Banksy revisited
You know the dull wall of Building E38 (pink, cream, whatever) that runs between MIT Press and Cosi? The other day somebody had the audacity (dare I say, the good heart) to spray-paint two machine guns with barrels curved together in the shape of a heart. When I saw this act of vandalism, I smiled and nodded. For I have learned to appreciate this kind of art. Street art. And it’s thanks to Banksy.
If music is art, are too the instruments?
You may think of a painting as a work of art, but do you ever think of a paintbrush as one? What about music — you may think of musical pieces as works of art, but how do you view musical instruments? Are they just tools, or can they be works of art themselves?
Area Four’s student-friendly lunches
If you’re particular about coffee, you know about Area Four already — their shots are dense, their lattes are tiny and strong, and if, like me, you have a shameful preference for vats of the watery American stuff, they do a great job at that, too.
Closing the loop
Despite the fact that Looper’s entire premise is time travel, it’s not your typical sci-fi film. It is hard to give a summary of the film without unraveling the plot, which speaks to how intricate the storyline is. Without giving too much away, the film centers on Joe (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who is meant to kill his future self (played by Bruce Willis). Little does he know that his future self has a plan of his own to both stay alive and prevent future events.
Engineering miracles and unsung heroes: A guide to Mars exploration
By now you must have heard about Curiosity, NASA’s latest robotic ambassador to Mars. It has been making headlines for weeks, first with its nail-biting landing sequence, fit for a sci-fi movie, and more recently with its discovery of evidence of streaming water in the Martian past. Curiosity is the stuff geeks dream about: a largely autonomous laboratory on wheels, the size of a small car and loaded to the brim with the most sophisticated science equipment ever sent to another world.
Choose your own adventure, college edition
Many of us have fond memories of time we spent in our younger years thumbing through choose-your-own-adventure books. These novels, now known as gamebooks, were exciting because the reader was responsible for the choices the character made and could spend time exploring different choices and story paths. Zach Weinersmith, creator of popular web comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC), recreates and innovates upon this magic for an older (though not necessarily more mature) audience in the spacefaring adventure Trial of the Clone.
Art, and the age of man
If you have not yet been to Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, now is the time to go. Thanks to street artist Swoon (Caledonia Curry), the ICA, or at least part of it, is temporarily festive. Swoon installed Anthropocene Extinction in its lobby just over a year ago, and the effect is still as refreshing as ever.
Finding friends in robots
Frank is enraged by the idea of having a robot nanny; a particularly hilarious scene in the movie is full of cursing and dramatic quips about killing robots. To be clear, this movie is not The Terminator or I, Robot, where robots gain artificial intelligence and revolt against their human makers. Rather, Robot & Frank follows the arc of the friendship between Frank and the robot — if you can even call it friendship at all, since technically the robot cannot feel — and the heart of this movie is about a family’s difficulty identifying and responding to an aging parent. The film’s main conflict, similar to other Sundance Film Festival winners, is rooted in human folly.
Is greed good?
It’s always disturbing to see how quickly money (a lot of it) can persuade people to compromise their morals, and Nicholas Jarecki’s feature-length directorial debut offers a glimpse of this in the form of the glitzy, sometimes seedy, world of high finance. Arbitrage follows the story of Robert Miller (Richard Gere), a 60-year-old hedge fund executive getting ready to retire into full-time philanthropy. But, as in any Wall Street thriller, there are a few catches in the plan: Miller’s a fraud (he’s padding his company’s books with some $400 million of his friend’s money), and he needs to complete the merger of his company before he’s exposed. The stakes become even higher when Miller accidentally becomes involved in the death of his mistress, art gallery owner Julie (Laetitia Casta). A massive cover-up ensues, one that involves Miller keeping his family in the dark and enlisting the help of Jimmy Grant (Nate Parker), the son of a former employee and the only guy who he knows from the other side of town.
Fifty shades of ignorance (rebutted one by one)
Guy Harrison, one of the standard-bearers of the new skepticism movement, has written a book carefully classifying and then mercilessly shredding 50 very popular — and very wrong — beliefs. Ranging in topic from UFOs to the concept of biological races, this compendium of beliefs may very well be a “who’s who” (make that a “what’s what”) of some things some people get wrong. All the usual suspects are there — faked moon landings, Roswell, Area 51, Bigfoot, Nessie — as well as many religious ideas.
On the pillars of our craft
If you are reading The Tech, there is a good chance you have learned the basics of engineering at MIT. In which case, an invitation to read a book called Engineering: A Very Short Introduction might strike you as — mildly put — unnecessary. If you are the cocky type, you may even be tempted to declare, with a smile and a zinger (“Why don’t you go ask the College of Cardinals to attend Sunday school?”), that this book is not for you. But you would be wrong.
DARE to get high?
A time for experimentation, college life is rife with pleasures — legal or otherwise. Those proud graduates of DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) have already been introduced to the evils of drugs. Those who haven’t heard the stern warnings and strict admonitions can still be saved from the stroll down sin lane. Now, both can find a refresher course on the most pernicious gateway drug of them all.
Vehicles for everyone
Ah, late summer, when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of actually playing one of the dozens of games he purchased during the Steam summer sale. The Valve Corporation’s talent for making PC gamers buy more games than they can ever hope to play is a thing of legend, and this year I once again found myself in its thrall.
The good war?
Are we going to invade Britain any time soon? Of course not, their food is terrible. Are we going to invade Canada? Why would we? We already have Taco Bell.
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.