Rats! Curses! Automation!

This study, from one of the many golden ages of psychology, now supplies data for researchers who wish to try to analyze the psychology of researchers who developed an apparatus which allows for the thoroughly automated monitoring and recording of shock-elicited vocalization in rats: “An automated apparatus for recording shock elicited vocalization in the rat,” Hank […]

Detect & remove cadavers from amongst the live objects

As professor William J. Wepfer, of the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology puts things in his ‘Message from the School Chair’ “Today’s mechanical engineers might search the ocean with an underwater observation manipulator; work on developing systems to program robots for manufacturing; or build a prototype of […]

Parker surges with the authorship lead: 1,050,000 and rising

Professor Philip M. Parker [pictured here] has now authored more than 1,050,000 books, according to a report by Caitlan Carroll for the “Marketplace” radio program. This new total should erase most doubts as to whether he is the most prolific author ever. When we reported about Professor Parker in 2008, he was up to only about 85,000 […]

Henry Rzepa muses on Mindless Chemistry

Chemist Henry Rzepa muses about a scholarly paper called “Mindless Chemistry” that appeared in The Journal of Physical Chemistry A Letters . He begins: The (hopefully tongue-in-cheek) title Mindless chemistry was given to an article reporting an automated stochastic search procedure for locating all possible minima with a given composition using high-level quantum mechanical calculations. “Many new structures, often […]

How to write a book semi-automatically

To semi-automatically compose a non-fiction book, or several hundred thousand of them, one can observe the methods of Professor Philip M. Parker (of INSEAD), of whom we have written (semi-automatically) many times. To semi-automatically compose a work of fiction, one can learn much by reading Michelle Legro’s essay in Brain Pickings. It begins: Plotto: The Master Book […]

Further advances in brainless writing

There’s a new advance in the effort to write prose without any direct involvement of a human brain. Until recently, writing was thought to be a skill that required at least some levels of understanding. The first giant breakthrough was Professor Philip M. Parker‘s automatic book-writing machine, which has produced several hundred thousand books (and […]