Authors

The Consequences of Scientific Discovery

by Jay London on March 28, 2013

in Authors, Events, In the News, Media

It’s not often that scientific research is the focus of a theater production. But a new play by Professor of Theater Arts Alan Brody, Operation Epsilon, asks the question: What’s more important, the pursuit of scientific discovery or the devastating consequences that those discoveries can create?

Operation Epsilon is based on the true story of 10 nuclear scientists in Nazi Germany who were captured by the Allies near the end of World War II. The German scientists—who included Nobel laureates Otto Hahn and Werner Heisenberg and were known as Adolph Hitler’s “Uranium Club”—were sequestered to the English countryside, where they were under surveillance and their conversations were secretly recorded. Portions of their actual transcribed conversations are included in the play.

From Joyce Kulhawik (www.joyceschoices.com):

“The production features a who’s who of local actors, who convincingly take us to a literal time and place I didn’t know existed, but wrestle with questions that are all too familiar and even more relevant now. It’s a simple play, really, that very clearly delineates some of the key issues of conscience that trouble us today—scientific inquiry versus its potential catastrophic results.”

Brody, who served as an associate provost at MIT from 2000 to 2006, teaches courses in playwriting and theater history. His works include the plays Invention for Fathers and Sons, The Company of Angels, and Greytop in Love, and the novels Coming To and Hey Lenny, Hey Jack.

The play, produced by the Nora Theatre Company and developed in part by the Council for the Arts at MIT, can be seen at the Central Square Theater through April 28 and received a positive review from The Boston Globe.

From The Boston Globe:

“What makes Alan Brody’s Operation Epsilon so engrossing is the fact that even (the scientists) can’t agree on the real truth of their motives. Were they merely disinterested scientists, conducting research for a ‘uranium machine’ that would produce energy, or did they know all along that their work was aimed at developing an atomic bomb for Adolf Hitler?”

Many remaining shows include a post-performance talkback session between audience members and faculty from MIT and Harvard, including Institute professors Robert Jaffe, Jerome Friedman, Robert Redwine, Janet Conrad, and Brody. A discount offer (use code MITID) is available for the MIT community.

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Faculty Forum Online: Forging a New Direction in Climate Research, Feb. 5, 2013

by Jay London on January 30, 2013

in Alumni Life, Authors, Events, Research

Update: View a video of this presentation.

Research aimed at predicting future climate activity has primarily focused on large and complex numerical models. While this approach has provided some quantitative estimates of climate change, those predictions can vary greatly from one model to the next and produce doubts in the projected outcome.

In the next Faculty Forum Online broadcast, Professor Kerry Emanuel ’76, PhD ’78 will discuss a new approach to climate science that emphasizes basic understanding over black box simulation. After Emanuel presents a brief overview of climate research, he will take questions from the worldwide MIT community via video chat on Tuesday, Feb. 5, from noon to 12:30 p.m. (EST).

Register for this free event—Forging a New Direction in Climate Research—to receive the link for live viewing. After the event, return to Slice and continue the conversation in the comments.

About Kerry Emanuel ’76, PhD ’78

Kerry Emanuel

In 2006, Emanuel was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He is the author of What We Know about Climate Change, a book The New York Times called “the single best thing written about climate change for a general audience.”

A Cecil and Ida Green Professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Emanuel is a co-founder of the Lorenz Center, an MIT think tank devoted to understanding climate activity. His research focuses on tropical meteorology, hurricane physics, cumulus convection, and advanced methods of atmospheric sampling.

Emanuel received his bachelor’s degree in earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences from MIT in 1976 and his doctorate in meteorology from MIT in 1978.

RELATED

“The 2006 TIME 100: Kerry Emanuel,” Time
“An Antidote for Climate Contrarianism,” The New York Times
“Scientist proves conservatism and belief in climate change aren’t incompatible,” Los Angeles Times
“Hybrid Hell: Hurricane Sandy is a kind of storm scientists don’t understand well,” Slate

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From a Pig’s Bladder to Composite Microfiber: The Evolution of Sports Equipment

by Jay London on August 1, 2012

in Alumni Life, Athletics, Authors, Health, Modern Geekhood, Research

Men's Olympic pole vault records, corresponding with advances in vault equipment

At the first modern Olympics in 1896, American Bill Hoyt won gold in the pole vault with a jump height of 3.3 meters. Today, Hoyt’s first-place jump would not even qualify for the 2012 Games and is barely half of Australian Steve Hooker’s gold-winning 5.96 meters in 2008.

