Spring Break
First-year celebrates an unusual milestone
Samantha Urban, Associate Entertainment Editor, surban@smu.edu
Issue date: 9/20/07 Section: News
Pluto was a planet and those scientists can lobotomize me to convince me otherwise."
Group member and Tulane junior Becca Bello initially joined the group because she thought the "When I was your age" moniker was funny.
"It sounds like we're all thinking of ourselves as grandparents telling the old 'when I was your age' stories," she said. "But I think the group is so popular because it's a fact that was drilled into our heads for our entire lives but changed so quickly."
Anyone in a field of science is probably used to seeing their research and knowledge altered by new technology and the passing of time. But the demotion of Pluto is arguably one of the more major facts of science to change for the younger generations.
And what better way to commemorate that change than with a T-shirt? Klimczak has taken advantage of the group's wide membership by selling T-shirts on the group's profile page. Klimczak says that when he first thought of the potential for profit from the group, he didn't feel like a lot of people were really selling merchandise through Facebook yet. Still, he felt like the group had already hit a plateau.
"I waited too long, actually," he said. "But we sell enough to keep a business running."
In recent months, the group got so cumbersome to take care of that Klimczak enlisted some help. He added Matt Jones, a Seattle Pacific graduate student who studied astronomy at Washington, as another administrator for the group when Jones messaged Klimczak and volunteered for the job. Jones says he asked to be an administrator because there is a good amount of spam that gets posted and needs to be deleted to help moderate what goes on.
"There are a number of discussion boards that are completely nonsense, which is fine, but we want to keep those to a minimum," Jones said. "Because there are so many people, there are many who look to create disturbances, promote their own products or links or just make a quick buck. So I am there to delete the garbage that I see."
Group member and Tulane junior Becca Bello initially joined the group because she thought the "When I was your age" moniker was funny.
"It sounds like we're all thinking of ourselves as grandparents telling the old 'when I was your age' stories," she said. "But I think the group is so popular because it's a fact that was drilled into our heads for our entire lives but changed so quickly."
Anyone in a field of science is probably used to seeing their research and knowledge altered by new technology and the passing of time. But the demotion of Pluto is arguably one of the more major facts of science to change for the younger generations.
And what better way to commemorate that change than with a T-shirt? Klimczak has taken advantage of the group's wide membership by selling T-shirts on the group's profile page. Klimczak says that when he first thought of the potential for profit from the group, he didn't feel like a lot of people were really selling merchandise through Facebook yet. Still, he felt like the group had already hit a plateau.
"I waited too long, actually," he said. "But we sell enough to keep a business running."
In recent months, the group got so cumbersome to take care of that Klimczak enlisted some help. He added Matt Jones, a Seattle Pacific graduate student who studied astronomy at Washington, as another administrator for the group when Jones messaged Klimczak and volunteered for the job. Jones says he asked to be an administrator because there is a good amount of spam that gets posted and needs to be deleted to help moderate what goes on.
"There are a number of discussion boards that are completely nonsense, which is fine, but we want to keep those to a minimum," Jones said. "Because there are so many people, there are many who look to create disturbances, promote their own products or links or just make a quick buck. So I am there to delete the garbage that I see."
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