Love, Loss, and Life@MIT
When I came to MIT as a freshman more than four years ago, I was excited for the challenge. One of the first things I heard at MIT was the oft-repeated parable about the bell curve, or, as we engineers might call it, a normal distribution. I forget who told me it first. Perhaps it was my freshman advisor, but it goes something like this: “If you were to put every student on a bell curve, MIT accepts only the highest one percent. You’re used to being in that top one percent, but now that you’re here, that curve starts all over. You won’t always be the best. You won’t always even be average.”
Talk Nerdy to Me
Since the fourth grade, I’ve needed glasses — but I didn’t start wearing them until the fifth grade.
Squid vs. Whale
We need to talk. The status quo has to end. We can’t keep sneaking out to the Four Seasons on Thursdays while I’m pretending to take my son to Little League. I’m an important person and the press have been stalking my SUV since last Tuesday. If we keep up this steamy love affair, sooner or later it’ll explode all over the papers.
Brouhaha Rhythm
Recent quasi-sporting events have led me to ponder why we root for underdogs. They are the independents in life’s many arenas, from the cultural to the entrepreneurial to the athletic.
Talk Nerdy To Me
On the way back to Boston for this summer, I lost my MacBook. Yes, I am careless enough to leave a laptop in a cab. In my defense, I flew back with my cat, Duke, and, having put my laptop underneath his carrier, I was more concerned about getting Duke situated than making sure I had everything.
GADGET REVIEW Bippity Boppity Bing: Microsoft’s New Thingamabob Doesn’t Quite Do the Job
And maybe it never will.
Gadget Review
<b>What it is:</b> Apple’s newest iPod Shuffle, a portable music player that holds 4 gigabytes of songs (about 72 hours, more than a thousand songs).
Sidebar: We Shot It
We lost our first iPod Shuffle. To keep the second one from getting away, we decided to shoot it. As it turned out, the iPod’s lightweight aluminum case proved no defense against an expert marksman’s rifle.
Brouhaha Rhythm
Coming home for the summer from MIT has been a time-honored tradition for me, assuming two years is sufficient to establish a tradition. As lovely as I hear Boston gets in the summertime, there’s too much waiting for me at home — family, friends, a significant other, and a job — for me to stay. Assuming, therefore, that going home would be my first and only choice for my summer plans, it logically followed that I’d have to bundle up the entire contents of my hovel and put most of it in storage, a process that consumed more time and more space than I probably would have liked.
Brouhaha Rhythm
I got my MIT class ring, or “Brass Rat,” last Friday, along with the other jewelry-inclined members of the class of 2011 who bought them, and I have to be honest, it’s taking some getting used to. I consider myself to be a non-aesthetically-minded sort of person (because it sounds nicer than “fashion-handicapped”), and an engraved beaver visible from orbit isn’t what I usually think of as a digital accessory. Yet here I am, staring at the hunk of metal on my finger and twiddling it back and forth like an indecisive electric screwdriver.
Talk Nerdy To Me
When I run into people these days, I sometimes get asked, “Are you still writing your column?” If you’ve been following, my articles, this term, have been much more sporadic, and it’s not because I’m running low on material. If anything, I’ve been having more sex rather than less.
Brouhaha Rhythm
Animals and I, historically speaking, have had a complicated relationship. I like most of them well enough, but I’m not really the sort of person that feels comfortable approaching someone walking their dog on the street, for example. I guess the awkwardness is mutual, since being approached and petted by someone who clearly isn’t self-confident doesn’t seem to appeal to the animals, either. (A note to the unwillingly single: that applies to humans, as well.)
Squid vs. Whale
They canceled pistol. Really? I know desperate times call for desperate measures, but times must be really desperate if the Institute’s last resort was to anger a bunch of expert marksman. These guys can shoot the clubs out of a playing card from 20 yards, and you want to make them upset? Check the endowment. We must be more broke than Harvard. At least Harvard only had to evict some of the most preeminent biologists in the world to save money.
Brouhaha Rhythm
Here I sit at Walden Pond, known to the literary world as the once-home of Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. Presumably, what was once a source of inspiration for Thoreau could also serve as inspiration for me, so here I sit with my pen and pad, surrounded by nature and awaiting my muse. Granted, I’m sitting in a van in the parking lot, but the parking lot’s surrounded by nature, and the van’s doors are wide open to admit the singing of birds, a cool New England breeze, and the sound of an ice cream truck playing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Yay, nature.
Ramblings From Hell
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how small I am — not only in stature, but in significance. I am a tiny person on a medium-sized planet in an even larger universe. In the scheme of things, I don’t matter. I am inconsequential.
Talk Nerdy To Me
MIT is full of numbers, from buildings to classes. We’re surrounded by them. Who doesn’t associate with some form of numbers? There are the ones that we always remember: our course numbers, our phone numbers, and our student ID numbers. And then, there are numbers that we choose to forget, like our “count.”
I’ve Got Brouhaha Rhythm
I like going to plays and theatre shows. It makes me feel cultured, the same way that going to movies makes me feel social and going to wild parties makes me feel sullied and vulnerable. I’ve always had an appreciation for the theatre, if only because it’s one of the most genuine forms of narrative entertainment out there. No CGI, no take two, no lip-syncing. There’s a great deal of appeal in the knowledge that each performance is unique, that the performers are walking and/or doing their high-kicks on a tightrope without the safety net of an editing room or stunt double.
30 Minutes with Prof. Gregory C. Fu 85
<i>S. Campbell Proehl:</i> Your lab focuses on asymmetric synthesis and palladium-catalyzed coupling reactions. Could you put this into layman’s terms for the general MIT population?
Take Back the Night
This week is Sexual Assault Awareness Week at MIT. I would like to encourage everyone to not only go to events, but to think about what an event like this means.