Among the many differences between the 1896 and 2008 events, Hoyt’s pole was made of a single piece of wood; Hooker used a pole that combined highly engineered carbon fiber materials.

To coincide with the London Olympics, an MIT-collaborated commentary in Nature Materials, “Materials and technology in sport,” traces how equipment innovations have impacted sports throughout history.

The commentary is co-authored by Kim Blair, a research affiliate at MIT’s Program for Sports Innovation, and Mike Vasquez ’08, MEng ’09 and Mike Caine, researchers at England’s Loughborough University Sports Technology Institute.

Tracing the history of various sports equipment like the skeleton bobsled and Olympic swimwear, the authors provides some interesting anecdotes, including:

  • The first soccer balls were composed of an outer leather shell and a pig’s bladder that served as an air containment unit.
  • Tennis racquet strings were originally made from animal intestine, with pig, sheep, and cow being the most popular.

The article pinpoints the advent of the technological infux in sports to the early 1990s, when financial, organizational, and competitive factors in sports and politics converged.

From Nature Materials:

As the Cold War drew to a close many of the high-end materials manufacturers, for example, DuPont and Dow Corning, started to consider commercialization pathways for their technologies other than for national security. Sport turned out to be a prime candidate for materials such as aluminum and titanium alloys, Kevlar, and neoprene.

Some advancements are not always welcome. Major League Baseball still requires a bat to be made from a single piece of wood. And when a microfiber composite basketball replaced the traditional leather ball prior to the 2006-2007 NBA season, players complained so loudly that the ball was switched back after less than two months.

More Olympic-related content on Slice can be viewed here and here.

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MIT Professor Defends Y Chromosome, Amuses Stephen Colbert

by Jay London on April 5, 2012

in Authors, Health, In the News, Research, Science

MIT Professor and Whitehead Institute Director David Page appeared last week on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report to dispute a recently prevailing theory that the human Y chromosome is headed for extinction.

Page, who research was published in a February issue of Nature, gave host Stephen Colbert a synopsis of the Y chromosome’s history. Using adjustable rubber tubing and a fabric-covered hair elastic as a visual aid, he attempted to explain the 300 million year evolution of human chromosomes to a comically skeptical Colbert.

From The Colbert Report:

Page: It turns out that, 300 million years ago when we were reptiles, we actually existed as males and females, but we didn’t have sex chromosomes. Whether we developed as a male or a female was determined by the temperature in which we incubated as an embryo.

Colbert: So, in the Garden of Eden, we were the snake?

The interview centered on Colbert’s main concern: whether or not the Y-chromosome would one day cease to exist. “I have heard for years that y chromosome is going away,” he said. “I heard that men would soon be obsolete and we would just be an all-lady planet.”

Page: We found that the rhesus monkey and the (human) Y chromosome carry the same genes…since all men and the rhesus are separated by 25 million years of evolution, it suggests that nothing much has happened to the Y chromosome in 25 million years.

Colbert:  So we’re going to be OK! Alright!

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You Never Know What’s Lurking Around The Corner. Well, Until Now…

by Jay London on March 28, 2012

in Authors, Design, Engineering, In the News, Modern Geekhood, Research, Travel, Uncategorized

The Media Lab’s Camera Culture group, led by associate professor Ramesh Raskar and postdoctoral researcher Andreas Velten, has designed a camera that can see around corners. The research was published in a March issue of Nature Communications.

The camera’s system is similar to a periscope but, rather than using angled mirrors to redirect light, it uses a femtosecond laser and opaque surfaces.  To peer into a room outside of a camera’s line of sight, the laser emits quick bursts of light (measure in quadrillionths of a second) against the wall opposite an open doorway. The light reflects off the wall and into the doorway, bounces around the unseen room, and re-emerges.

From geek.com:

“MIT Media Lab utilizes a laser pulse to bounce photons off surfaces to see what the camera can’t. If the photons hit an object, they bounce back and reach the camera. In so doing, the camera can measure how far away the unseen object is.

The unit MIT labs has used has a time resolution of two picseconds, which means it can detect how far light has traveled with an accuracy of 0.6 millimeters.”

