5/11/2007

ring ring ring ring ring ring ring bananaphase?

Sometimes a good title for a paper is necessary. I find that sometimes if an article in an alright-but-not-super journal is on a subject that is somewhat outside my interests, it can appear worth reading even if I've never heard of the authors as long as it has a curious title. This can sometimes be accomplished by a single word.

Case in point: Electron Density Modulations in Columnar Banana Phases.

How often does a chemist use banana in a paper title? I did chance upon another Chemistry of Materials article from about three years ago that picked up on it first, to be fair.

(If you are me, bright colours in the graphical abstract also help.)

17 comments:

Excimer said...

see, I'M not the only one who can come up with freaking awesome pop culture references for post titles. *applauds*

Ψ*Ψ said...

Yeah, but yours are still better. I'm not so up on pop culture.

Anonymous said...

I love the fact that 'random' is the most common tag on the blog.

Anonymous said...

There is a pop culture reference in the title?

Mitch

Ψ*Ψ said...

Yes, and it's stuck in my head now.

Excimer said...

For the Raffi-ig'nant among you: prepare to be rocked.

Anonymous said...

i had a similar revelation the other day - a paper title talking about a process as "fecund". i enjoy obscure words, so i was quite stoked with that one, and i'm considering working it into my thesis to wind up the markers. but it's no banana phase!

MJenks said...

This reminds me of a paper I read a while ago in JACS solely because it had the word "Kegome" in the title. Being a big Inuyasha fan, I couldn't pass it up. That's when I realized that Kegome means "honeycomb". Or something like that.

Anonymous said...

There are penguin diagrams, in experimental physics.
The guy who introduced them got stoned at a party and he made a bet he would use a word penguin in a nontrivial context in his next paper. It was very hard to make good on his bet, eventually he realized out that some graphs he was using did look a bit like a penguin and the rest is history.

Unknown said...

So what is "banana phase"? I won't read articles that do Fourier transforms. ^^

Anonymous said...

1) Puhleeeze! "Bent-core smectic phases!" Propagating seeded chiral naughtiness therein,

Google
"bent-core smectic" banana 41 hits

2) Penguins? Penguins! You cannot handle the truth about Penguins!

Anonymous said...

But that's not the original Badger song, it's some cheap ripoff.

Mitch

Excimer said...

Yeah, well, badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger mushroom mushroom aside, that's the song.

Despina said...

ehhh...those people are a bit bananas (sorry, i just had to).

i tend to go for articles referring to 'machines'or 'the N-word' in the title...i'm easily impressed

Unknown said...

Kudos for making the "Banana" in the link stay green...yay HTML skeelz!

Are you going climbing Sunday?

Anonymous said...

I'm hoping to use 'embiggen' or 'cromulent' in a paper at some point.

The names of some 2D NMR expts are good sources of humor as well: COSY, NOESY, ROESY, INEPT, INADEQUATE, etc.

Anonymous said...

i always enjoy a little playfulness in a scientific paper. it's not really that braggable, but my first paper had "tadpole" in the title (http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ma035989z).