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

Podcast: Long Time, No See, Tetrahedron!

Link to July 8 issue

Sanford Group

P.S. I'm still figuring out rudimentary audio engineering. Helpful comments welcome!

Opportunity

HEY SCIENTISTS!

Feeling out of the rat race?
Lost in those interminable development meetings?
Want to conceptualize a game plan to bring real value to your organization?

The Biotech DEFENSIVE MBA^TM can help! Learn the latest lingo straight from the horses' mouths.
Get engaged in that next strategy session.
Move your career AHEAD with a world-class approach.

Skills learned in the Biotech DEFENSIVE MBA^TM may include:

• Using bold print and CAPITAL LETTERS to drive home action items.
• Speaking in short imperatives.
• How to keep those $2,000 suits looking pressed and fresh*
• Speaking for long intervals (without saying much of anything).
• Condensing complex thoughts into bullet points for easier intellectual digestion.

A can't-miss, proactive,
paradigm-shift, life-changing,
highly-hyphenated
opportunity

Special topics for the Biotech DEFENSIVE MBA^TM include:

• Outsourcing and You: The Inevitable, Looming Shadow
• Hey, that R&D Line Item Costs a Lot...What Do You Do, Again?
• Have Fun at Your Summer Conference; I'll Be on My Yacht
• Did We Mention Bullet Points?

Be proactive! Learn to play hardball with the think-outside-the-box-crowd. Act today, and we'll even send you the math quiz at no additional charge:

From high school to completion, an MBA can be earned in as little as 5 years. A Ph.D. chemist - with postdoc - averages 11 years. 

1. Who wins this scenario? 
2. Do you suppose there's any difference in starting salary?
3. What would the chemist do if she could have those 6 years back? Discuss.

The Biotech DEFENSIVE MBA^TM is enrolling now.** 
Don't delay, take control of your future TODAY!

(Note for the humorless: This is satire.)

*Step 1: Wear suit. Step 2: Stop working in that dirty old lab.
**Program completely booked up for the year. Maybe you can take on an internship or another post-doc while you wait?

WWWTP? "Tristillation?" Not So Fast, Zarco

A goofy, over-the-top marketing campaign for Zarco* tequila made its Twitter rounds yesterday (thanks, David Perry, ChemBark, and Chemjobber!).

Here's the company's video, titled "Tristillation (TM) Explained." I can't succinctly explain all the goofy pseudo-science in one fell swoop, so I'll just go second by second.

0:01 - Welcome to Zarco! Why, oh why, does everyone believe labs need a blinding hospital-white color scheme?
0:03 - Do you usually use a light microscope to examine molecules? I certainly don't.
0:04 - That retort in the background is boiling away, but there's NO FLAME underneath it (?!?)
0:06 - When's the last time you used a separatory funnel to isolate your distillate?

0:11 - Laymen's terms - Dear Zarco: Distillation doesn't work like that! The crude fermentation isn't sitting there in some sort of "pre-alcohol" waiting for you to add heat. When you distill, you're purifying the ethyl alcohol (their 'C-two-H-five-Oh-H') away from the water.

Ye Gods.

0:17 - A third undiscovered 'element' - this part is so inane I forgot to laugh. Short answer: no.
0:22 - Chemetron Medical products collection jar in the background. That's a plastic autoclave bottle; I'd never use it for this.

There's a few other videos save on their YouTube portal, Highlights include near-complete lack of gloves, goggles, or other safety equipment, and (chuckle) a background reflux condenser, which you'd actually use to distill something, sitting abandoned on a clamp.

I get the kitschy, comedic sci-fi vibe Zarco was going for, but they'd better hope their target audience isn't science literate. I can't get past the stupid long enough to buy a bottle.

*Does it bother anyone else that "Zarco" sounds like Darco, the fine activated carbon powder we actually DO use in lab? (to remove colors from solutions)

Friday Fun: Artemisinin on NPR

NPR Story

2012 Keasling lab article in PNAS

Wikipedia: Artemisinin

Get it Funded! (A Game)

Last night, intrepid C&EN reporter Dr. Dre, err, Dr. Drahl, sent over another challenge from NOS2013:

I think Jerry Berson talked w/me re funding influencing field flux. So what's gonna happen to totsyn?
— Carmen Drahl (@carmendrahl) June 27, 2013

Let's reword that: How will changes in funding affect total synthesis, the study of assembling complex natural products from simple commercial chemicals?

Now, this isn't the first time folks have declared the synthetic field to be on death's door. Hardly. So, I answered the way I always do, which has kept the field alive and kicking long past Woodward:

@carmendrahl @2014RMC @ChemProfCramer TotSyn will survive - it'll just dress itself in new clothes for new funding opps #SameOldStory
— See Arr Oh (@SeeArrOh) June 27, 2013

Chemjobber, always one for a savvy one-liner, immediately jumped on board:

.@SeeArrOh "Towards the enantioselective nanodelivery of 56-desoxymaitotoxin" @carmendrahl @2014RMC @ChemProfCramer
— Chemjobber (@Chemjobber) June 27, 2013

Nyuk nyuk nyuk. OK, wise guy, I've got a few more, then . . .

"Reversible carbon dioxide capture using lycopodium alkaloid analogs"

"Pentacene-functionalized steroids for solar panels"

"Origin of Life: The Gliotoxin Hypothesis"

"Analysis of 10^5 novel secondary metabolites in the human gut microbiome"

OK, Readers, I'm sure you can do better. Leave me some gut-shakers and knee-slappers in the comments section!

I Think I Like This Book Already

Diseased walnut leaf, inverse color

I'm only two chapters' deep* into Mary Roach's new book Gulp, yet I'll certainly enjoy the remaining 300-odd pages. How do I know? Here's an excerpt, from p. 28 (emphasis mine):

"A quick word about chemicals and flavors. All flavors in nature are chemicals. That's what food is. Organic, vine-ripened, processed and unprocessed, vegetable and animal, all of it chemicals. The characteristic aroma of fresh pineapple? Ethyl 3-(methylthio)propanoate, with a supporting cast of lactones, hydrocarbons, and aldehydes. The delicate essence of just-sliced cucumber? 2E,6Z-Nonadienal. The telltale perfume of the ripe Bartlett pear? Alkyl (2E,4Z)-2,4-decadienoates."

Cheers, Mary. I can't wait to read the rest!

Note: Neurotic Psych and Science News have also written reviews; I'll round up my thoughts better after I finish the book.

*So far, only one tiny sticking point: Roach refers to "oxidating" beer (p. 25), a term that I believe has been largely supplanted by "oxidizing" to refer to interaction of food chemicals with molecular oxygen. I've even grabbed the NGram: