Remember When…

The Technologists: a Historical Thriller Set at MIT

by Nancy DuVergne Smith on February 13, 2012

in Remember When...

The author will answer questions at the Feb. 21 book launch at the MIT Museum.

The author will answer questions at the free Feb. 21 event at the MIT Museum.

The Technologists, Matthew Pearl’s new historical thriller, is set at MIT during the Institute’s founding era. The book feels authentic—Pearl spent long hours in the MIT archives—and he has created engaging fictional portrayals of MIT founder William Barton Rogers, early faculty, and students including Ellen Swallow Richards. It’s also a page turner that makes MIT history feel personal, even against a backdrop of mayhem and mystery.

Dive into the book yourself at the  MIT Museum’s book launch on Feb. 21, 6:00-7:30 p.m. Hear a reading by Pearl, a bestselling novelist and Cambridge resident, and buy the book at the event or the museum store.

Inexplicable disasters—Boston Harbor is in flames after ships collide when their instruments simultaneously fail and a terrifying incident when glass windows melt out of State Street buildings—mean the police need help. First they turn to Professor Agassiz at Harvard, but eventually the upstart Institute for Technology takes a role. A secret group of students, who are about to become the Institute’s first graduating class,  step in to apply new-fangled scientific methods to untangle the mystery.

Students also illustrate the struggle between privilege and merit. The protagonist, Marcus Mansfield, is a Civil War veteran, former machinist, and charity scholar. His powerful character and insights illuminate the path to the solution. Technology itself is a topic—viewed with suspicion by the established university up river and labor unions who fear it will take their jobs.

Want more? Random House, the publisher, even offers a prequel. For 99 cents, you can buy or download a short story titled The Professor’s Assassin. Set in 1840, Rogers is still a science professor at the University of Virginia when a colleague is brutally slain and he becomes a man of both words and deeds to capture the killer. History and murder, oh my!

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DIY IAP: Celebrate MIThenge

by Nancy DuVergne Smith on January 27, 2012

in Campus Culture,Remember When...

MIThenge evokes ancient rituals.

MIThenge evokes ancient rituals.

MIThenge, among the time-honored rituals of campus life, is as close to sun worship as the campus community gets. In mid-November and late January, the circular path of the sun crosses the axis of the Infinite Corridor. The setting sun can then be viewed from the far end of the corridor, evoking the mysterious wonder of Stonehenge. It’s a little bit of campus magic—and it has rolled around again.

The next sighting of this seasonal phenomenon is set for this Monday and Tuesday. If you are nearby, swing by the Infinite Corridor and see it in person.

  • January 30, 2012: from 4:46:00 p.m. to 4:52:30 p.m.
  • January 31, 2012: from 4:47:30 p.m. to 4:53:30 p.m.

For others, here’s how to celebrate from afar.

Visit the revised MIThenge site webpage, originally prepared by Ken Olum PhD ’97, now a Tufts faculty member, and maintained by Keith Winstein ’04, MNG ’05, back on campus as a CSAIL grad student. Go the site for viewing tips, get an update on the azimuth controversy, and see photos from the November 2011 sighting as well as older images.

Read the Slice of MIT post to find out how MIThenge got its start. Hint: the phenomenon was only discovered, calculated, and publicized in 1975-76.

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NYT on Cambridge: “Easy to Caricature, but Hard to Dislike”

by Amy Marcott on December 29, 2011

in Remember When...,Travel

The New York Times travel section recently featured Cambridge, Mass., and highlighted the hot spots to hit with a mere 36 hours in town. They also created the abbreviated 36 seconds in Cambridge video below. Not surprisingly, an MIT favorite is listed among the must-see sites.

What are your favorite places in Cambridge?

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Blunders, viewed as aids to memory

by Patrick on December 4, 2011

in Classroom,Learning,Prof. Winston's Ideas,Remember When...

Professor Patrick Henry Winston ’65, SM ’67, PhD ’70

I was rummaging around in the attic when I stumbled across my notes and quizzes from my first term, fifty years ago. I opened up the binder and there it was: the dreaded 8.01 quiz #2.

