Paleontologists See Stars as Software Bleeps Scientific Terms

[JacksinPA]

Paleontologists See Stars as Software Bleeps Scientific Terms (Published 2020)

When their annual conference was moved online, they were amused to find seemingly benign words blocked and replaced with asterisks during virtual sessions.

www.nytimes.com

When their annual conference was moved online, they were amused to find seemingly benign words blocked and replaced with asterisks during virtual sessions.

The trouble started when Thomas R. Holtz Jr., an expert on the Tyrannosaurus rex, typed “Hell Creek Formation,” the rock unit in Montana where the remains of North America’s last giant dinosaurs have been found.

He was trying to answer a colleague’s question after an online presentation during the first day of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s 80th annual conference.

But Mr. Holtz was stunned when instead of the word “Hell,” four asterisks appeared in the chat.

Puzzled, he described the issue on Twitter. Colleagues chimed in with other words that had been rejected by the software system set up to filter out profanities: knob, pubis, penetrate and stream, among others.

“Most funny to us was the censorship of ‘bone,’ which, after all, are the main thing we work with,” Mr. Holtz said.
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The software censor was on overdrive.

 

[RAMOSS]

Paleontologists See Stars as Software Bleeps Scientific Terms (Published 2020)

When their annual conference was moved online, they were amused to find seemingly benign words blocked and replaced with asterisks during virtual sessions.

www.nytimes.com

When their annual conference was moved online, they were amused to find seemingly benign words blocked and replaced with asterisks during virtual sessions.

The trouble started when Thomas R. Holtz Jr., an expert on the Tyrannosaurus rex, typed “Hell Creek Formation,” the rock unit in Montana where the remains of North America’s last giant dinosaurs have been found.

He was trying to answer a colleague’s question after an online presentation during the first day of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s 80th annual conference.

But Mr. Holtz was stunned when instead of the word “Hell,” four asterisks appeared in the chat.

Puzzled, he described the issue on Twitter. Colleagues chimed in with other words that had been rejected by the software system set up to filter out profanities: knob, pubis, penetrate and stream, among others.

“Most funny to us was the censorship of ‘bone,’ which, after all, are the main thing we work with,” Mr. Holtz said.
========================================================
The software censor was on overdrive.

We see it on this board too. For example, Bereshit is the Hebrew for genesis, and it used to be that on the old software, some of those letters were * out.

 

[Checkerboard Strangler]

I occasionally have a cocktail in the evenings.
On a good many forums that would have been a ****tail.

 

[Deuce]

Well, **** me