Am one of the authors of the linked article. Thanks for all of your kind comments! Let me know if you have any questions and I'll be happy to answer.
I remember the very late nights at Burton Connor, maybe students will get more sleep now :)
Initially we started looking into it more for curiosity's sake, but as we started digging we kept finding more and more ridiculous stuff to the point where we decided to start working on blog post. Then David joined in on the action and helped a ton with the research and writeup.
No professor was involved. The paper was released yesterday, so we just documented as we went along in the investigation process. It only took like 8 hours of work to compile the doc. We finished it last night and posted to Twitter in the morning.