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The "main enterance" is Lobby 7, at 77 Mass. Ave. It actually has a name, the Rogers Building, but you're right that nobody uses it.

Actually many of the buildings went by name. If I told anyone I lived in W13, I'd get a blank stare. Tell them I lived in Bexley Hall, and they'd start making assumptions.

-A.C., MIT Class of '84.

The "main enterance" is Lobby 7, at 77 Mass. Ave. It actually has a name, the Rogers Building, but you're right that nobody uses it.

Actually many of the buildings went by name. If I told anyone I lived in W13, I'd get a blank stare. Tell them I lived in Bexley Hall, and they'd start making assumptions.

-A.C., MIT Class of '84.

The "main enterance" is Lobby 7, at 77 Mass. Ave. It actually has a name, the Rogers Building, but you're right that nobody uses it.

Actually many of the buildings went by name. If I told anyone I lived in W13, I'd get a blank stare. Tell them I lived in Bexley Hall, and they'd start making assumptions.

-A.C., MIT Class of '84.

You might take a look at this thesis work. it contains information about the developement of the xok monitor.

<a href="http://www.opensourcetext.org">California Open Source Textbook Project</a> (COSTP)(conducting pilot projects)

<a href="http://wikibooks.org/wiki/World_History_Proj ect">Wikipedia World History Project</a> (a beginning K-12 pilot inspired by COSTP and based on strict California State surriculum standards)

<a href="http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html">MIT's OpenCourseWare project</a> (a university-based open curriculum project)

California Open Source Textbook Project (COSTP)(conducting pilot projects)

Wikipedia World History Project (a beginning K-12 pilot inspired by COSTP and based on strict California State surriculum standards)

MIT's OpenCourseWare project (a university-based open curriculum project)

Actually, it looks more like the Gehry buildings in Düsseldorf, Germany, to me... and that's not very surprising, considering it's the same architect :-)

Hey, at least the W20 hairball never happened. It could be worse. (Wonder if it would have been called "Transparent Hair-izon"... heh.)

Hey, at least the W20 hairball never happened. It could be worse. (Wonder if it would have been called "Transparent Hair-izon"... heh.)

Why is the building "pretty ugly"? Because you say so? Ah, so you've studied architecture at length, have you? You're an expert on the aesthetics of the built environment? No? I didn't think so.

Its comments like this that should make it obvious what is wrong with today's architects. They are so bloody arrogant. They claim to have some special insight that the "common people" don't have. Well, fact is, those "common people" are the ones who give Boston its beauty, a walk through the North End should make it clear that this city wasn't build by a master architect, but by thousands of small additions done by people with little or no training in art.

It's really upsetting that people have given control of their environment to others. MIT's most famous building Building 20 was famous for having its design in the hands of those who live in it. Its "temporary nature" permitted its occupants to abuse it in ways that would not be tolerated in a permanent building. If you wanted to run a wire from one lab to another, you didn't ask anybody's permission -- you just got out a screwdriver and poked a hole through the wall.

Students loved that building. Not because it was built by some famous architect, but because everyone truly felt it was theirs.

Unfortunately, this is something that is lost on most of today's designers.

At least Hahvahd's dorm looks kind of normal... This is the infamous retarded sponge at MIT.

Ok, so as an MIT student, I've watched the institute blow its money on pretty stupid things. When I got here, Simmons Hall was finishing construction, and Stata was just a big hole in the ground. Simmons was the solution to overcrowding on campus, to build a huge dorm full of holes that can hole about 10% of the people a building that size should hold.

Now, there's Stata. It's pricetag was $283 million, up from a proposed $95 million. Even worse, Gehry's quoted in The Tech complaining about having to deal with "stupid things like budgets". I'm glad they managed to stop him at only three times the initial spec.

A final amusing tidbit about State. Many of the offices and rooms have these large, angled concrete columns. Most of them are covered with marking by construction workers, jotting notes of what wires to run where and which holes go in which walls. No one told the workers that the columns weren't getting painted over, though. Now these offices look like someone came in to graffiti the columns.

Ok, so as an MIT student, I've watched the institute blow its money on pretty stupid things. When I got here, Simmons Hall was finishing construction, and Stata was just a big hole in the ground. Simmons was the solution to overcrowding on campus, to build a huge dorm full of holes that can hole about 10% of the people a building that size should hold.

Now, there's Stata. It's pricetag was $283 million, up from a proposed $95 million. Even worse, Gehry's quoted in The Tech complaining about having to deal with "stupid things like budgets". I'm glad they managed to stop him at only three times the initial spec.

