Schools by Location

[HappyQuark]

In choosing schools, I came up with a list of just under 20 graduate programs that I was strongly considering and from that narrowed my choices down to about 10. On a whim, I decided to plot out these original selections to discover, not surprisingly, that location played a bigger part in my selection process than I had intended. Apparently I avoid the center of this country like the plague, with a few exceptions.



With this data, we are able to construct a mapping of all regions which are incapable of supporting life.



Some may say that they've spent time in this black abyss of doom and survived, but this raises the obvious existentialist question; can one really call that living?

[SSM]

Are you sure this didn't have more to do with the lack of good physics schools in the center of the country?

[midwestphysics]

About the only one I would add to the abyss would be Michigan (U of M), that's my opinion though.

[WhoaNonstop]

Hey now! I've lived in that black area for 24 years and look how I'm turning out!

-Riley

[SSM]

Maybe the lack of well-known schools

[midwestphysics]

Obviously given by my username, I'm also from the black hole. Still I know that in terms of geography, it goes east coast, west coast, and then a few places in-between. Sucks, but that's where the money is.

[HappyQuark]

Hey now! I've lived in that black area for 24 years and look how I'm turning out!

-Riley

For what it's worth, I also hail from the black abyss.

[HappyQuark]

Ok, so I was a little bit bored and decided to plot all of the physics graduate programs and then assigned each school a standard Red to Green gradient based on rankings, where Green represents good rank and Red is bad.

In fact, It is set up so that pure Green (0,255,0) corresponds to a Rank of 1, (255,0,0) corresponds to the worst rank (anything at 145 or which US News didn't bother to rank) and each color in between corresponds to some discrete step of 1/145th.



This data allows us to more accurately plot the dead zones. Reviewing these plots is highly disconcerting because we can clearly see that dead zone is encroaching on the west coast much further than we had initially anticipated. If California, Oregon and Washington aren't careful, they run the risk of being being infested.

[WhoaNonstop]

Weeee... Still in the Abyss.

-Riley

[midwestphysics]

I'm in the green (real green) now, didn't expect that.

[grae313]

California is fine, the mountain range will keep us safe.

[badphysicist]

California is fine, the mountain range will keep us safe.

Until the earthquakes knock us into the pacific!

[kroner]

I think this map has already been drawn:

[WhoaNonstop]

I think this map has already been drawn:

We have successfully made the correlation that places with larger population densities are more likely to vote democrat and that places with larger population densities are more likely to have physics graduate schools.

-Riley

[rims]

We have successfully made the correlation that places with larger population densities are more likely to vote democrat and that places with larger population densities are more likely to have physics graduate schools.

-Riley

And we have learned that Hawaii is a safe place to go, and that Alaska should be avoided completely.

[HappyQuark]

I think this map has already been drawn:

We have successfully made the correlation that places with larger population densities are more likely to vote democrat and that places with larger population densities are more likely to have physics graduate schools.

-Riley

I use Apple/Nike+ to track my runs and one of their better features allows you to track your exact path via your iPhones gps and plot it on google maps. They also keep a log of all popular running paths and allow you to browse these paths based on area. Zooming out displays the paths in that area as a yellow cloud with the size of the cloud roughly proportional to the number of paths in that area.

I rarely make sweeping generalizations about any group of people. However, based on the overlap between the running map below and those in the previous posts, we are presented with one avoidable truth.

Anybody that goes to a school with a rank of anything lower than 50 is a fat republican.



I'll let everyone know when the pre-print version of my paper on fat republican physicists is uploaded to the arXiv.