Video courtesy of Nature

The system is repeated several times, bouncing light off different spots on the wall and entering the room at various angles before returning to the camera. By comparing the times at which the light returns to the camera, the system can deduce the distance traveled by the laser. The end result is a low-resolution three-dimensional image that shows the geometry of the unseen area. The current prototype takes several minutes to form an image, but the Media Lab team is working to reduce it to less than 10 seconds.

The Camera Culture team also made headlines in December 2011 when they relased a trillion-frame-per-second video of a burst of light traveling the length of a plastic bottle.

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After More Than 20 Years, 1980s Video Games Officially Hard

by Jay London on March 22, 2012

in Authors, In the News, Modern Geekhood, Remember When..., Research

If you ever felt guilty about spending too much time playing those old Nintendo video games and never achieving victory, you may have some relief. It’s official: those eight-bit video games were very hard, or at least mathematically difficult.

A research team that includes Professor Erik Demaine and doctoral candidate Alan Guo analyzed the computational complexity of classic Nintendo video games, including the first three Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, and the Legend of Zelda franchise. Their math-heavy study, “Classic Nintendo Games are (NP-) Hard,” discovered that many games fall into a category of mathematical problems called “NP-hard,” or equivalent to the most difficult solvable mathematical theory.

From SlashGear:

“Basically, the researchers mapped out every hazard, every bottomless pit, every flying enemy, every bullet bill, as a ‘city’ and discovered that, while there is a mathematical way to solve the most efficient route, it is pretty darn difficult.”

Look familiar?

The team, which also includes Free University of Brussels faculty member Greg Aloupis, asked one basic question: given the starting position, how difficult is it to reach the goal? They determined the games were very similar–each begins at a specific point with a task-completing objective –and are scaled-down versions of another problem, “NP-complete,” or computationally unsolvable. The NP-complete problems are simplified in the games, therefor reverting to NP-hard.

From The New Scientist:

“(It’s the) travelling salesman problem – finding the shortest route between a series of points – which is of real interest in the field of logistics, and also the knapsack problem, used in deciding how to allocate resources. So theoretically you could convert an example of either problem into a Mario level, and play the game to solve it. That approach would be fun, says Demaine, although it would probably be simpler to solve the satisfiability problem directly.”

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Meet Six MIT Authors at 4/30 Book Signing

by Amy Marcott on April 26, 2011

in Authors

On Saturday, April 30–during the MIT150 Open House –six MIT authors will be present for book signings at the MIT Press Bookstore in Kendall Square. Each author has recently published a book with the MIT Press, MIT’s renowned publishing house. Visitors are invited to come and meet the authors, learn about their research, and check out the newly expanded bookstore.

A schedule for the signings is posted below.

Schedule

11:30am
Alex (Sandy) Pentland
“Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World”
How understanding the signaling within social networks can change the way we make decisions, work with others, and manage organizations.
(Available as an eBook)

12:00pm
Sanjoy Mahajan
“Street-Fighting Mathematics: The Art of Educated Guessing and Opportunistic Problem Solving”
An antidote to mathematical rigor mortis, teaching how to guess answers without needing a proof or an exact calculation.

12:30pm
Samuel Jay Keyser
“Mens et Mania: The MIT Nobody Knows”
A memoir of MIT life, from being Noam Chomsky’s boss to negotiating with student protesters.

1:00pm
David A. Mindell
“Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight”
How human pilots and automated systems worked together to achieve the ultimate in flight–the lunar landings of NASA’s Apollo program.

1:30pm
Philip N. Alexander
“A Widening Sphere: Evolving Cultures at MIT”
How MIT¹s first nine presidents helped transform the Institute from a small technical school into a major research university.

2:00pm
Erik Brynjolfsson
“Wired for Innovation: How Information Technology is Reshaping the Economy”
An expert on the information economy explore the true economic value of technology and innovation.
(Available as an eBook)

Signing eBooks?

If you’re an eBook enthusiast, this might be the point where you’re asking, what about me?? Fear not, eBook readers; when it comes to book signings you have options beyond a)not attending and b)arming the author with a metallic Sharpie®. Consider:

Autograph, a free app for iPhone and iPad that accepts signatures and inserts them into documents. Unclear whether signatures can be inserted into eBooks.

Autography, an app that allows authors to sign a blank digital page with a stylus. The signed page is then sent to the reader electronically and can be inserted behind the title page of most eBooks. (Note: This app isn’t currently listed in the iPad app store. Stay tuned for an update.)

