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Fun fact, he almost got the worldwide console rights to Tetris back in the 80s, and tried going to Soviet officials to get those rights. To the point he's the antagonist of a recent "Tetris" movie that came out.

Never knew of the guy but what a terrible sounding person from his Wikipedia at least.

Shit apple doesn’t fall far from the shit tree I guess.

It's useless, but I'm ashamed to admit I found this tiny piece of trivia interesting.

I believe by saying it is coincidental they are saying there is probably no relevance, just an interesting piece of trivia, why put out this interesting piece of trivia? Because maybe someone will be able to make an argument of relevance.

Ghislaine's father (Robert Maxwell) was also a terrible person but for different reasons.

Robert Maxwell was a crook, he used pension funds (supposed to be ring-fenced for the benefit of the pensioners) to prop up his companies, so, after his slightly mysterious death it was discovered that basically there's no money to pay people who've been assured of a pension when they retire.

He was also very litigious. If you said he was a crook when he was alive you'd better hope you can prove it and that you have funding to stay in the fight until you do. So this means the sort of people who call out crooks were especially unhappy about Robert Maxwell because he was a crook and he might sue you if you pointed it out.

I imagine it's the interesting peculiarity that the same people seem to crop up over and over and over again. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon or something, except it's like one or two degrees. As George Carlin said, "it's a big club, and you ain't in it"

For example Donald Barr (father of twice-former US Attorney General Bill Barr) hiring college-dropout Jeffrey Epstein whilst headmaster at the elite Dalton School

Additional fun facts about Donald Barr: he served in US intelligence during WWII, and wrote a sci-fi book featuring child sex slaves

If you want to know more about the history of Pergamon Press there's a great Behind the Bastards episode on Robert Maxwell (Ghislaine Maxwell's father) - who himself was a scumbag in a variety of ways that were entirely distinct from Ghislaine Maxwell's brand of scumbaggery - that covers this. Might even be a multipart episode - it's a while since I've listened to it, but I have a feeling it's at least a two parter.

"Coincidental" means random, with no causal connection being explicitly claimed. It just means that two things share some characteristic (such as being relatives.) The thing that is coincidental is that the person who founded the company being discussed is also the father of another person who current events have brought into prominence.

It's why you would say something like "more than coincidental" if you were trying to make some causal claim, like one thing causing the other, or both things coming from the same cause.

So, "What is coincidental about that?" is a weird question. It reads as a rhetorical claim of a causal connection through asking for a denial or a disproof of one.

When I read something in a textbook I blindly believe it, depending on the broader context and the textbook in question. Is that a bad thing?

People are constantly filtering everything based on heuristics. The important thing is to know how deep to look in any given situation. Hopefully the person you're referring to is proficient at that.

Keep in mind that research scientists need to keep abreast of far more developments than any human could possibly study in detail. Also that 50% of people are below average at their job.

Most of the times you don't "accept" results. You have to build something on them, like an extension or a similar version on other field. So usually the first step is try to understand the cryptic published version and do a reproduction or something as close as possible.

The exact reproductions is never published, because journals don't accept them, but if you add a few tweaks here and there you have a nice seed for an article to publish somewhere.

(I may "accept" an article in a field I don't care, but you probably should not thrust my opinion in fields I don't care.)

Academia has problems, like everywhere else. But that seems like a big extrapolation from just one professor.

Fake data—you can only get that type of scandal when people are checking the data. I’d be more skeptical of communities that never have that kind of scandal.