When I was a freshman, I always wrote down F = Ma, force is equal to mass times acceleration, as the first step toward solving 8.01 problems. Writing it down got the formula into my visual field, which generaly is a good idea, because visual problem solving is an important contributor to problem solving.

Alas, on that 8.01 quiz #2, writing F = Ma got me into big trouble.

This was the problem: an open railroad car rolls along a frictionless track at constant speed, v. Then, it starts to rain into the car. What force is required to keep the car going at constant speed?

I concluded that each drop went from zero horizontal velocity to v instantaneously, but then I was baffled, not knowing yet about impulses.

I should written F = d mv/dt, because force is equal to the derivative of momentum, mv. Usually, mass is fixed and velocity changes, so F = m dv/dt = ma; but in the quiz problem, velocity is constant, but the mass is changing, so F = v dm/dt.

Simple, but I muffed it, and because it was simple, and because I was extremely sore at myself for muffing it, I couldn’t ever forget it, so I would never make that kind of mistake again.

Curiously, this year’s 8.01 quiz #2 also featured rail cars moving along a frictionless track.

I wonder if any of the freshmen will remember the problem 50 years from now. Probably just the ones who got it wrong.

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“Smoot” Enters the Dictionary

by Nancy DuVergne Smith on November 22, 2011

in Alumni Life,Campus Culture,Modern Geekhood,Remember When...

Olli Smoot '62 on the repainted Mass. Ave. bridge.

Olli Smoot '62 on the repainted Mass. Ave. bridge during the 50th anniversity.

The Smoot unit of measurement has long been a Google calculation, but now the historic MIT term resides in a more conservative venue—the fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary just out in print—and soon to be online.

In a recent NPR commentary, Weekend Edition host Audie Cornish notes that “Smoot” is one of 10,000 new words featured in the fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary:

“Smoot: a unit of measurement equal to five feet, seven inches, often cited when discussing the inherent arbitrariness of measurement units; after Oliver Smoot whose height was used as the basis of the measurement.”

Of course MIT folks know more history. MIT celebrated the 50th anniversary of the measuring of then-freshman Ollie Smoot ’62 with Smoot Day on Oct. 4, 2008. Activities ranged from unveiling a plaque on the newly repainted the Harvard Bridge (AKA Mass. Ave. bridge)  to parties and a performance by the legendary singing group the Platters. Read more about Smoot’s Legacy.

A Boston Globe article noted that other new words including “upselling,’’ “manboob,’’ “panko,’’ and “vuvuzela.’’ The dictionary, 10 years in the making, comes with free smartphone apps (also available separately) and the entire dictionary will be free online.

Scrabble, anyone?

 

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1939: MIT’s Goldfish Swallowing Champ

by Nancy DuVergne Smith on September 9, 2011

in Campus Culture,Remember When...,Student Life

Guest blogger: Debbie Levey, CEE technical writer

This fall, sushi is advertised on the menu of the five MIT dorms with dining plans for freshman and sophomore residents. However, raw fish of a different sort attracted big crowds on campus 70 years ago.

According to The Tech of March 31, 1939, Albert Hayes Jr. ’42 claimed for MIT the “new world’s record for piscine deglutition” and honored his class by swallowing 42 goldfish.  A large crowd on the previous night watched him in the commuter students’ 5:15 Club room as he exceeded the previous record of 36, set by a Northeastern student.

Fish gulper at work in 1939.

Fish gulper at work in 1939.

In an elaborate fish-by-fish summary, The Tech reporter noted, “The first few fish went down rather easily—with the aid of dashes of salt. After about the first 10, Hayes had more trouble, and resorted to copious drinks of his chocolate soda chaser. Every 10 that went down received a bounteous applause from the audience and on the tying and winning swallows, Hayes brought down the house.”

Clearly this was not an easy feat. Hayes eventually “resorted to gravity to aid him in downing the slimy fellows. He would tilt his head back, open his face as wide as it would go, and drop in the lively goldfish. For perhaps 10 seconds his body would seem to relax. There would then be violent vacillations of the Adam’s apple, followed by contortions of the esophagus. A burp might or might not come after the oscillations.”

