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From MIT with love
Despite this meeting being incredibly boring, I have had good adventures. Wandering back towards the hotel last night, I stopped first at the Model Railroad Club (!) (TMRC) and then at good old MITERS, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kennyjensen's old hang out.
TMRC was, coincidentally, hosting their semiannual open house, and the railroad was well staffed by a collection of awkward geeky types, which I mean in the best, most heartwarming way possible. I needed ask only one question to launch a quite satisfying technical discussion, lots of people jumping in to contribute details, bits of history, and so forth; that question consisted of me pointing at some circuit board and asking, "What is that?" (The coolest bit is this: they take advantage of the lows in the pulse width modulation of the rail power to measure the back-emf generated by the trains and thus measure how fast they are going.)
I popped in over at MITERS, right next door, and asked exactly the same question. This time that was a home-made nitrogen laser, made of a scrounged furnace ignitor (essentially a 1:166 transformer), a fistful of diodes, two rails of aluminum, and some nuts and bolts. The kid handed me some ear protectors and set the thing off, and amidst the sparks and the ozone, there was a pulsing ultraviolet beam, manifested in a fluorescent green spot on a white piece of paper that'd been accentuated with yellow highlighter. ("Are we blinding ourselves," I asked.. "Probably not..." I was told.) MITERS is, in other words, the awesomest thing ever. Maybe I will start ROC ERS !
Christine is a trooper of a tourguide, exuding enthusiasm, lighting up with stories, and letting us into all kinds of places with secret keys. I was, of course, beside myself, as she took us down through the tunnels, to a drag party at one house, and through innumerable, amazing other MIT residences, all very Casa Zimbabwe but with the odd caveat that they have University cleaning service (a point that Alex and I found oddly perplexing). I did ask some people whether they knewkennyjensen. At first they said no, until someone said, "Wait, you mean [insert crazy nickname]?" and then it was clarified that, yes, they all knew kennyjensen! In particular, we met a few people from SQUID Labs, which seems to be a lab of MIT expatriates now based in Berkeley. So that was exciting too, though sadly many were in town for a memorial service for a TEP alum. In one dorm lounge we encountered a jacobs ladder, tesla coil, van de graaf generator [and these three items were duly set into motion], various other items i couldn't even identify, and an amazing x0xb0x (pronounced "zox box"—imagine my crazy Google-foo in dereferencing that utterance, ultimately discovering its local Lady Ada origins) which I would also classify as the awesomest thing ever.
I won't even attempt to describe it, really, except that I couldn't help but dreamily imagine my parallel life in the alternate universe in which I was admitted to MIT.
* * *
The TEP alum who died was Kevin McCormick, aka Frostbyte, someone, oddly enough, whose work I was vaguely familiar with. Story in the Tech (campus paper): http://www-tech.mit.edu/V125/N55/mccormick.html . A google search reveals many very touching blog entries. There is also, somewhere, a memorial wiki.
kennyjensen's old hang out. TMRC was, coincidentally, hosting their semiannual open house, and the railroad was well staffed by a collection of awkward geeky types, which I mean in the best, most heartwarming way possible. I needed ask only one question to launch a quite satisfying technical discussion, lots of people jumping in to contribute details, bits of history, and so forth; that question consisted of me pointing at some circuit board and asking, "What is that?" (The coolest bit is this: they take advantage of the lows in the pulse width modulation of the rail power to measure the back-emf generated by the trains and thus measure how fast they are going.)
I popped in over at MITERS, right next door, and asked exactly the same question. This time that was a home-made nitrogen laser, made of a scrounged furnace ignitor (essentially a 1:166 transformer), a fistful of diodes, two rails of aluminum, and some nuts and bolts. The kid handed me some ear protectors and set the thing off, and amidst the sparks and the ozone, there was a pulsing ultraviolet beam, manifested in a fluorescent green spot on a white piece of paper that'd been accentuated with yellow highlighter. ("Are we blinding ourselves," I asked.. "Probably not..." I was told.) MITERS is, in other words, the awesomest thing ever. Maybe I will start ROC ERS !
