When you’ve worked in the lab too long
ILLOGICAL ILLUSION:
After running calculations and working problems all day long,
anyone can feel a little illogical. With yellow paint and
tape, someone transformed the mild-mannered old sign for
the Geological Engineering Laboratory into a clever statement.
If you haven’t seen it before, the sign sits in the
window of the Glaser Laboratory/Nortel Networks Room in Hearst
Mining Building, between Cory Hall and Hearst. (Rachel Shafer
photo)
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Acclaimed mathematician and Rice University professor Richard Tapia’s
list of “firsts” is long. First member of his Mexican-American
family to graduate from high school. First to graduate from college.
First Hispanic named to the nation’s highest scientific governing
body, the National Science Board, appointed by President Clinton. First
Hispanic elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
Yet even with these accomplishments, he’s also the first to admit
he still occasionally doubts himself. “When I’m around
all these really good people, especially as an underrepresented minority,
I sometimes ask myself, ‘Do I belong here?’” he says. “It’s
the ‘great impostor syndrome.’ So I talk to myself and
convince myself, ‘Yes, I do belong.’ We always have that
extra baggage of the need to convince ourselves that we belong.”
On Thursday, March 16, Tapia will be on campus to share his experiences
and inspire Berkeley students when he delivers the Regents’ Lecture.
His talk is entitled “Successes and Challenges in Diversifying
Research Universities and the National Science and Engineering Workforce.” [FULL STORY]
Everyone likes a secret revealed. EECS graduate student Michael Cho recently
created an online game of it. Milliondollarscode.com is a code-breaking contest
where players compete to decipher a famous quote first and win $100. The quote
is hidden somewhere under 16,000 characters and embedded among random letters
and numbers.
“You don’t need to be a cryptography expert to solve the puzzle,” Cho
explains. “I designed it so a smart 14-year-old could win.”
In fact, the trick with this game is not so much the brilliant smarts
of one person but the power derived from ever greater numbers of people
playing.
Each person who registers gets to reveal one additional letter, which
appears by midnight the same day. Instant gratification this is not.
[FULL STORY]
Ladies, how many times have you gone to use the bathroom and the toilet
seat is left in the unconscionable upright position by your boyfriend/brother/housemate/fill-in-the-blank?
Gents, do you bristle every time you’re asked/begged/nagged/fill-in-the-blank
to put the toilet seat down? For years, this problem has left men and
women flush with
anger. No longer. A team of ME seniors (all men, most now alumni) promise
peace with their new design called the Hands-Off Toilet, a bathroom
system that automates the raising and lowering of the toilet seat and
flushing process.
“We did it so the women would stop complaining,” explains
ME senior Eustaquio Alfonso Carrillo, chuckling.
The story began last fall when Carrillo, a member of Cal’s Hispanic
Engineers and Scientists (HES) club, wanted to enter the student design
competition at the National Technical and Career Conference held in
early January by the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers. Carrillo
knew he could find a competitive team. He approached friends who had
worked together on a preliminary design of the bathroom system for
ME 110. (Carrillo’s friend, ME senior Herman Bravo, had a girlfriend,
and it was from the personal experience of their relationship that
the Hands-Off Toilet idea was born.) They agreed to form a team. [FULL STORY]
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