Once he surpassed the previous record, the new Intercollegiate Goldfish Swallowing Champion “was fed the 41st fish by the president of the Class of 1941, John B. Murdock, who nearly ate one himself. The 42nd and last was dropped in Hayes’ mouth by Miss Ida Rovno ’39.”

Elsewhere in the March 31 The Tech, the champion himself wrote, “Some of my friends challenged me to do it. I thought it was a good joke, but after the first goldfish I decided it wasn’t…. The only immediate discomfort is a terrific strain on the throat muscles, which seems to be the limiting factor. Afterwards, though, there is a terrifically slimy taste, like a hangover, only different. All that I wanted to do was to prove that a Tech man can beat anybody at their own game. If a Harvard man can down four goldfish, surely a Tech man can do him ten times better.”

After all that, the glory proved ephemeral. The April 4, 1939, Tech noted, “Latest reports have the record in this contest as 89, a number that dims by far what was thought a ‘sensational feat’ performed last week by the Institute champion, Albert E. Hayes, Jr. ’42.”

 

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Go Way Back with the Wayback Machine

by Liv on August 18, 2011

in Campus Culture,Media,Remember When...

Remember how much you miss web design and formatting from, say, the late ’90s? No? Well if you don’t miss it, you might still enjoy taking a peek at it from your (hopefully more sturdy/less caustic) current web platform. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine allows visitors to browse snapshots of different sites over time, and http://web.mit.edu/ has been crawled 1,336 times—going all the way back to May 19, 1997! You need to see it to believe it.

This screenshot of an archived page puts things in perspective. Click the image to visit the page.

Let us know what you think. Was the web better ten years ago? Better now? With the flood of new apps for mobile devices, is the question moot? Leave a comment on our Facebook page.

 

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Claude Shannon: Digital Pioneer’s Work Still Reverberates

by Nancy DuVergne Smith on August 15, 2011

in Remember When...

Claude Shannon's clever electromechanical mouse, which he called Theseus, was one of the earliest attempts to teach a machine to learn and one of the first experiments in artificial intelligence. Photo: Bell Labs

Shannon's clever electromechanical mouse, Theseus, was an early attempt to teach a machine to learn. Photo: Bell Labs

As summer wanes, it is a lovely time for some reading that is part pleasure, part substance. Materials about the late MIT professor Claude Shannon SM ’40, PhD ’40—digital pioneer, toy designer, avid chess player, and amateur juggler—might be a good start.

Cited as the father of information theory, Shannon’s early ideas proved key to the redesign of the telephone system and the development of the modern computer. During WWII, he met the famous British mathematician Alan Turing, an exchange that exchange resulted in Shannon’s pioneering analysis of cryptography systems.

A New York Times review of a new book, The Information, zeroes in on Shannon’s 1948 work, particularly focusing on his 1940s efforts at Bell Laboratories.

Shannon, who taught at MIT from 1956‒1978 and died in 2001, invented the field of information theory and set its research agenda for the next 50 years, according to an MIT News Office article.

Shannon built this 3-foot-high mechanical W.C. Fields, which juggles balls by bouncing them onto a drum. Photo: Mark Ostow

Shannon built this 3' juggling W.C. Fields. Photo: Mark Ostow

His MIT master’s thesis was “possibly the most important, and also the most famous, master’s thesis of the century,” said Howard Gardiner. (Ever used the word “bit”?) You can read his master’s and PhD theses, see his Theseus Maze, and watch a 1961 CBS video on computer research and artificial intelligence citing his work—just go to this MIT Museum page.

Shannon was also a whimsical genius. The MIT Museum collected toys and other devices he created such as the first artificial intelligence mouse to navigate a maze and a mechanical W.C. Fields that pays tribute to the actor’s days as a vaudeville juggler. That collection presents the pieces to the public for the first time.

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Did My Brother Co-Invent E-Mail?

by Nancy DuVergne Smith on July 11, 2011

in In the News,Remember When...