Looks like there’s still room for growth in the realm of eBook autography. If anyone has additional suggestions for useful apps, leave a comment!

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Holiday Gift Giving—MIT Style

by Amy Marcott on November 24, 2010

in Alumni Life, Authors, Modern Geekhood

Time for the second (possibly annual) edition of ways to infuse your holiday gift-giving with MIT-ness. Items below—in a range of price points—are either created by MITers or about MIT. View last year’s list as well.

Computers and Electronics

e-Readers
The Amazon.com Kindle, Sony Reader, and Barnes & Noble NOOK all use electronic ink technology developed at the MIT Media Lab.

Hyperscore music composition software
A program designed to teach students and adults how to compose music simply by drawing lines on the screen. It was created by MIT Media Lab spin-off Harmony Line, Inc.

LEGO Mindstorms

LEGO Mindstorms are based on MIT's programmable brick technology.

LEGO Mindstorms
These robotic invention kits grew out of a 20-year collaboration between the Media Lab and LEGO company. They are based on MIT’s programmable brick technology, where a tiny computer is embedded inside a traditional LEGO brick. With this technology, kids (or adults) can build and program robots or other computerized contraptions via sensors and motors.

Interactive fiction
Nick Montfort SM ’98, an MIT associate professor in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and a digital media producer, creates programs (sometimes called “games”) that let users type commands to a character who interacts with a simulated world. Learn more about and download some interactive fiction.

Mobile Apps

You might have to buy a gift card and then strongly suggest your recipient try these out. Or stand over their shoulder to make sure they buy exactly what you suggest. Either way.

Satellite Augmented Reality
By Adam Eisenman SM ’07—for iPhone 3GS and 4

Point your iPhone camera to the sky and find out which set of more than 370 satellites are visible above in real time using the Satellite Augmented Reality app.

Point your iPhone camera to the sky and find out which set of more than 370 satellites are visible above using the Satellite Augmented Reality app.

Find out which set of more than 370 satellites are visible from your current location in real time simply by pointing your iPhone camera. The app also includes a mechanical slide rule interface and provides pointing directions (azimuth and elevation angles) toward each of the satellites or any other potential geo satellite location. You can also input a virtual location and discover what the view of the sky would be there.

JumpTask
By Ryan Kabir ’05 and Alvin Liang ’05, MNG ’08—currently web-based, available for iPhone within a few weeks

Ask for small favors from nearby friends (or strangers!) without overly inconveniencing them. You can even offer a tip to show your gratitude. Pay someone $2 to put $1 in your expiring parking meter, for example. Or ask someone to verify a restaurant is open. These work best with location-specific requests.

Screen shot of the Locale app.

Screen shot of the Locale app. Specify conditions, including time of day, place, and more, under which your phone's settings should change.

Locale
By MIT students in the 2008 EECS class Building Mobile Applications with Android

Clare Bayley ’10, Carter Jernigan ’08, Jasper Lin MNG ’08, Christina Wright MNG ’08, and additional contributor Jennifer Shu MNG ’05 won grand prize in the Android Developer Challenge with this app. Use it to specify situations and conditions under which your phone’s settings should change. Like to automatically revert to vibrate in a movie theatre, or to let VIP callers always ring through, or to alert you when your battery is low upon walking in your front door. You can also add third-party plug-ins for more features. Astrid, for example, will remind you to pick up milk when you drive near the grocery store (among other cool things).

Crittercism
By Robert Kwok ’05 and Jeeyun Kim ’05—for iPhone

For the iPhone app developer, this manages support requests from within the app and offers a way to reply to users directly. Integrate it into your app in less than 5 minutes and take care of any bugs or complaints before they hit the app store as negative ratings. Go to the website to sign up for private beta testing.

Metal Detect
By Adam Eisenman SM ’07—for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad

Convert your device into a metal detector. Just calibrate and pass it over metallic objects and the dial moves according to the amount of metal detected. You’ll hear audio feedback too. Great for checking your person before passing through airport security or finding treasure at the beach. Eisenman has created numerous apps, including trackers for public transportation in various cities. Discover more.

IdeaTable
By Ryan Kabir ’05—for iPad

Organize tasks and ideas as well as identify patterns and relations in your thinking through virtual cards/Post-It Notes. Write one idea per note then shuffle and sort however you like on the table.

Alumni, have you created any mobile apps? We’d love to hear about them. Post in the comments.

