Thursday, November 6, 2008

Horses, Blood, and Vomit... All in a days work!

Well, all in a couple of days while at work at least!

Yesterday I got an email from my Mum about how she won $6.50 on a horse in the Melbourne Cup (Australia's premier horse race - "The Race that stops the Nation!"). It was always fun to have a punt on the Cup, and I always had a soft spot for the grays (who cares about a brown race horse? They are so common!). Anyhow, in memory of me, Mum put a couple of dollars each way on a gray horse, which ended up being the runner up! Ironically, on the same day here in America, another important race came to it's end. Much like the Melbourne Cup, the gray also finished as the runner up...

Yesterday, we took our sophomore class on a tour of one of the core facilities here at the University of Self-Promotion. This was a fairly standard and sadly uninteresting lab visit, until one of our students suddenly threw up in the middle of the lab! She had got her flu shot the day before, had felt unwell in the morning, improved enough to come to school, and then sudden was sick. Strangely enough, she was absolutely fine for the rest of the day...

Lastly, I bring you to the world of popular science. I recently reviewed a paper in my former field. I was picked as a reviewer as I had been referenced several times by the authors. The paper reported a novel finding that is important to practitioners in my former field. Last week I was contacted by a popular science magazine who were considering writing a piece on this paper (it must be noted that they no nothing of the fact that I reviewed the paper in the first place). I gave my opinion and answered a few questions, and heard nothing else from the magazine...

Today I was contacted by another popular science magazine about the same paper. They got my name from the article that the first popular science magazine wrote and quoted me in! The second magazine asked me a considerable number of questions and took down all of my information. They promptly published an online article on this paper this afternoon...

I am quite happy to be quoted in a popular science magazine (I was quite chuffed!). The thing is this: The first magazine made no mention of quoting me, but did. The second magazine clearly stated that they would quote me, but didn't! It's all rather confusing really...

3 comments:

JollyRgr said...

That makes you famous.....so to speak!!!

Odyssey said...

It's being misquoted that can make you really famous. :-)

Congrats!

Goose said...

Far from misquoting me, they actually made me sounds quite knowledgeable!