Read here: distraction guaranteed

If you're reading this, you shouldn't be. You're probably in the library, taking an unprecedented 16th study break of the day-and now you have gotten truly desperate.

Don't worry; this column will not be dedicated to overarching, ambiguous theories about human beings or life in general. Been there. Done that. Also been overly criticized for being there and doing that.

Instead, I'm giving the people what they want: random, interesting facts that will properly distract you during finals. Recently, the blog "Oddee," which dedicates itself to discussing "the oddities of the world," released a list of history's most bizarre scientific papers. In addition, Alex Boese just wrote "Elephants on Acid," a book that meticulously chronicles the most ridiculous experiments in science. Both of these are fairly long reads and I know that you are busy, so let me boil them down into the four most important facts you need to know:

1) Country music will kill us all. A 1992 study by Steven Stack and Jim Gundlach discovered that the greater the air time dedicated to country music in a region, the greater the white suicide rate. Stack and Gundlach wrote that country music nurtures a self-destructive mood through "its concerns with problems common in the suicidal population, such as marital discord, alcohol abuse, and alienation from work." The results were independent of divorce, poverty and number of missing teeth. Such a finding is why I think we need to reconfigure the Axis of Evil-to all three Dixie Chicks.

2) In 50 years, we will all be dating our computers. OK, so maybe not our computers, but definitely their robot offspring. Dr. David Levy, an artificial intelligence researcher at the University of Maastricht, believes (or should we say, hopes) that "by around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots." What will cause society to accept robotic love? Easy, says Levy. All we need is a "story like, 'I had sex with a robot, and it was great!'" to appear someplace like Cosmo Magazine" and the rest of the country will have to jump on the bandwagon. And from what I have read in Cosmo, such an article can't be too far off. I can see it now: "100 Hundred Ways to Please Your Robot."

3) The art of nachos is also a science. It's a situation we all know intimately: We have just lightly dusted our tortilla chips with cheddar cheese and placed them in the microwave. But how much time should I give my nachos? And at what power setting? Well, it turns out that the most reliable temperature interval to carry out ultrasonic measurements in cheddar cheese is identified as between zero and 17 degrees Celsius.

In a paper titled "Ultrasonic Velocity in Cheddar Cheese as Affected by Temperature," Italian researchers discovered the most conducive heat in which to experiment on cheese. The paper reads (I assume) like an Orgo textbook: "At 0 < T < 35°C ultrasonic velocity was 1590 to 1696 Ms, at 0 and 35°C, respectively. Differential Scanning Calorimetry thermograms linked the temperature dependence of ultrasonic velocity to fat melting." The article was immediately regarded as a breakthrough in chemistry, food engineering and Duke's Beta chapter.

4) Everyone has a little Michael Vick in them. All you social psychology students should know about Stanley Milgram (and if you don't, you've really got to start studying). Milgram researched the laws of obedience in humans. He famously discovered that people will keep shocking a man who appears to be in serious pain as long as the experimenter tells them to keep going.