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Comment by joker3 | Hacker News Reader

It's also essential to read the first cited article (https://www.bmj.com/content/327/7429/1459?ijkey=3b8c1a70a8d2...) which very much inspired this paper and is also quite a bit funnier.

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$37 for 1 day access to download the paper. If that's not part of the satire, I don't know what it is.

That might be the suggested amount, and it is a great paper, but I think you are allowed to donate less if you choose: http://sci-hub.tw/10.1136/bmj.327.7429.1459

Thankfully at least bmj still has a real website. Most of the elsevier journals have moved on to a 'web app' design for journal articles and IEEEXplore has as well. These load and display absolutely no article information until you successfully run all of their third party code (only works in latest Chrome and FF). That means you can't even get the DOI from the page for sci-hub. All you get is the crappy little 'loading' spinners.

You will benefit from http://unpaywall.org/

It's like when someone says something funny, then another person follows up with a witticism that basically repeats the same joke...

Like someone makes an inspired pun and some dude immediately exclaims "LITERALLY!"

They did an actual trial here though

Also, the one with the trial was just published, while the funny one is from 2003. Maybe this is immediate in sea turtle years?

The point being made by this new paper is actually substantially different to the original 2003 one

>We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.

Classic.

> The relevance to parachute use is that individuals jumping from aircraft without the help of a parachute are likely to have a high prevalence of pre-existing psychiatric morbidity. Individuals who use parachutes are likely to have less psychiatric morbidity and may also differ in key demographic factors, such as income and cigarette use. It follows, therefore, that the apparent protective effect of parachutes may be merely an example of the “healthy cohort” effect.

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