Look! You can buy Professor Wilczek’s DNA!
I should have swiped his dixie cup from one of the many physics open houses I went to. I could be rolling in dough by now. Alternatively, I’ve been to a few parties and gatherings with his daughter. I could have easily taken her cup without much fuss– that’s half his DNA and half his wife’s DNA in one batch.
Oh, the opportunities I missed at MIT. It wasn’t about the education – it was about collecting DNA from Nobel Laureates.
Today I got an e-mail from the house manager at East Campus, announcing with great sadness that James “Big Jimmy” Roberts died last night at his home in Brockton. Big Jimmy was the night watchman, known for his size, his ability to carry on a conversation long after you were done with it, and mostly his big heart and love for the students of the east side of campus. Sadly, it seems that his heart wasn’t quite big enough.
I last saw Big Jimmy over the summer when I was crashing on the hall after staying too late to catch the T back to Davis. Hanging out in the kitchen, I heard the familiar jangling of soda cans and large lumbering footsteps. Those cans would eventually be cashed in and the money would be used to buy us ice cream, chili, or some other treat. On nights when I was busy tooling or otherwise occupied, those sounds generally meant that it was time for me to close my door and avoid a long conversation about EC gossip. But on this night, I hadn’t seen him in awhile, so I just waited for him instead.
His head popped into the kitchen to swipe the checkpoint and then he saw me. “Hey, Erin, long time no see! What are you up to?” he said as he leaned all of his weight onto the kitchen table, panting as he caught his breath. It was always apparent that walking up and down the stairs of elevator-less East Campus wore Jimmy out. After my sophomore year, they moved him to a different shift, presumably for his health. But he hated it and rose a stink with his boss. As a compromise, he was stationed at Senior House and allowed to do substitute shifts at EC on occasion.
Jimmy once complained that students on the west side of campus were boring and never came out of their rooms. If you knew Jimmy, you’d understand why that was a problem for him. He was always interested in talking to the students, even when they weren’t so keen on talking to him. He often said that the best way to keep the place safe was to know all the residents. And it seemed that Jimmy knew everything. What he didn’t know, he made up. Ever hear about the student who had sex in every bathroom at MIT? That was a Big Jimmy story, and completely untrue, according to the student in question. He used to threaten to write a book about all of the stories he had gathered over the years. I can only imagine how entertaining that might have been.
I don’t remember what we talked about the last time I saw him. Possibly some embarassing story about a former EC resident or what kind of mischief was happening on another floor. Maybe we talked about my prospects for getting a job. I guess it doesn’t really matter.
An era ended last night. Goodbye, Big Jimmy. We’ll miss you.
The MIT Mystery Hunt was this weekend, and as such, I spent my entire weekend on campus, most of it in 56-154. While it was a good clean hunt (no hinting required) and I got to see friends from out of town, this may have been the least amount of fun I have had during the actual hunt itself, due in large part to the fact that we had grossly overestimated our team’s ability. Well over half of our team members were first or second time hunters, an artifact of running the hunt for a year — freshman and most sophomores had never hunted before and the juniors had only hunted once and that was two years ago. A common complaint amongst those of us with lots of experience was that we were being stretched too thin — too many people wanted our help on too many puzzles at once. And as a result, I think we did a poor job of teaching the newer hunters good techniques. Had I realized before the hunt that we would have been so non-competitive, I might have focused more of my energy on being somewhat social and having fun, rather than spending all of Sunday angry about having to start the cross-sum over.
That being said, Setec wrote a good hunt and there were a number of puzzles that I really enjoyed working on.
Despite the stress (note to self: remember to eat during the hunt), I am looking forward to next year with the great hope that Phys Plant doesn’t fall into the same traps that we ran into.
While in the process of applying to graduate schools, I read a lot of papers (okay, mostly abstracts) relating to natural language processing. Including this one, which suggests that using search engines is a good way to determine how popular a given phrase is — the more hits, the more popular. With the amount of material out on the Internet these days, that seems more than reasonable, and I have in fact used that technique. But, unsurprisingly, it turns out not to be entirely failsafe.
When brainstorming names for our MIT Mystery Hunt team this year, someone suggested “Forgive Me Father, It Has Been Two Years Since My Last Mystery Hunt.” However, someone (possibly even Matt) suggested to me that that was the incorrect phrase and that Catholics say “Bless me, Father.” And so we did a quick comparison with Google, and determined that “forgive me father” was more popular, and thus correct. And then our team opted to not select my favorite suggestion, “Guillotined Priapism,” and “Forgive me, Father” became our name. But Matt McGann actually looked at Google’s results and it turns out that Catholic’s do say “Bless me”.
So… Bless us, Father, for we have sinned. We’re still going to be called “Forgive me, Father” anyway.
If you’re here from the Glee Club Scavenger Hunt, you really want to follow this link
Tonight I went to hang out with Breath, the birthday boy, and we celebrated by going to a lecture in building 32 (aka the Stata Center). Now, before you berate us for being nerds, this was a lecture on origami given by Robert Lang and I thought it was a fine way to celebrate a birthday. I mean, we got to make party favors and everything.
The first thing he talked about was the one-cut theorem, proved by Erik Demaine, who lectured 6.046 when Breath and I took it, even though he is barely older than us. The theorem states that you can cut any shape or collection of shapes that you want out of a piece of paper with only one cut, provided that you fold it correctly. To demonstrate, we first made a five pointed star, which is rather trivial. But the complicated finale piece (which took us about an hour to fold) was the MIT Logo. (The new ugly one, not the old seal — it wasn’t that complicated.) Breath took some pictures and movies, which I’ll link to as soon as he posts them.
And then came the really cool math and artsy stuff — this guy is amazing. He explained his disk packing algorithm and TreeMaker program that allows him to create pretty much any origami shape you can imagine. The artistry of it blows my mind. There’s the fish which is all one piece of paper, no cuts. If that’s not cool enough for you, there’s also the organ player — if you pull her head, her arms move across the piano as if she was playing it. She’s also just one piece of paper. In fact, most of his stuff is one piece of paper — his website has bunch of pictures.
He said he has spent up to three days folding one piece. I was tired after spending an hour. But the best part is that this stuff is actually applicable to the real world. They’ve apparently made origami stents for heart patients that expand after you insert them. It’s also been applied to airbags and telescopes. This is by far the coolest application of math theory I have seen in a long time.
Okay, fine… we’re nerds. Berate away.
Colossus of Rhode 
