Shear Madness and People in Trees

Awesome DME day today. I'm one of the slower more careful people in DME, but even I am nearly finished by now. I even got this really awesome picture of me studiously at work, except when I say really awesome I mean totally staged.


Also, my team has been dubbed the Fantastic Four. There's four of us, we're team number four...it was destined to happen. We're even the right genders too, three guys and one girl. In retrospect, Teenage Mutant Ninja Engineers would have been a great name too, but I guess you can't have everything.

Anyway, in addition to our usual time in the lab, today we also explored some of the actual research laboratories here at MIT! We ended up going to three different labs - the Sloan Automotive Lab, the BioInstrumentation Lab, and the famous Media Lab! They were all amazing, but especially the BioI Lab and the Media Lab. I can't really pick between the two of them, because they are simply so different...anything and everything can happen in the Media Lab though. It's sort of like MIT's playground, and that's why I love it.

For tonight's entertainment, we ventured into Boston's Theater District to see Shear Madness, which is half-comedy, half-mystery, half-improv. (Yes, I know that makes three halves; no, I don't care.) Regardless of what genre you put it in, the show is simply hilarious - mostly through innuendo and double entendre, though they also made plenty of jokes about Boston, Britney Spears, and even MIT! At a specific point in the play the audience gets to interact with the actors, and Snively actually ended up getting into an argument with one of the characters. Needless to say, the other guy had no chance at all.

The great thing about Shear Madness is that the script changes frequently, and because it's part-improv it's never quite the same twice. I won't give away the ending, but the audience really does control some of the action, which is truly enjoyable. I saw the play once before when I was in Washington, D.C., and in my humble opinion Boston's version was much better. :)

After the show we all got some amazing ice cream from J.P. Licks, conveniently located right by the Hynes T station. I got a cone of Oreo, and it was hands-down one of the most delicious things I have ever eaten. Back on campus, I first ended up hanging out with some DME kids in their Baker quad. Then a couple other DME'ers wanted to see Simmons, so I took them up to my room and we ended up talking for over an hour.

Oh yeah, before I forget, remember that I mentioned people in trees? Basically, there was this amazing tree in the courtyard on Georges Island that four different people spontaneously decided to climb. And it wasn't an easy tree to get into, either. Although I would have loved to join my friends in celebrating our simian ancestry, I decided my interests would be best put to use if I stayed safe on the ground took some pictures.

Here's Jake, one of the most skilled tree-climbers in this part of Boston:


Diandra '11 smiles for the camera:


Counselor Dan '09 jumps up onto a low-lying limb:


There's been so much crazy stuff going these past few days, I can't believe tomorrow is actually Friday!

Welcome to MIT

It is currently just past two in the morning, and I could not be happier.

In the past twenty-four hours alone, I have soldered a robot's motors, visited Georges Island, played Ultimate and wiffleball, wandered through the Prudential Center Mall, eaten at the Cheesecake Factory, walked along the Charles, roamed through Boston Commons, and taken the T twice. I've also slept a little.

Typical life at MIT? Not sure yet, but so far it feels amazing.

I have plenty more to say, but being in DME is practically a full-time occupation, so it may be another day or two before you see me. However, be on the lookout for pictures of robots, Simmons, and people in trees. Yes, I really said people in trees. It'll make sense later, I promise.

Summer flavor

So today was the Summer Solstice. "Sun stop," for all you Latinists out there (me). Apparently, if you happened to be standing outside at (local) noon, your shadow would have been the longest possible. Ever.

However, I did not see my longest shadow ever, because at local noon for South Bend I was shut up in my lab, either cutting bone or slacking off. There's a lot of slacking off in my lab. It's kind of the culture.

Also, I definitely meant to watch sunset this year, but I didn't. Instead I was in my room, wasting still more time on my laptop. Which inevitably calls to mind one of my favorite scenes from The Great Gatsby, when the ineffable Daisy Buchanan utters these ageless words: "Do you always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it?"

Yes, Daisy, I do.

I love my laptop, by the way. I'll probably post an entry dedicated to him soon. His name is TIM. And in case you're wondering, no, I did not name him after the beaver who seems to share his name. I named him TIM long before I found out Tim Beaver existed. Ergo, in a relativistic sense of things, my laptop was named TIM before the beaver was named Tim. So there. ;)

You may also be thinking it's weird/geeky/nerdy/insert-adjective-here to name your computers, but really it's not. Computers have always needed names, for networking purposes and such. So my personal thought is, why not give them actual names? Especially when said name actually means something to the owner.

Other random stuff going on, today was my parents' 32nd anniversary. Today was also Harry Potter's birthday, and probably should have been the day Book 7 came out, but I guess someone decided that delaying it a month would be a better plan, commercially speaking. As if the book wouldn't break all the records anyway.

Bitter much? Yes, just a little.

(EDIT: It has come to my attention that Harry was not born on the solstice, but rather on July 31, also known as Lammas, which used to be the solstice but no longer is, thanks to the precession of the equinoxes. And in case you're wondering why in the universe I know about the procession of the equinoxes, I used to be an astronomy nerd. Science Olympiad forever, baby.)

Other random comments: okay, I actually do read Jess' blog, I was just being sarcastic in the other comments, as I am wont to do. I pretty much stalk the MIT blogs, actually. It's kind of a bad habit.

More exciting news: I got my FPOP decision yesterday. Quick explanation - FPOP is MIT-speak for Freshman Pre-Orientation Program - they're basically wicked cool explorations of one particular academic or social area. Anyway, I got my first choice, Discover Mechanical Engineering! Because making robots is sexy and we all know it. I even went so far as to create the Facebook group for the DME'ers - which I named "Robots Are Hot." Clearly I am a geek, but I'm having hella fun with it, as my California friends would say.

By the way, I am utterly surprised I actually have readers. Thanks for all your comments and such guys, I don't take it for granted...you make this actually seem meaningful.

Oh, one more thing, which is kind of embarrassing but I'll tell you anyway because you may find it funny. For some reason my internal clock has been completely off today, probably because it's summer and all the days sort of run together, like all the different flavors of ice cream in a big cone. Instead of getting Monday flavor, and Tuesday flavor, and Wednesday flavor, and so on, all I get is summer flavor...one big, sticky, undifferentiated scoop of day.

So the net result of all this was that, this afternoon I thought it was Monday, and tonight I thought it was Friday. Which basically means that I am probably going to hate getting up for work tomorrow because it'll seem like Saturday.

When did summer vacation get so hard?