Paging through the Autumn ’08 issue of the Reed Magazine, I came across a photo (p. 47) containing two smiling faces that I knew well: Julia, currently a 4th year graduate student at Northwestern University and her (Reed) thesis advisor, Maggie. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that the two were also showing off matching (and removable) VIPEr tattoos to a photographer at the Gordon conference on Solid State Chemistry last July.
V.I.P.E.r. is really the acronym for the Virtual Inorganic Pedagogical Electronic Resource that Maggie and her collaborators at I.O.N.I.C. (the Inorganic Online Network of Inorganic Chemists) have created. Although the public face of I.O.N.I.C.-V.I.P.E.r. is a highly useful set of web pages devoted to the teaching of inorganic chemistry, its deeper purpose is to help the Man from U.N.C.L.E. defeat the agents of T.H.R.U.S.H. To accomplish this, they distribute V.I.P.E.r. tattoos to interested chemists.
23 Mar 2016 update: Going through my old emails I came across the photo in question (and I learned that the Gordon Conference topic was Solid State Chemistry, a well-known haunt of Maggie’s). Julia and Maggie are standing in front of Maggie’s poster, and if you look carefully, you’ll see a pair of matching I.O.N.I.C. V.I.P.E.r. tattoos:
