When the human-machine boundary began to blur
MIT Professor David A. Mindell PhD ’96 feels equally passionate about engineering and literature, and has the degrees from Yale to prove it. His obsession with the detailed study of the evolution of technology, though, is evident in Between Human and Machine, a twist-by-twist account of the personal, managerial, institutional, military and even political forces behind the field that came to be known as cybernetics, the modern fruits of which — including computers — have become the cornerstone of our technology and an inextricable part of our lives.
Ted delivers cheap laughs, Family Guy style
If you like to laugh, you should see Ted. It’s Seth MacFarlane’s (Family Guy) first try at directing for the silver screen, and he delivers on what he does best — telling hilarious vulgar, racist, or sexist jokes. But MacFarlane’s gift is also a curse, because Ted seems to skimp on everything else, making it feel more like a big-budget vehicle to tell the same jokes you can get from an episode of Family Guy.
Pixar’s newest heroine is no damsel in distress
Meet Merida, a spunky, fiery-headed young princess, and the first female star of a Pixar film in the 17 years the studio has been making movies.
Sunny summer soundtrack
Scottish singer-songwriter Amy Macdonald entered the US music scene five years ago with This Is the Life, but we haven’t seen (or heard) much of her since. It’s been a long wait for US-based fans — her second album, A Curious Thing (2010), is not readily available on this side of the Atlantic — but the recently released Life in a Beautiful Light makes for the perfect summer soundtrack.
The art of war, in charcoal and watercolor
Two days after the charter incorporating MIT was signed in April 1861, Confederate forces attacked a military installation in South Carolina. It was the first in a series of battles that would last four bloody years and decide the fate of a nation. Shiloh, Antietam, Vicksburg, Bull Run and Gettysburg are now the stuff of history, names that to this day evoke deep wounds — physical, psychological, moral — in the very fabric of America, many of which are still open. But there was a time when citizens on all sides of the war followed these names for breaking news, which often took the form of written and graphical reports in printed newspapers.
Everest, everlasting?
A visit to the art galleries on the second floor of the MIT Museum yields a pleasant surprise. “Rivers of Ice: Vanishing Glaciers of the Greater Himalaya”, featuring the photography of filmmaker-mountaineer David Breashears, successfully integrates art and science to paint a fascinating portrait of climate change in the Greater Himalaya region.
Old Alien DNA, new story
I had high expectations going into Prometheus. Ridley Scott finally took the director’s chair again to create a pseudo-prequel to Alien — one of my favorite sci-fi films — which he directed in 1979. Scott did such an amazing job with Alien, so how could Prometheus not be good?
A titanic failure of management and policy
The horrifying image of a muddy column of oil rushing incessantly from the earth’s guts into the deep blue waters of the Gulf is forever branded in my memory. As I watched in disbelief the live video feed from the bottom of the sea, showing the Macondo well vomiting poison into the ocean, week after week, impervious to the incompetent attempts of BP to kill it, there was one question that kept bouncing in my head: how on earth did this happen?
Religious writings, as poetry
I remember the exact moment when I realized some of Jesus’ utterances only made sense as poetry. The time was an evening in early January 1994. The place was the public square in Chitré, a small city in Panama’s countryside. While hundreds of youngsters rode their new Christmas bikes in the tropical summer breeze, I — at the time an 18-year-old devout Christian — sat quietly inside my father’s car, reading my Bible under a dim yellowish light. The version was Nácar-Colunga’s direct translation from the original Greek and Hebrew into my native Spanish. I remember the exact passage I was trying to assimilate: Matthew 6:25-34. “Do not worry about your life,” said the Lord. “Look at the birds of the air … Consider the lilies of the field.” And then the inspired prescription: “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow.”
Culture versus politics
I didn’t really know what to expect when I went to the Museum of Fine Arts to hear a talk by Marjane Satrapi. After all, I had only heard of her from a discussion in my French IV class that same week when we watched her movie Persepolis.
Return of the superheroes
The slew of Marvel superhero movies in recent years has culminated with Joss Whedon’s multimillion dollar brainchild, The Avengers. Each Marvel installment had a pleasant dosage of witty lines and heroic bravado, but when all of these characters come together, there is a little too much of everything. Still, the special effects, comical dialogue, and some stellar acting make the movie worth both the money and the time.
