October 18, 2002: Volume 56, Number 6

Across Campus -- Blame the chipmunk; Philip Kosky's titles

We have a small chipmunk to thank for the three-hour power interruption on campus on Sunday night.

While generators restored power throughout most of campus, the resulting "brownout" caused failures in a number of small motors and other electrical components. Students were evacuated from Fox for about 90 minutes while officials traced the cause of smoke that resulted from a failed generator.

The small rodent somehow entered an enclosure of electrical gear, either while it was being maintained or through a conduit, only to discover that electricity takes the path of least resistance. The animal did not survive.

Philip Kosky, the Distinguished GE Research Professor of Engineering, has a clever way with lecture titles. Last year, he gave a talk on "Mad Cow" disease titled, "Conformational Protein Disease: Rendering a Verdict – It Ain't All Bull!" (It was a serious talk on estimating the probable number of human victims who will get the disease in the U.K. in the next 25 years.) And for an internal talk on forming diamonds from natural gas, he used the title, "Say It With Sewage." (A nod to a Time magazine headline about a fellow researcher who experimented in the field.) "If only the content were up to the standard of the titles," Kosky laments.

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