I’ve been hearing a lot of grief from my scientist friends about having to write research papers or submit or edit them, etc.

Here’s a silver bullet - if you’re in Computer science that is. SCIgen randomly generates an entire computer science research paper (complete with graphs and figures) at the click of a button. All you have to do is fill in the five author fields.

For example, the trio behind inky circus came up a paper titled On the Visualization of Hierarchical Databases.

Here’s the abstract. Can I just say, who knew we had it in us?

In recent years, much research has been devoted to the visualization of XML; however, few have deployed the investigation of spreadsheets. Given the current status of classical archetypes, end-users daringly desire the refinement of the partition table. We construct a heuristic for autonomous information, which we call Emu. Such a claim is usually an extensive mission but fell in line with our expectations.

As you can see the results are pretty spiffy - which explains how three randomly generated papers made their way to the World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics in Orlando in 2005. The 13 minute movie about the hoax, Near Science, can be viewed here. 

There’s a fantastic online experiment going on now that seeks to create music from the first 10,000 numbers of pi. But it’s interactive. Which means that the first note you pick will be played when the number 1 crops up, the second note you pick will be 2, and so on.

My choice of notes wound up dark and minor enough that the result sounded like a less professional riff of the soundtrack to “There Will Be Blood“‘s blood-pressure raising march of minor notes and strings. It’s a bit rushed (after all there are 10K notes to run through) but the fun part is that you can vary and repeat it as much as possible. I’m now going back to come up with some nice pretty high notes to play pi: I’m thinking triangles, and song birds, and the noise of sunshine instead of dark and roily mining story in California. 

Every now and then I’m completely blown over by something I come across on the web and it’s so distracting and delightful I hardly do anything else than wade in its glory. Well, that’s precisley what I did when I came across the mp3s of Singing Science Records.

These songs are real deal people. Fantastic jaunty 1960s jingles about science. Songs so catchy and springy that they stay on repeat in your head for days at a time.

Zoom A Little Zoom is awfully good. And It’s A Scientific Fact is gold. Those are just some titles from the LP Space Songs. But then there’s Energy & Motion Songs, Experiment Songs, Weather Songs, Nature Songs, and More Nature Songs.

So go. Download them all. Load them up in iTunes and learn something. It’s way more fun when there’s a swinging beat involved. 

The other day I was at the pub with my friend and she mentioned that her dad got her a pocket rohypnol drug test kit. Cute. (kind of like this one here)

And this got us to musing about where Rohypnol came from to begin with. My vote was military. I mean, who else is keen to make people all pliant and erase their memories? Helloooo Darpa how are you doing? Obviously!

My friend however, thought it was the medical industry. This conjured up images of black market organ trafficking and eeeevil surgeons rubbing their latex gloved paws together in glee at all the kidneys they could harvest with drugged-out consent. Turns out she was right.

Rohypnol is its trademark name. Roofie its street name. But its real name is flunitrazepam and it was developed by Roche in the 1970s “for the management of insomnia and induction of anaesthesia” according to their website.

Here’s where it gets interesting. First, it’s not approved by the FDA and is an illegal drug in the US but it’s available by private prescription in the UK - mostly for colonoscopies. Norway and Sweden withdrew Rohypnol but then later reintroduced it under a different guise: Flunipam and flunitrazepam respectively. And I didn’t know this but Kurt Cobain OD’d on a cocktail of flunitrazepam and champagne weeks before his death. Still, I wouldn’t stock up on those stocking stuffer quite yet. The Association of Chief Police Officers reported that none of the 120 cases from November 2004 to October 2005 were linked to rohypnol.