Mother, I’m hungry
Just a month before the end of the semester — and my life at MIT — I decided to go out and have a nice, stress-relieving dinner. On Tuesday we went to Hungry Mother, a tiny restaurant just in the corner of Portland and Bristol streets, in front of the Kendall Square Cinema. I discovered it by luck and since then I had always planned to visit it. What an amazing surprise!
Return of the superheroes
When I found out that Marvel was making a movie called The Avengers where they dumped all their famous superheroes together, I figured it was just another franchise film. Marvel films are known for their explosions, ruggedly handsome actors, and romantic subplots. After watching so many of such films, I anticipated the typical formula. While The Avengers did follow that formula to some extent, it also showed Hollywood how real entertainment should be done.
Enjoy life: skip the latter half of The Atheist’s Guide
The advice not to judge a book by its cover proves wise in the case of Alex Rosenberg’s latest tome. A fetching title and subtitle, which seem to fly out of the page from a Big-Bangish burst of white over the background of a colorful deep-space image, promise hours of thoughtful and imaginative reading about how freethinkers can enjoy life without resort to nonsense. It’s a beautiful, exciting cover, for what turns out to be a rather dull and overall underwhelming book. The book starts strong, by boldly stating its goal, namely answering the “unavoidable questions” in life. It also demarcates its audience: “This is a book for atheists,” we are told, for “people who are comfortable with the truth about reality.” It is certainly not for “people who believe in religion,” not even for “just doubters and agnostics” that are still undecided. No. It’s solely for those who “have moved past that point” and know for certain that “belief in God is on par with belief in Santa Claus.”
Is Schrödinger’s cat dead?
Dustin R. Katzin ’12 is a quintessential MIT renaissance scholar, whose impressively diverse achievements are a testament to the remarkable breadth of MIT education and simultaneously set stratospheric standards for the rest of us. A scientist and artist in one, in the four short years of college, Dustin has managed not only to complete a double major in physics and mathematics, dazzle his peers with musical artistry and stay involved in myriad other extracurriculars, but also to have fun while doing it. His crowning artistic achievement is Schrödinger’s Cat: a Musical Journey into the Strange World of Quantum Mechanics, a programmatic orchestral work that was premiered by MITSO last Friday. I sat down with Dustin to talk about music and life at MIT.
Dark humor, Dark Shadows
Remember being five and giggling about clumsy characters and silly scenes such as a vampire not seeing himself in the mirror while brushing his teeth, an orphan under a bed sheet trying to scare away a guest, or even a vampire chilling out with stoners before sucking their blood and perhaps inviting Alice Cooper to his house later that week?
Prints come alive
I’m sure that most of us are familiar with the “experimental” nature of contemporary art. While some of these works are stimulating, when I consider the great paintings from the Renaissance or the Impressionists in comparison to conceptual art and other modern art movements, I sometimes wonder if figure painting will ever “come back.”
Intrigue in Boston
Next House presented their self-produced musical Curtains over CPW and last Sunday, in celebration of the dorm’s 30th anniversary. Curtains, originally written by Rupert Holmes, tells the tale of the murder case that occurs in a Boston theater. The star of the show, Jessica Cranshaw (Tiffany J. Lin ’11), is shot in the beginning of her performance and a detective by the name of Lieutenant Frank Cioffi (Staly Chin ’15) comes to unravel the mystery of the murder. Baffled by the fact that Cranshaw’s costars and director were glad that she passed away, the detective puts everyone on his suspects list. In this play, there are relationship issues with cast members, rekindling of love, mother-daughter issues, boat shows, and newspaper critics from The Boston Globe!
Urine good hands?
Corporate profits soar. A corrupt politician is bribed into raising fees for a necessary service, at the expense of the people. The people’s protest is brutally suppressed by the police.
Putting the horse in front of the cart
A front page for The Onion dated November 22, 1963 reads: “Kennedy Slain By CIA, Mafia, Castro, LBJ, Freemasons.” I’d bet you a nickel that many people find that headline funny. I know it made me laugh. Although the assassination of John F. Kennedy is one of the most traumatic events in American history, the joke works because the reader is familiar with the barrage of wildly speculative and imaginative conspiracy theories that followed the tragedy, regarding the identity and motives of the killer. Yet most, if not all, of the parties mentioned above in jest have been proposed in all seriousness at some point as conspirators in Kennedy’s assassination in hundreds of books and documentaries. Such is the level of ridicule to which assassination theories have sunk in their efforts to seek closure to what is obviously still an unanswered question, and an open wound.