Christine is a trooper of a tourguide, exuding enthusiasm, lighting up with stories, and letting us into all kinds of places with secret keys. I was, of course, beside myself, as she took us down through the tunnels, to a drag party at one house, and through innumerable, amazing other MIT residences, all very Casa Zimbabwe but with the odd caveat that they have University cleaning service (a point that Alex and I found oddly perplexing). I did ask some people whether they knew
kennyjensen. At first they said no, until someone said, "Wait, you mean [insert crazy nickname]?" and then it was clarified that, yes, they all knew kennyjensen! In particular, we met a few people from SQUID Labs, which seems to be a lab of MIT expatriates now based in Berkeley. So that was exciting too, though sadly many were in town for a memorial service for a TEP alum. In one dorm lounge we encountered a jacobs ladder, tesla coil, van de graaf generator [and these three items were duly set into motion], various other items i couldn't even identify, and an amazing x0xb0x (pronounced "zox box"—imagine my crazy Google-foo in dereferencing that utterance, ultimately discovering its local Lady Ada origins) which I would also classify as the awesomest thing ever.I won't even attempt to describe it, really, except that I couldn't help but dreamily imagine my parallel life in the alternate universe in which I was admitted to MIT.
* * *
The TEP alum who died was Kevin McCormick, aka Frostbyte, someone, oddly enough, whose work I was vaguely familiar with. Story in the Tech (campus paper): http://www-tech.mit.edu/V125/N55/mccormick.html . A google search reveals many very touching blog entries. There is also, somewhere, a memorial wiki.
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On the MIT website(s) they really laud themselves for being so great, saying like "We're going to figure out everything about how the mind works because we've got all the best scientists doing all the best research at the intersection of all the relevant fields. (my paraphrase)" And they now even have this new Picower Institute of Learning and Memory (http://web.mit.edu/picower/). Here's an actual quote from that website: "What sets the Picower Institute apart? A faculty with the skills to examine the complexity of the brain from its molecules, to its cells, to its circuits, to the cognitive system as a whole—and to integrate those diverse findings into a coherent concept of the human mind."
You know what? I don't think so.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm certain that they're doing some really great research there at MIT, but they seem to be almost entirely lacking in cognitive psychologists. You can't understand human learning & memory (let alone the human mind in general) by focusing exclusively on the brain, anymore than you'd be able to fully understand Mac OS X by just studying the computer's processor, motherboard, RAM, etc. It doesn't matter how good of a team you have or what kind of technology they're inventing.
You could know almost everything about which areas of the brain are associated with what cognitive functions, how neurons grow and develop, etc. and still be able to say nothing meaningful about the mind. Cognitive psychologists study the human mind from an information-processing perspective, using experimental methods on things like mental states, processing, representations, input-to-output, etc.
There's just no way to leapfrog from understanding neurons directly to understanding the mind.
This seems to be a giant blind spot or something at MIT.
I'm sure most of the people there are very smart and doing great work, and there's no doubt that all the awesome new tech they crank out is exciting and potentially very very useful ( I did just find a really cool tech project that's relevant to my interests here (http://web.media.mit.edu/~vemuri/wwit/wwit-overview.html). ), but I just don't see how they can almost completely neglect the important role of cognitive psychology and still make claims that they're going to figure out the mind. I could just be missing something, or be mistaken; if so, I'd gladly be corrected.
And to say nothing of metacognition.
So anyway, I didn't apply there. I guess I probably didn't stand a chance anyway, what having gotten "only" a 750 in math on the GRE (I'm sure my 800 verbal counts for squat-nada). I've just heard ridiculous rumors that they don't accept anyone without an 800 in math.
So those are my thoughts on MIT for the moment.
BTW, those suckers at ETS (Educational Testing Service) are a bunch of thieving tyrants. Freakin' $111 to mail a piece of goddamn paper with my GRE scores on it to seven places! And this after I already paid $245 to TAKE their damn tests (general + Psych subject test), not to mention the books I had to buy to study for them. Bah.
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