I just spotted a piece on the chemical clean room at the NTNU Nanolab in Dagbladet's Magasinet. The occasion was high school students touring the campus on "Researcher's Night". High school students get shuffled around and tour selected labs. "Oooh; shiny. And ohmigawd; lasers". The title carefully chosen for the piece: "Ikke promp her" ("Don't fart here"). The subtitle was "Dette er et av landets reneste rom" ("This is one of the country's cleanest rooms"). Sheer poetry, and an awesome lead-in for a piece on nanotechnology.
Compared to this one, the feature article on nanotech I found in Magasinet reads like a PNAS paper. Was this the only title the "journalist" considered? It kind of tells you what target groups Dagbladet caters to.
Epic self-owning on my part, come to think of it, seeing as how I actually browsed Dagbladet online.
Anyhoo; the piece is full of gems and reinforces my initial conclusion of Trond Erling Pettersen only being a journalist if you broaden the definition to those who can spell. For example: "Mikroskopet kalles Atomic Force Microscope, og brukes til å måle partikkelstørrelser ned til noen få nanometer. ("The microscope is called Atomic Force Microscope and is used to measure particle sizes down to a few nanometers")
Forskerne kan se på atomstrukturer og danne et overflatebilde av noe som er så smått at det rett og slett er vanskelig å se det for seg. ("The researchers can look at atomic structures and form a surface image of something which is so small that it's hard to imagine")."
Hold the phone, chief - I can look at atomic structures using AFM? And wouldn't at least a part of the reason for having an atomic force microscope in teh first place - or even an optical microscope for that matter - be that it enables one to look at structures not visible to the naked eye? Add to this some pie-in-the-sky drivel about how in the future, when we all have personal jetpacks strapped to our silver jumpsuits, nanotech can solve everything from disease to global warming to providing unlimited energy sources.
On the plus side, I now have a pretty good idea who used to write "For a good time call ..." in bathroom stalls, and I have to admit that Trond Erling Pettersen has gotten a hell of a promotion.
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Long comment, so I'll start off with an executive summary on my view of the article:
Header - Really bad
Body - Acceptable
Actually, I didn't think it was half bad that piece (for a Dagbladet article on science, that is). Yes, it may not be written with the up and coming academic with a substacial number of publications within the field of nanotechnology in mind, but I'm willing to forgive Dagbladet that, since they have reserved the Rocky cartoon for that target group. :-D
I read the piece as a feature on the cleanroom at NTNU Nanolab, and not so much about the student tour. It does try to explain how clean it is, that it is very useful, expensive (without hinting about a wasting money) and some of the instrumentation. The result is pretty decent, yes, I'm sure it could be done better by somebody else, but I've seen a lot worse.
But what bothers me is the header with the "fart" joke in there. WTF? It ruins the whole piece. If he absolutly needed a funny header, he could have said "Don't sneeze in here" with a picture of the engineer with the cold and mouth cover. It would at least been sligthly relevant to the piece and could have worked as a hook. The fart bit I can't see mentioned in the article at all. But it would have been even better if he, a professional journalist that writes for a living, could come up with a header that was interesting and gave a hint about the content of the article. Is asking too much?
...nanotech can solve everything from disease to global warming to providing unlimited energy sources.
See, I told you those nano-robots that can change structures on a molecular level are good! But do you listen? Nooooo.....
;-)
Actually, I didn't think it was half bad that piece (for a Dagbladet article on science, that is).
You might be right. Could be I got too put off by the title, even though I read the piece thrice yesterday, scouring for content.
Of which I found preciously little.
You know that joke that if you put 1000 monkeys with 1000 typewriters in a room, then given enough time, you'd get "King Lear".
This piece: 12 monkeys, 45 minutes.
If he absolutly needed a funny header
What's wrong with "Knock, knock" jokes?
See, I told you those nano-robots that can change structures on a molecular level are good! But do you listen? Nooooo.....
LOL..why you gotta put me on blast like that?
This piece: 12 monkeys, 45 minutes.
And we all know that you have to be french to think 12 Monkeys are any good...
:-)
Of which I found preciously little.
I think we can agree the he wrote about all the stuff he understood from the tour...
Seriously, as a piece on the cleanroom, and makes a relevant comparison with an operating room, which most people think is "super clean". It goes on a bit about NTNUs plans for building more clean rooms, that we have other rooms in Norway cleaner then Nanolab's, but not of that scale. A bit about dresscode in a cleanroom etc.
What it does not, however, is say say much about nano-technology. Except it's small; the footprint on the moon is as good picture as any, I would guess, but that's the only useful info about nanoVT (or is that nanoST in English?). ;-)
As I said, it is a acceptable feature on the clean room, but the header just completly ruins it. Not much content on nanoTech, though.
And we all know that you have to be french to think 12 Monkeys are any good...
I see you caught my not-so-subtle diss
As I said, it is a acceptable feature on the clean room, but the header just completly ruins it. Not much content on nanoTech, though.
The "Conclusion" section would have read: "It's cool and important to have super-clean rooms because for whatever reason they're necessary for nanotechnology, which is cool for reasons I don't understand and might provide important technology on an undefined but prolonged timescale"
The "Abstract" would've been: "Don't fart in clean rooms because then they wouldn't be clean anymore and that would make it harder to fabricate my personal jetpack some time in the future although I don't know why"
LOL
You should have considered a carreer in journalism...
;-)
..you mean in Dagbladet, or in a real paper?
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