I’m finally back to the story of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health logo.
I wrote Part 1 in mid-November and Part 2 a week later. I said that Part 3 was “coming soon,” but I’ve been a bit shy about revealing this. You’ll see why.
In August, 2005, Ingo, Greg, and I were sitting in a pub in Minneapolis in the early morning hours. I think maybe Brian was there, too. We had a session, which Ingo had organized, at the Joint Statistical Meetings the next morning (really that morning), and so we should have been sleeping. (Sunduz was also in the session, but, sensibly, she wasn’t out drinking with us.) I think this was later in the evening on the night I’d offended the guy from Insightful when I said that anyone who still used Splus rather than R was an idiot. And it was just after Greg and I (and perhaps Brian, if he was there) paid the waitress to not bring the round of drinks that Ingo had ordered.
Of course, we were talking about the Hopkins SPH logo (otherwise, why would I be discussing this?) as well as an innovative alternative that Brian Caffo had devised, and Ingo bet me to include Brian’s alternative logo in my talk the next day (or really that day): If I included the alternative logo in my talk, he’d buy me beer for a month.
So, I did, though I had to stay up quite a bit later to get the images together.
Christina and Michael were in the back of the room. Ingo was sitting in the front row. We’d used Greg’s laptop, so there was evidence. I made a bit of fun of the Bloomberg name change, and I made a bit of fun of the logo, by showing the Missionary Church logo. And then on my third slide, I paused for a bit and looked at Ingo, and he looked at me and then up at the screen, and when I saw that he’d seen it, I flipped to the next slide.
Here’s Brian’s alternative logo, next to the original. Well, it’s Brian’s design but my rendering.
And here’s a PDF of the logos in context.
And here’s the month of beer:
Ingo was willing to restock if necessary, but that wasn’t allowed. We still have most of those coasters; they’ve been great toys for the kids.
In October that year, I used the alternative logo on the “Wall of Wonder” itself, on a second bet, with Fernando this time.
I gave another of those informal statistics lectures, this time on “What is regression?” Of course, they were pre-screening slides at that point, because of the first such informal talk. But I gave them a last-minute substitution, with just the one logo change.
(I’m pretty sure that Patty caught me, but she didn’t turn me in.)
Here’s the second month of beer:
It all seems a bit juvenile in retrospect. I guess I’m getting (or have gotten) old.
Update: Ingo says that “juvenile” is another word for “hip and dynamic,” so I guess it’s just that I’m no longer hip and dynamic.