MIT Press Books

Alumni receive 20% off any MIT Press title. A few of the most recent publications with MIT connections are listed below.
Becoming MIT book cover
Becoming MIT: Moments of Decision
Edited by David Kaiser, MIT associate professor of science, technology, and society

The evolution of MIT, from William Barton Rogers’s novel laboratory-based system of instruction to today’s pioneering research, as seen in a series of crucial decisions over the years.

Operations Rules: Delivering Customer Value through Flexible Operations
By David Simchi-Levi, MIT professor of engineering systems and civil engineering

Simchi-Levi, considered one of the premier thought leaders in supply chain management, offers a set of rules that will help managers achieve dramatic improvements in operations performance.

Reinventing the Automobile: Personal Urban Mobility for the 21st Century
By (the late) William J. Mitchell, former dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning; Christopher E. Borroni-Bird; and Lawrence D. Burns

Explores how to leave behind unwieldy, gas-guzzling, carbon-dioxide-emitting vehicles for cars that are green, smart, connected, and fun. Mitchell, who pioneered urban designs for networked “smart” cities and helped oversee an ambitious building program that transformed MIT’s physical campus, died at age 65 on June 11, 2010, after a long battle with cancer.

Looking for other books by members of the MIT community? Find a list the Atlantic website deemed part of the Tech Canon.

Arts and Crafts

Photomosaics
While at MIT, Robert Silvers SM ’96 invented the process of using thousands of tiny photographs to create a larger image and has since displayed his artwork worldwide. The American Spirit poster replicates a Time/Life cover of the Statue of Liberty. Books include his original artworks, a Disney collection, and portraits.

Origami T-shirts
Origami master Brian Chan ’02, SM ’04, PhD ’09 also creates 2-D art and metalwork. Buy some origami-themed T-shirts he designed. View more of his work.

Money

Of course, when all else fails or you procrastinated so long that not even the most expedited shipping will deliver the present in time, money works. Douglas Crane MBA ’98 is VP of family owned Crane & Co. cotton papers, which has continuously supplied the United States Treasury with its currency paper—and an evolving array of embedded security features—since 1879.

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Are These the Seminal Tech Books?

by Amy Marcott on October 1, 2010

in Alumni Life, Authors, In the News, Research

Recently on The Atlantic website, Senior Editor Alexis Madrigal offered up a list of 50 classical works concerning technology. The Tech Canon he calls them. Not surprisingly, several of the books were either written by or are about members of the MIT community. The canon covers a range of topics, including the history and implications of scientific advancements, marketing, design, networks, cyberculture, and artificial intelligence.

Madrigal and other editors compiled the list using more than 200 suggestions from tech writers and scholars on Twitter. Though he says the rankings are “approaching arbitrary,” I included them anyway. Quoted passages are from the Atlantic’s write-ups. And in case you find the list lacking or missed the call for ideas on Twitter, they’re taking suggestions for round two.

#46—Don Norman ’57, The Design of Everyday Things
Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things“Don Norman’s case for rethinking the way things are constructed to better serve people is a landmark in industrial design. He codified tenets of user-centered design that have become standard practice not just in designing stuff but digital interfaces.” Norman, who received a degree in electrical engineering and computer science, is cofounder of the Nielsen Norman Group, retired Northwestern University professor, former VP of Apple Computer, and columnist for the design website Core77. His latest book, Living with Complexity, will be published by the MIT Press this month.

#41—Stewart Brand, The Media Lab
Brand, who founded the first Hackers Conference, observed cutting-edge research at the Media Lab for three months in 1986 and penned this book.

#33—Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
Levy’s book looks at how the hacker culture and ethic evolved, starting with the early mainframe hackers at MIT in the 1950s and 1960s.

#32—Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture
“Fred Turner’s scholarly treatment tells the story of the rise of digital utopianism. Turner focuses on Stewart Brand, editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and a Bay Area luminary in early computing culture. If you want to know where digital culture received its peculiarly libertarian and funky texture, this is the book to read.” Now an associate professor at Stanford, Turner once taught communication at the Sloan School of Management.

#14—Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden
“Leo Marx’s literary treatment of the introduction of the machine into American life and letters is a foundational work in American history” and “shows that the internal conflicts Americans feel about the way technology allows us to transform the world have roots stretching back to the dawn of industrialization.” Marx is senior lecturer and professor emeritus in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society.