A final amusing tidbit about State. Many of the offices and rooms have these large, angled concrete columns. Most of them are covered with marking by construction workers, jotting notes of what wires to run where and which holes go in which walls. No one told the workers that the columns weren't getting painted over, though. Now these offices look like someone came in to graffiti the columns.

I see the tarball of your thesis files was last updated 21-Oct-2003. Not updated the tar, or are we slacking a wee bit ;) ?

JK, best of luck to you. Interesting blog :)

When designers attack!!!!
Details at 11.

When designers attack!!!!
Details at 11.

When designers attack!!!!
Details at 11.

Does anyone have a clue about what kind of research Richard Stallman does today at MIT?

I couldn't find him on eecs.mit.edu/people.html

True to Microsoft tradition, looking at the concept model here, it appears that Bill's building has already crashed.

Thanks folks, I'll be here all night...

- sm

your setting up a museum - but cant afford $3500? is it in your backyard or something? he must have spent his money on the building design

Is that you, Albert?

FWIW, I really like the building. I wasn't sure at first, but after having worked in there for about a month now, it's quite nice for the most part.

How fitting, the building is just as crooked as Microsoft itself!

Ha ha ha... :-/

The song "YATTA" will get into your brain and it won't leave. Except that in the hard disk video you can't quite hear it all that well.

Lienhard's course is available on OpenCourseWare as well, to go along with the posted Heat Transfer textbook. It's a very thorough read for an intermediate-level class, happy learning :-) Here's the link

Lotus lost the lawsuit to monopolize the look and feel of Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet software. A menu hierarchy is not copyrightable.

But conveniently available here.

The animated girl was done differently. They employed a similar technique to what was used in the Matrix. First a hard shadow is computed and then blurred. This gives a similar impression, but does not allow light to "glow" through an object.

There are actually quite a few other approximate interactive techniques for subsurface scattering, see for example the book "GPU Gems" by NVIDIA, or see here.

Yes, it happened, but not at UC. That is one of the famous MIT "hacks".

Actually I was thinking of The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs although the book you linked to seems very interesting as well. Has anyone read them both?

None of the readers seem to anything about it...

A few points:
* interpreted languages nowadays tend to compile to native code
* the compiler or run time is better at optimising than you are
* performance is not the same as scalability, a scalable architecture is more importantant than Mips (Mips are cheap commodities which you buy in inexpensive boxes from HP or Dell - if your architecture supports it)
* most real life systems have latencies (io, kernel activities, screen painting) which are only tangentially related to the grunt of your piece of code (see architecture)
* Erlang is uber scalable, designed to build reliable high performance systems. It provides its own (very lightweight) concurrency and means the developer doesn't use expensive OS process and thread spawning and doesn't have to worry about managing threads and synchronisation.

Check out the Yaws (yet another web server) versus Apache benchmarks for throughput and concurrency.

Erlang systems also stay up. The main BT telephony system only had 31ms downtime in its first year (see here (page 30).

MIT's IT track teaches a systems development course using .NET

And I second the education vs. training comment.

..or doesn't it just look like the MegaMaid body, floating through space ?

There are online methods using both the techniques you mention. The theory is usually a little more involved, so you're not likely to get a good tutorial from page 1 of google results.

Try MIT's open courseware (Machine Learning course) for some better explanations of this stuff, if you can handle the maths, ughhh.

This looks suprisingly like a technology developed at Nortel back in the mid-1990s called SoundBeam. Even more interesting: it would seem that the MIT Media Lab picked up the Nortel technology and continued to use it in their own prototypes through the late 1990s.

Nortel's brief description of the technology (available for licensing!) is here.

The description of the MIT Media Lab device as an evolution of the Nortel design is here. The full site about the Media Lab device that used Nortel technology is here.

Lots of people can "discover" the same physical effect. I'm just curious whether the MIT Audio Spotlight is another name for Nortel's SoundBeam or something different that they developed separately. If the MIT guys/gals developed their own, it's natural to wonder what its relationship to SoundBeam is, considering it seems to have been invented around the same time the Media Lab was making prototypes with the Nortel technology. Perhaps Nortel's pre-existing patent moots the "race to millions" that the Technology Review story implies. Regardless, the story is obviously a little more complicated than the Technology Review article.

This looks suprisingly like a technology developed at Nortel back in the mid-1990s called SoundBeam. Even more interesting: it would seem that the MIT Media Lab picked up the Nortel technology and continued to use it in their own prototypes through the late 1990s.

Nortel's brief description of the technology (available for licensing!) is here.

The description of the MIT Media Lab device as an evolution of the Nortel design is here. The full site about the Media Lab device that used Nortel technology is here.

