This is actually a really great explanation and, perhaps more importantly, a really great example of how science and other academic pursuits really work. Person

This is actually a really great explanation and, perhaps more importantly, a really great example of how science and other academic pursuits really work. Personally, I study computational biochemistry and a lot of work appears on the arXiv long before the official publications. So, I try to keep up with the arXiv, but as this is all non-peer-reviewed I have a similar checklist that I use before spending more time going into the details of the paper. That's not to say that this paper should have been disregarded out of hand. There's a difference between a crackpot and a honest good attempt that deserves further scrutiny. Still, with the number of papers that get published these days, having a list like this is a valuable tool.