We're all about the red state/blue state bit. When I get a chance, perhaps tomorrow, I'm going to talk about moving beyond the simplistic red state/blue state divide, but tonight, we're going to use that red state/blue state thing to bring home a point.
I was browsing the blog of one of my former professors at SIMS (hi Professor Tygar!) when I found this interesting article. The Times Higher Education Supplement has issued its list of the fifty top universitites in the world. This listing was neat simply because my alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley, clocked in as the second best school in the world. Harvard is the only university to beat us out. Hey, we're highly ranked both in football and in academics!
But that's not entirely the point I was making. Tim Lambert noticed that twenty of the fifty schools in the list were in the United States, and he decided, just out of curiousity, to see what would happen if he plotted them on a map. The result is below.
Interesting, n'est pas? The only school not in the blue states is my colleague William's alma mater down there in Austin, Texas. Go figure.
Of course, you can discuss amongst yourselves what this might mean...
[Side note: After some hunting, the only copy of the list I could find was this jpg. (local copy) Also, I might point out, of the seven of us that have posting access here on the NFZ, four of us either attend or have graduated from a school on that list, and we might make it five next year.]
Posted by katster at November 15, 2004 03:32 AM
Huh. Only 3 Canadian universities on there, and they're obviously the big ones. =P McGill, Toronto, and UBC.
Well, my supervisor got his PhD from UBC...
Posted by: Sebastian at November 15, 2004 07:18 AMWell, we all know that universities are hotbeds of commie pinko liberals. I bet Colin Powell went to one, too.
Posted by: Rob at November 15, 2004 08:30 AMWell, both the schools Shrub himself went to (Yale and Harvard) are on that map. Doesn't seem to have done *him* much good. ;)
-kat
Posted by: katster at November 15, 2004 08:33 AMMmm, research universities. I notice that they're not counting the best places to undergrad, which is a totally different set of standards.
(Go commie pinko Reed!)
Posted by: Aris_TGD at November 15, 2004 11:23 AMSeen the county map of Texas' presidential election result? Sea of red, patch of blue near the Mexican border, one outpost of sanity in the middle of the state. ^_^ Advance the Enlightenment to our fellow Texans from our Hill Country bastion of learning! Go UT!
Posted by: William at November 15, 2004 11:51 AM
