing system every registered scientist gets a physical booklet of tear-out vouchers. They are printed on very cheap gray paper. Submitting a minor observation about a fruit fly costs one coupon. A world-changing revelation about the universe requires three coupons and a letter of recommendation from a passing postman. And anyone caught trying to publish without the correct paperwork faces severe penalties. They make you teach undergraduate seminars on Sunday afternoons in the unheated annex building where the projector never works.

“I cannot survive on just two breakthroughs a month.” — Dr. Barnaby Plinth, shouting outside a laboratory

The threat of Sunday seminars hasn’t stopped the trade. Black market dealers whisper offers of peer review from dark alleyways near the chemistry block. They mostly work in cash. Shady individuals in heavy coats loiter near university bicycle sheds asking passing professors if they need spare data tables or a forged conclusion. One anonymous laboratory assistant sold his last submission token to a botanist. He got a lifetime supply of instant coffee and a swivel chair with all four wheels still attached, which he wheeled right out of the biology department.

Some researchers bypass the dealers entirely and just cheat the page limits. They combine multiple fields of study into a single manuscript. The resulting documents are highly unstable. They are often incomprehensible. This leads to bizarre new disciplines such as theoretical plumbing and quantum bakery. Last week a team of chemists tried to publish an entire encyclopedia of reactions on the back of a single postage stamp. It spontaneously combusted during the peer review process. It burned a hole straight through a solid mahogany desk.

The fire damage hasn’t changed official policy. Representatives from the Global Registry of Papers defend the strict quotas. They insist the world simply does not have enough shelf space for any more knowledge right now. “If we allow scientists to just keep discovering things at this rate, we will run out of hard drives by next Tuesday,” a spokesperson for the Registry said. He was carefully measuring out his daily allowance of paper clips. “We are asking the scientific community to tighten their belts and stop looking through telescopes.”

The paper clip allowance is not going over well. Rogue researchers are organizing illicit midnight symposiums in abandoned warehouses out by the docks. Scientists recklessly present unapproved charts at these secret gatherings. They whisper their findings to cheering crowds of data addicts. Authorities have promised a crackdown. They are deploying special task forces armed with red pens. The goal is to break up these illegal knowledge-sharing rings and confiscate any unauthorized pie charts before they can be exposed to the general public.

The raids will target the young post-docs first. But for traditional academics the hardest part of the rationing is the cultural shift. Older professors remember a golden age when a person could publish a lengthy treatise on the specific gravity of lint without having to fill out triplicate request forms in blue ink. The Institute of Pointless Inquiry is bracing for a long season of intellectual austerity. They are advising their staff to save their best ideas for special occasions. Perhaps try making do with last year’s hypotheses. It’s going to be a quiet winter.