You know you're at the U of C when...

You know you’re at the U of C when the words conflate, interpellate, and instantiate appear in everyday conversations. Sometimes your own.

“The Strange Laboratory of Dr. LaBarbera,” University of Chicago Magazine, October-December 1996

(‘Crescat scientia; vita excolatur’, motherfuckers!)

(via jasmined)

One of the stand out universities that rocked the regular admissions trends is the University of Chicago. The school had a record-breaking 42% increase in applicants for the class of 2014. They accepted 18% of the students, compared with 27% last year. Perhaps more compelling is the comparison between this year and 1993 when the acceptance rate was 77%. It’s safe to assert that the University of Chicago has outdone almost any other school in history as far as their application statistics.

University of Chicago student Max Gallop predicted both the Republican and Democratic winners (first, second, and third) in the Iowa caucuses in January 2008. Read more at Slate.com.

You know you’re at the U of C when university press authors “set the western canon to modern music.” And you know you’re at the U of C when the University of Chicago Press is eager to claim these cerebral rock stars as our own (they’re actually Stanford profs).

jasmined:

Physical Constant Cheer

Gimme the speed of light ……C
Gimme Planck’s constant………H
Gimme root negative one……….I
Gimme carbon………………….C
Gimme the Bohr radius…………..A
Gimme the gravitational constant….G
Gimme the additive identity of a non-trivial group…O
What’s that spell? ………..CHICAGO!

University of Chicago Cheers

guacamolepizza:

Only UChicago would have a second-year ruler of a micronation.

goodhue:

Graffiti, UChicago-style:

Dombrowski has come across [Regenstein Library] graffiti written in Arabic (“a lot of it, actually”), Chinese (“a reasonable amount”), German, Turkish, Greek, Russian and Serbian. But that’s not the nerdy part, of course. The nerdy part is: the graffiti she has found scrawled in dead languages; the graffiti that use the letters of multiple dead languages; and the graffiti scrawled in hieroglyphics. As with every piece of graffiti she locates, she took a picture of the hieroglyphic graffiti. Then she brought it to an Egyptologist at the university for translation.

Translation: “We did it twice in the morning.”

(Chicago Tribune, Flickr)

You see a squirrel reading a 3×5 card.

The squirrel drops the card and flees as you approach, and you pick it up.

It says, “Boronauski and his co-workers used RRKM Theory to try and estimate the dissociation rate of CH3SO2Cl via a molecular dissociation. However, they were unable to interpret the rate because they could not determine the distribution of internal energies of the radical. An experimental approach will allow us to definitely determine the energy partitioning, meaning which percentage of radicals created will have the energy to overcome the energy barrier.”

(Good to know what the squirrels are up to).

- submitted by Jeff McMahon

http://twitter.com/QuaintExplosion/status/11500709221