Hearty congrats to UC Berkeley Professor George F. Smoot for winning this year's Nobel Prize in Physics (along with some other dude). Professor Smoot will be enjoying a nice chunk of change from the Nobel Foundation, and will be entitled to park in the specially designated Nobel Laureate parking spaces on campus.*
With a name like "Smoot," he has to be good.
* Seriously. Next time you're on the Berkeley campus look for spaces marked "NL." Those are reserved for Nobel Laureates.
EDIT: Link now points to UC Berkeley news story.
He was the second worst teacher I ever had at Cal. I took gen rel with him and he didn't even settle on a text book during the semester. Mostly he just lectured incoherantly. Fortunatly he's good at other things so I won't fault him for that.
It's a $55 ticket to park in the prized Nobel Laureate spot if you're a mere non-Nobel Laureate.
Instead of designated parking spots, they should give every Nobel Laureate her or his own rocket pack, thus making parking spots an obsolete relic of a byone era.
uh, really? My first impression upon seeing those parking spots was, "WOW, nobel laureates?" Then, after the growing a couple more brain cells, I figured out that it's for the national lab people.
uh, REALLY? what does a nobel laureate parking pass look like? and what's to prevent N.L.s from elsewhere, like that schmoe from MIT Andrew Fire who won the med prize? oh wait, he was a Cal undergrad...
btw, $55 per day for a year is about twenty grand, in parking tickets you don't have to pay.
Nope, the parking spaces are for Nobel Laureates, all right. They're concentrated around the science buildings because, well, most of Cal's Nobel Prizes are science-related.
Wikipedia verifies the parking space thing. And Wikipedia is never wrong.
GO BEARS!