#8—Vannevar Bush EGD ’16, “As We May Think”Vannevar Bush's article "As We May Think"
In July 1945, 30 years before the invention of the personal computer and 50 years before the birth of the public World Wide Web, Vannevar Bush wrote this article for the Atlantic Monthly and proposed his idea for the Memex machine. The device was to be a way to sort through vast amounts of information—essentially describing modern hyperlinks. Bush wore many hats at MIT: he was a professor, VP, School of Engineering dean, MIT Corporation chair, and, of course, is the namesake of the Bush Room.

#7—Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor
In this book, published 25 years ago, political scientist Langdon Winner “points out that while we fight tooth-and-nail over the paper Constitution, the equally life-shaping technical constitution of the nation is perceived as beyond the reach of social control.” Winner was an assistant professor at MIT for a time.

#5—Thomas Hughes, Networks of Power
“Thomas Hughes is perhaps the foremost historian of technology in the world,” and in this book, he presents “the most comprehensive account of ‘how the west was wired,’ [using] electrification as a test case for a new general theory of technological system building.” His work has informed examinations of how networks such at the Internet or railroads have developed. Hughes is a distinguished visiting professor of the history of technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society

#3—Norbert Wiener HM, Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine
A child prodigy who studied philosophy and zoology and received a PhD in math from Harvard, Norbert Wiener helped “elaborate and standardize the connections between systems of any kind, whether mathematical fictions or complex societies of organic animals.” Wiener taught mathematics for many years at MIT and eventually became an honorary member of the Alumni Association.

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Buzz Cuts a Rug on Dancing with the Stars

by Amy Marcott on March 19, 2010

in Authors, In the News, Modern Geekhood, Space

Buzz Aldrin in his astronaut days and now his dancing days.

Left: Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin takes photos during training on July 1, 1969. Photo: NASA Kennedy Space Center. Right: Aldrin rehearses with dance partner Ashly Costa. A typical session in the studio is three-and-a-half to four hours. Photo: ABC/Rick Rowell.

A competitive nature propelled Buzz Aldrin ScD ’63 into his career as an astronaut, and it’s that same spirit he’s taking with him on his next venture, as a contestant on ABC’s Dancing with the Stars (DWTS), premiering this Monday, March 22. Aldrin has already sized up his competition, targeting none other than Olympic figure skating gold medalist Evan Lysacek as his most formidable challenge.

“If you take [Lysacek's] age and multiply by three, it’s still eight years younger than me,” Aldrin says. But he’s not daunted. For relaxation, the octogenarian scuba dives and downhill skis (which he took up at age 50) and continues exploring other non-celestial worlds: Antarctica, the Titanic ruins two-and-a-half miles below the ocean surface, the North Pole on a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker. “This dude, for an 80 year old—he could probably bench-press me if he wanted to,” Lysacek told Access Hollywood.”

And let’s not forget that Aldrin brings something to the competition no other dancer does. An MIT degree. What exactly does that afford him? “Concentration, orderly thinking, memory, integrated thinking of transitions from one step to another,…an appreciation for the bigger picture” he says. “I learned all of those things at MIT.”

Buzz Aldrin dancing with partner Ashly Costa for the premier of Dancing with the Stars.

Photo: ABC/Rick Rowell.

On being hip
Dancing on a reality show is not Aldrin’s first foray into pop culture. You might actually be surprised to learn how visible he is. He’s performed in a rap video with Snoop Dogg and others (view the performance or see the making-of video at the end of this post—it’s hilarious); guest-starred in episodes of The Simpsons, Numb3rs, Sesame Street, 30 Rock (airing May 6), and more; will soon release an iPhone app; launched a space brand, Rocket Hero, that’s been licensed by electronics, toys, science-edutainment, and apparel companies, like Nike for a skate shoe; is the inspiration behind Disney’s Toy Story character Buzz Lightyear; and served as the icon for MTV’s original station identification and its video music award, the Moonman (originally called the Buzzy). MTV is so indebted to Aldrin that it has given him its first-ever official endorsement of a DWTS contender, dubbing Aldrin the celebrity they most hope wins the competition.

Some of Aldrin’s many public appearances are aimed at promoting books he’s coauthored, of which there are seven, including two illustrated children’s books, two science-fiction novels, and two autobiographies. His most recent is the memoir Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon (Harmony 2009), written with Ken Abraham. [click to continue…]

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