Not your typical MIT students
Image by Ed Yourdon
While wandering around taking photos, I happened to notice a group of about 20 people out at the edge of the Great Lawn -- equipped with hoops and batons and ropes and various other odds and ends. More people trickled in to join the group, and each newcomer was welcomed with wild abandon ...
I had no idea what was going on, and finally decided to walk over to the group and ask someone. They explained that they were a competitive group of "spinners" (aka jugglers, twirlers, etc.) and that they regularly met on MIT's Great Lawn each Monday evening.
"Oh, so you're not MIT students," I said to them.
"Well, we're not," the fellow in the pink shirt admitted. "But I think some of our members in the past have been MIT students."
"Yeah," said one of the other fellows. "Why not? It's all just physics."
I had no idea what he meant, and decided I should just leave them alone and take a few more pictures as they practiced their moves...
Note: this photo was published in a Sep 5, 2010 blog, titled "Sunday's Thought for the Day."
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It was a lifetime ago that I stumbled off a Greyhound bus in downtown Boston, a clueless 17 year old kid with two suitcases that held all my worldly possessions. I dragged them out to the street (no roll-aboard suitcases in those ancient times), and asked a taxi driver to take me to an address in Cambridge that I had scribbled on a scrap of paper: 77 Massachusetts Ave.
"Aye," the driver muttered, in a dialect that never did become familiar during the next several years. "SebendySebenMassAve."
When he dropped me off, I noticed two things. First, enormous stone steps leading up to the entrance to an imposing granite building. And second, a long line of scraggly, sloppily-dressed young men stretching from the building's entrance down toward the street where the taxi had dropped me. Aha, I thought: I'm not the only one who forgot to fill out the official form requesting a dorm room.
Welcome to MIT.
I waited in line for two hours before being assigned temporarily, with two other equally absent-minded, newly-arrived MIT students, to sleep on mattresses in an East Campus dorm room that had initially been assigned as a "single" room to an understandably annoyed fellow from Cincinnati. One of the other temporary misfits, whom we immediately nicknamed "Filthy Pierre," had just arrived from Paris with nothing but one large, heavy duffel bag that he dragged into the room. Its contents consisted of miscellaneous telephone parts, which he dumped on the floor and kicked under the bed before wandering out of the room to explore Boston. (He had not showered in weeks, and he was eventually expelled for burning a cross on MIT's Great Lawn on Easter morning. But that's another story.)
Thus began my four-year experience at what many still consider America's premiere scientific/engineering university. That I survived and graduated is a minor miracle; and while I'll hint at the adventures along the way, in this Flickr set, you'll have to look elsewhere for the details...
I continued to live in Cambridge for a couple of years after I graduated; took a couple of graduate courses in AI and computer science, taught a couple summer MIT classes to innocent high school students (one of whom challenged me to write the value of pi on the blackboard, to 100 places, from memory - which I did), took full advantage of MIT's athletic facilities, and 25-cent Saturday-nite movies at Kresge auditorium, which always featured the enormously popular RoadRunner cartoons, and occasionally walked through the same halls and pathways that I had first explored as an overwhelmed undergraduate student. But then I got a new job, moved to New York City, got married, settled down, and began raising family. After that, I typically travelled to Boston two or three times a year on business trips, but never seemed to have time to come back to MIT for a casual visit.
But one of the advantages of a near-fanatical devotion to the hobby of photography is that you begin to appreciate that all of the experiences you internalized and took for granted need to be photographed -- for posterity, if nothing else. Some of my most vivid memories of MIT, which we took for granted - like the huge,red, neon, flashing/pulsating "Heinz 57" sign out on the northern edge of the (Briggs) athletic fields -- are gone. Some of the legendary professors and deans have died and commemorative plaques have been erected in their honor. And there's a whole lot of new stuff - mostly new buildings and laboratories, whose specific purpose is a mystery to me - that I just have to shrug and accept.
But the basic campus is still there. And the memories are just as vivid as they were, so many years ago. I can't say that I captured them all in this Flickr set; the photos were taken at sunset one evening, and dawn the following morning. But they'll give you an idea of what it was like, a long long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away ... and what it's still like today.
SUSPICIOUS DEVICES
Image by mreraser
** EDS NOTE: POSSIBLE OBSCENE GESTURE ** This photo provided by Todd Vanderlin shows an electronic device hanging beneath an overpass in Boston, Monday Jan. 15, 2007. The device consists of light emitting diodes on a circuit board forming the shape of a gesturing character which is part of a promotion for the TV show "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," a surreal series about a talking milkshake, a box of fries and a meatball, according to Turner Broadcasting, a division of Time Warner Inc. and parent of Cartoon Network. Other similar devices, planted at bridges and other spots in Boston threw a scare into the city Wednesday Jan. 31, 2007 in what turned out to be a publicity campaign for the late-night cable cartoon. Highways, bridges and a section of the Charles River were shut down and bomb squads were sent in before authorities declared the devices were harmless. (AP Photo/Todd Vanderlin)
2011 09 10 - 6332 - Washington DC - Combined Kit
Image by thisisbossi
My photo kit combined with my USAR kit.
I'd say I was 97% certain that nothing would happen the following day, but I was trying to read into the news reports, trying to think of what the governments' agents were thinking as they considered whether to release information to the public. My guess was that they had a pretty good idea who was doing what & where they were, and by releasing limited info to the public: they were hoping to perhaps scare or hasten the suspects into breaking from their plan, potentially opening themselves up to additional evidence & possibly additional clues into others involved. Or at least that was my psychoanalytical sort of guess.
But I was going to be ready, just in case. The only things left behind were my machete (better suited to jungles than cities; and a step above the security threshold of what I figured I could explain away if questions by police), my crowbar (the tool at the middle sufficed, and again: with the crowbar bigger than my bag it'd have been difficult with the police), my hardhat (too bulky), three pieces of wood (also too bulky), and possibly a few other bits that slip my mind at the moment.
All-in-all the following day went swimmingly; no real action to be seen apart from a few suspicious vehicles here-and-there. The only thing I ultimately used the kit for was a boost to my exercise and also to tend to six separate incidents of maimed children, victims of the gravitational attraction of limbs to pavement. I used my expert band-aid skills to tend to their grievous wounds. Next time I'll get cartoon-themed band-aids.
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