Friday, Feb. 11 UC Irvine Chancellor Ralph Ciccerone announces he will resign his position at the end of the school year—right after the big faculty water fight—to become president of the National Academy of Science, an outfit with some of the smartest people outside of my bathroom mirror, boasting 190 members who’ve won the Noble Prize, though several of them won the award when it was still given for achievement in the field of “Minding Your Own Business. See? Myaah.” Ciccerone replaces Bruce Alberts, who is completing his second six-year term, the maximum allowed by the academy’s bylaws, and how smart can these people really be if they still believe in term limits? Anyway, Ciccerone is one of those people you admire so much you just hate him because you will never, ever, ever be him. Not even close. Stop trying. Really. You’re embarrassing yourself and everyone around you. Ciccerone not only did his undergrad at a little place I like to call MIT, but he also played on the baseball team there. He received his master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering, with a minor in physics from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and served as a research scientist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla; and at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado—though I’ve heard the latter is a “party” atmospheric research center. Ciccerone is an atmospheric chemist, which I just found out is an actual title and not what tweakers in Riverside call themselves when they take the lab outside on pleasant days. Ciccerone’s work has helped shape policy on climate change and pollution; he’s conducted research on the plasma physics of Earth’s ionosphere, the chemistry of the ozone layer and radiative forcing of climate change; and he also helped identify the roles that nitrous oxide and methane play in climate change and global warming, which we all know doesn’t exist and won’t until it kills every one of us.