SUCCESS HAS A THOUSAND FATHERS...

SUCCESS HAS A THOUSAND FATHERS...

"Publish or perish" being the whip on the backs of common laborers in the fields of scholarship it is customary for written works to be co-authored so as to pad as many resumes as possible.

So along with R.W. Apple's expense accounts and Donald Kuspit's incomparable eight scholarly quotes in one paragraph the cover article in the March 10 issue of Nature should be donated to The Smithsonian for most co-authors of a single article.

With the sexy cover headline of "Purple Haze, Casini's Titan images in detail" the accompanying article is co-authored by:

Carolyn C. Porco
Emily Baker
John Barbara
Kevin Beurle
Andre Brahic
Joseph A. Burns
Sebastien Charnoz
Nick Cooper
Douoglas D. Dawson
Anthony D. Del Genio
Tilmann Denk
Luke Dones
Ulyan Dyudina
Michael W. Evans
Stephanie Fussner
Bernd Giese
Kevin Grazier
Paul Helfenstein
Andrew P. Ingersoll
Robert A. Jacobson
Torrence V. Johnson
Alfred McEwen
Carl D. Murray
Gerhard Neukum
William M. Owen
Jason Perry
Thomas Roatsch
Joseph Spitale
Steven Squyres
Peter Thomas
Matthew Tiscareno
Elizabeth P. Turtle. I demand proof of that name
Ashwin R. Vasavada
Joseph Veverka
Roland Wagner
Robert West.

That's thirty-six. Seven others are named in the "Acknowledgments" section at the end of the article.

There are 143 sentences in the article. Reserving the last paragraph, containing three sentences, for the seven "and others" in the acknowledgments, and employing the arithmetic tool of "division" that works out to 3.9 sentences per co-author.

Congratulations to all.

-Benjamin Harris, et al