Why I am such a great media slut (brief example)

There's actually a lot I can write about this, but let me give a brief example from one of today's e-mail exchanges.

My work on nonlinearity management, already the subject of a Caltech press release and some other publicity, is going to be covered in Engineering and Science, a quarterly research publication that Caltech sends to alumni. Its editor, Doug Smith, and I have discussed possible Dr. Evil and James Bond references that can go in the article. Doug brought up James Bond, and I basically stated it would be awesome if we could have "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!" somewhere in the article. (He responded with a comment about Dr. Evil and his fondness for mounting lasers on sharks. There are lasers involved in this project...)

Of course, I have previously used the term "Kerr sandwich" to help publicize this work (I think that helped a lot in getting coverage by Physical Review Focus, which is why Caltech's PR team came on board) and referred to random walkers as "monkeys" when it came to our football ranking system. It helps that I work on cool stuff, but cute, pithy phrases make great selling points.

Another thing that has helped immensely is that I know just about all of Caltech's PR people (including Doug) because of the prank book I'm writing. (This is also how I was able to get my April Fool's joke on Caltech's website.)

Sometimes, I just can't escape my Beverly Hills origins.