UAHuntsville on The Escapist

[skate_or_die82]

A news story about my alma mater ended up getting a blurb on The Escapist, my favorite online gaming publication. What's the connection to gaming? Cheap hardware. UAH and UMass Dartmouth are using a cluster of PlayStation 3s to run some astrophysics calculations to test theories about black holes:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/88324-PS3-

Comments

[alruff]

How is that "almost" ironic?

[skate_or_die82]

fixed

[happinessiseasy]

Irony

"Irony is a literary or rhetorical device, in which there is an incongruity or discordance between what one says or does, and what one means or what is generally understood. Irony is a mode of expression that calls attention to discrepancy between two levels of knowledge. In fiction, it is a demonstration of the distance between the character's knowledge and that of the audience.
...
The American Heritage Dictionary’s usage panel found it unacceptable to use the word ironic to describe mere unfortunate coincidences or surprising disappointments that “suggest no particular lessons about human vanity or folly.”"

[skate_or_die82]

geez. i usually just avoid the word altogether because i don't feel like anyone agrees when to use it. it's not worth it. in fact, the passages you quote don't really seem to help. i only edited my post because that's how i interpreted Alex's comment and i trust his judgement as a writer. but hell, you're the grammar ref, so whatev?

i mean, i could argue that the statements "the PS3 is expensive" and "the PS3 is cheap" are incongruous, but maybe it's only irony if the cluster builder calls the PS3 an expensive gaming console? i don't know. you figure it out and i'll edit the post.

[chris462]

Hrm ... one of my bosses is working on a PS3 cluster, but I don't think it's the UAH project.