Culturelativitially

Every good journalist knows that it’s important to report news in terms that people relate to. For example, instead of writing:

“Joe has manufactured 3,235,329 hammers, which is a lot”

you write:

“If you whacked the guy that invented voicemail routing once each with every single hammer that Joe has ever manufactured, you’d make a hole 5 miles deep with a satisfyingly icky puddle of goo at the bottom.”

This seems especially true of boring, stodgy technology news; by relating it to pop culture we apparently make it readable. It’s kinda like saying “Robert Goddard and Wernher von Braun developed the first modern rockets, which led to the invention of Tang,” or “Albert Einstein developed the theory of relativity, which allows ‘Ice Truckers’ to start and end at precisely the right time.” (Work it out, folks…)

In that vein, Drs. Albert Fert and Peter Grunberg won a Nobel prize this week for discovering giant magnetoresistance, or GMR. One of the first real applications of nanotechnology, it allows engineers to easily strengthen resistance of very small magnetic disks, increasing potential for very dense data storage.

In effect, it lets us break an unbreakable law and make data storage devices tinier and denser at the same time. It’s revolutionized our ability to efficiently miniaturize massive silos’ worth of data, saving on datacenter storage space. And it’s enhanced our ability to effectively transport and mine data that could one day lead to cancer cures, more accurate weather predictions, etc., etc.

So how did Scientific American, the UK’s Guardian, Nature and many others make this news interesting? Here’s Scientific American’s headline:

Like your iPod? Thank this year’s physics Nobelists

Now I’m not saying that GMR’s use in rich media portability hasn’t been a significant boon to mankind; GMR has pretty much built the portable MP3 player industry and done worlds of good for video gaming. But there are days when we take this culturelativitially thing a bit far.

Just as an aside, Dr. Fert was born in Carcassonne, France, which sits on the Canal du Midi (one of the great engineering marvels of its day, BTW). He grew up in the last of the medieval walled cities, where every one of the narrow, cobbled streets pitilessly routes visitors to the Museum of Torture. Walk down any street, duck into any dark alley, open any door…and find yourself in the Museum. Even if you don’t want to learn about the little metal propeller thingee that looks like a lemon reamer (and performs a similar function in dungeon victims), your resistance will be broken and it will be etched into your memory.

There’s a metaphor there somewhere.

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