An amazing five-part Opinionator series in the New York Times documents a significant piece of computer history at MIT in the 1960-70s. Filmmaker Errol Morris writes about his brother, Noel Morris ’65, in the series: “Did My Brother Invent E-Mail With Tom Van Vleck?”  Here’s his starting point:

“Noel Morris’s place in history? Noel Morris was my older brother, who had dropped out of MIT and spent most of his waking hours holed up in an apartment working at a computer terminal. This was in the ‘60s, long before there was anything close to a home computer. The name Tom Van Vleck was not unfamiliar. He was a friend of my brother’s who worked with him at MIT in those days. I called him.”

The series, which ran June 19-23, mixes personal narrative with the exciting early days of room-size computers, particularly the role Noel Morris and Van Vleck played in the earliest email communication. Part 1 begins with Errol Morris’s search for Van Vleck ’65 and some family history relating to his brother’s death of a heart attack at age 40. Part 2 reveals technical details such as how to tell one programmer’s work from another’s. Part 3 looks into the MIT Archives collection for documents and images of early computing progress at MIT. Part 4 continues the saga of Multics and the search for history.

Professor Robert Fano (left), the founding director of Project MAC (later the Lab for Computer Science), with Marvin Minsky, later of the Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Professor Robert Fano, left, the founding director of Project MAC with Marvin Minsky. Photo courtesy / MIT Museum

Part 5 concludes the series with interviews with Robert M. Fano ’41, ScD ’47, Ford Professor of Engineering emeritus, on starting Project MAC and his work on time-sharing computers in the 1960s. Then Morris turns to Van Vleck and asks about the origins of email. Among the questions to sort out are whether Morris and Van Vleck should be rightly cited as the first to send email (from one computer terminal to another) or does that title stay with Ray Tomlinson SM ’65, who was the first to send email from one computer to another over the brand-new ARPANET.

Van Vleck, who is not concerned about this question, says he and Noel Morris launched their e-mail communication on the only game in town:

“When Noel and I were doing it, there really was only one computer we could use. There was only one time-sharing computer, and so that’s what we did.”

Get interactive! See what it was like to send messages via the email program MAIL invented by Van Vleck and Morris.

 

 

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How MIThenge Got Its Start

by Nancy DuVergne Smith on June 30, 2011

in Campus Culture,Remember When...

MIThenge photographed in 2009; courtesy Wikipedia.

MIThenge photographed in 2009; courtesy Wikipedia.

As sun worshipers come out in northern climes, Slice is mulling a venerable sun ritual we can look forward to in the cold months—MIThenge. The twice annual event—mid-November and late January—is now a campus tradition, but it was only discovered, calculated, and publicized in 1975-76. And the discovery came from the architecture department.

Want to see MIThenge—the two-minute phenomenon that floods sunlight down 825 feet of the Infinite Corridor? Watch a short video.

A Sky and Telescope article traces the origins of MIThenge to the fall of 1975 when then architecture research affiliate Tom Norton heard comments about how sunlight occasionally flooded the Infinite Corridor. Curious about how far the sunlight could reach, he worked with two colleagues, Timothy E. Johnson and Sean Wellesley-Miller, who made the calculations a project in an architecture class. Several students found that a solar alignment occurred twice a year. Norton decided to publicize the event and created a poster that reported the phenomenon and included the student calculations and photography pioneer/MIT professor Doc Edgerton’s silhouette of Stonehenge. “MIThenge” was born when Norton plastered posters all over campus just before the next sighting in January 1976. Ever since, students have crowded the optimal viewing area—third floor of Building 8, looking west—twice a year.

That was not the end of the calculations, however. When Ken Olum PhD ’97, now a research professor at Tufts Institute of Cosmology, was working in his graduate degree, he saw the poster and noticed a problem with the numbers. He found an error in “rounding the azimuth to the nearest degree and having the corridor slant upward an unrealistic amount,” the article reported. His response was a new calculation that he posted in 1997 with predicted dates through 2100. Although there are caveats about those calculations, you can find the dates in the MIThenge website.

Learn more in the Sky & Telescope article—and mark the date for the next MIThenge.

 

 

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