It's Baton Rouge: Out To Lunch

The university is a place of learning, where scholars do research and impart their wisdom to students through lectures and courses. But with all those smart people walking around, sometimes great ideas emerge from the ivory towers of academia that are quite unrelated to one’s field of study or area of expertise. And, like all happy accidents, sometimes those are the best ideas. Take, for example, the current experience of Professor Manos Chatzopoulos.   Manos is Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at LSU. Like a lot of folks on the LSU campus, Professor Chatzopoulos got fed up trying to find a parking space. Where you and I might curse in frustration or even pray for a parking spot before we're late for our appointment, we're not astrophysicists who specialize in supercomputer simulations of supernovae and massive stellar evolution. Manos is. So what did he do? He came up with a parking app. Park Zen uses smart crowdsourcing to track and connect users with available parking in their vicinity— right d