WE GET PRESS
This is not that much of a post, but earlier today I was struck that Purdue University had multiple PhysOrg postings in one day. So, I did a little research, and the amount of press that Purdue enjoys on PhysOrg is quite staggering. I don’t have any solid statistics, but through a quick search of the archives, no other university even comes close to the number of individual articles detailing research achievements in mainstream media. I have to ask those of you out there, why on earth is this? Purdue has had 5 Slashdot articles and 9 PhysOrg articles in the past month and a few days, as well as BoingBoing (let’s not forget Berkeley), Digg and other hits.
Now, this is nothing in comparison to say, JPL/NASA-type organizations, but it’s something. No other research university (including those affilliated with various contributors to vdov.net) comes even close. Of course this statistic is limited to mass media — we’re not talking important science literature. The reason I actually went through and searched a bit was because today there was yet another Cooks article on PhysOrg here. This isn’t anything new, but it’s something I’m at least slightly involved in. Wait, scratch that. Might be involved in in the future. Let’s face it … I don’t have a real project yet other than simulations, although perhaps spring break might cure that.
Cheers.
It is interesting. I have always thought that bio was at a bit of a disadvantage simply because everything we do is invisible and we have no impressive hardware for the lay person. This is why I think that you only see bio in science when there are ethical/religious questions raised. With chemistry (especially like Costa’s) there is always cool hardware even if the actual experiments are invisible to the naked eye. This is also probably why you never see people getting amped about organic chem unless something cool is made from new plastic or something. And even then people are only excited about the product not the process. Shawna obviously has the lions share when it comes to public sexiness. NASA not only has macro scale science (not to mention cosmic scale) it also has really awesome hardware that goes into space. It all has to do with size. If people can see something happen they care. If it affects them in an obivous and direct way they care. Otherwise its all invisible.
completely unrelated to anything in this post, but I wanted to wait until acost posted again. Hopefully you all can place the significance.
-1 x -1 x -1 = -1 OR worse
-1 + -1 + -1 = -3
Either way the subtitle seems to be negative, I’m just wondering to what degree you intended.
unfortunately you’re wrong rhollen. it took the vast majority of a day for myself and a number of the people in our lab to figure out what this really means, and it turns out it means … ’slightly better than normal’. you see, you can’t apply the not to the unexceedingly, because that doesn’t make any linguistic sense (you have to think for quite awhile before you realize why you can’t apply the not to the unexceedingly). so if you apply the not to the unpleasant, you get pleasant.
unexceedingly pleasant == sort of ok/better than normal.
yes, this is what we have decided the real meaning of it is. and yes, this is how ph.d. candidates in the cooks group enjoy spending our afternoons.
actually, it was a contest to find a triple negative that could be used in actual speech. we never found one that really worked and had a colloquial translation, but this was the closest we got.