Friday Fun: Chemistry Gobbledegook

Some kind soul pointed me in the direction of the University of Chicago's Random Academic Sentence Generator. Never tried it? You pick important-sounding verbal albatrosses from four drop-down boxes, and out pops a perfectly stuffy, albeit meaningless, sentence:

"The logic of normative value(s) clarifies the position of the fantasy of the image."

"The poetics of civil society opens a space for the discourse of power/knowledge." 

Fun to play with, and feels uncomfortably similar to the nonsense Mathgen paper from last year, or the CompSci one from 2005.

I scoured the internet for similar chemistry-themed jargon games, and here's what I've found:

Novel recycled packing material, or avant-garde nonsense generator?
(Both!)

ScienceGeek Educational Jargon Generator
Generate short bursts of jargon-ese

Scratch MIT Project
Buggy, a bit tough to load and use

Nonsense Generator
A bit too far out for my tastes...

Challenge - Readers, I'm hardly competent at programming, but I would love to see an engine that specifically generates random chemistry snippets. Y'know, push a button, and end up with: "The ab initio organometallic calculations support system kinetics for delivery vectors." Or some such ilk...
Any takers?

Happy Friday!
SAO

Schools = Summer Space for Small Companies?

Ahhh, summer! Time to put your feet up, barbecue, maybe take a long vacation with the family. But while you're away...who's working in your lab space?

"Piled Higher and Deeper" by Jorge Cham - www.phdcomics.com

Long-time readers know I work at a fairly small biotech; we've joked before over whether to call ourselves "micro" or "nano" based solely on full-time employees. Due to our infrastructure limitations, we depend on local universities and off-site collaborations to move projects along. Sometimes, small companies like us will band together in an incubator facility (examples: Seattle, Virginia, Mass), with room to work out their science, and (presumably) access to shared instruments like NMR, MS, or HPLC.

Critical lab equipment

A recent visit to our local Uni revealed another potential angle: unused academic lab space. Despite rumors to the contrary regarding crazy hours grad students work, repeat trips have taught me that this particular school doesn't seem too strict about summer schedules. Perfect storm, right? Here's some fully-functional labs waiting for someone to use them in a down cycle. The staff's there, safety's looked after, police and fire standing by, what more could you want?

I'm certain I'm not the first to voice this idea (examples: UT, Iowa State). I'm sure there's boondoggles to work out with IP transfer and inventorship. But I'm surprised I don't see more universities opening their doors to entrepreneurs full-tilt over the summer months.