Lots of people can "discover" the same physical effect. I'm just curious whether the MIT Audio Spotlight is another name for Nortel's SoundBeam or something different that they developed separately. If the MIT guys/gals developed their own, it's natural to wonder what its relationship to SoundBeam is, considering it seems to have been invented around the same time the Media Lab was making prototypes with the Nortel technology. Perhaps Nortel's pre-existing patent moots the "race to millions" that the Technology Review story implies. Regardless, the story is obviously a little more complicated than the Technology Review article.

"The fine folks at the MIT Sound Media Lab have come up with a cheap and practical way to focus sound: "A beam of light can be controlled in many ways - it can be aimed at one person in a crowd, spread to fill a room, or projected to create rich, distant imagery. We can now do these very same things with sound. The Audio Spotlight can be used in two major ways: As directed audio, sound is directed at a specific listener or area, to provide a private or area specific listening space. As projected audio, sound is projected against a distant object, creating an audio image. This audio image is literally a projected loudspeaker - sound appears to come directly from the projection, just like light." While still under development, they are testing applications of the device in collaboration with several of their media lab sponsors in preparation for eventual commercial release."

I also recall another story someplace where a guy was messing with a portable version of this in a mall, spooking people out. Apparently the sound appears in the persons head, but you do know exactly which direction it is coming from.

I can see the potential to harrass politicians and other public speakers right now. It is definitely an acquired skill to be able to speak without stumbling despite that kind of distraction.

"The fine folks at the MIT Sound Media Lab have come up with a cheap and practical way to focus sound: "A beam of light can be controlled in many ways - it can be aimed at one person in a crowd, spread to fill a room, or projected to create rich, distant imagery. We can now do these very same things with sound. The Audio Spotlight can be used in two major ways: As directed audio, sound is directed at a specific listener or area, to provide a private or area specific listening space. As projected audio, sound is projected against a distant object, creating an audio image. This audio image is literally a projected loudspeaker - sound appears to come directly from the projection, just like light." While still under development, they are testing applications of the device in collaboration with several of their media lab sponsors in preparation for eventual commercial release."

I also recall another story someplace where a guy was messing with a portable version of this in a mall, spooking people out. Apparently the sound appears in the persons head, but you do know exactly which direction it is coming from.

I can see the potential to harrass politicians and other public speakers right now. It is definitely an acquired skill to be able to speak without stumbling despite that kind of distraction.

"The fine folks at the MIT Sound Media Lab have come up with a cheap and practical way to focus sound: "A beam of light can be controlled in many ways - it can be aimed at one person in a crowd, spread to fill a room, or projected to create rich, distant imagery. We can now do these very same things with sound. The Audio Spotlight can be used in two major ways: As directed audio, sound is directed at a specific listener or area, to provide a private or area specific listening space. As projected audio, sound is projected against a distant object, creating an audio image. This audio image is literally a projected loudspeaker - sound appears to come directly from the projection, just like light." While still under development, they are testing applications of the device in collaboration with several of their media lab sponsors in preparation for eventual commercial release."

I also recall another story someplace where a guy was messing with a portable version of this in a mall, spooking people out. Apparently the sound appears in the persons head, but you do know exactly which direction it is coming from.

I can see the potential to harrass politicians and other public speakers right now. It is definitely an acquired skill to be able to speak without stumbling despite that kind of distraction.

Every decent university sees this. They encourage it. Hell most overbook themselves on the basis that only 65% of students stay past their first year.

To crack the Curse of the Bambino for the Boston Red Sox.

in a lot of higher-level languages, eg functional languages like lisp, haskell and ocaml. But not only debugging: in these languages you tend to write code that doesn't have bugs in the first place. No need for mallocs, no buffer overflows, no memory leaks. And if you're careful to write in a functional style, no "side-effect" bugs (variables that change value when you weren't expecting them to). For a language that started out in the 1950s, it's amazing how far ahead it was and still is as a development environment. This paper is a fascinating read, especially the section on Worse is better that describes why Unix/C won. And there are other languages like the ML family and Haskell. OCaml (Objective Caml, a descendant of ML) is as concise and elegant as python, but produces native-code binaries quite competitive in speed with C, and occasionally faster. I'm wondering why anyone uses C-like languages anymore.

in a lot of higher-level languages, eg functional languages like lisp, haskell and ocaml. But not only debugging: in these languages you tend to write code that doesn't have bugs in the first place. No need for mallocs, no buffer overflows, no memory leaks. And if you're careful to write in a functional style, no "side-effect" bugs (variables that change value when you weren't expecting them to). For a language that started out in the 1950s, it's amazing how far ahead it was and still is as a development environment. This paper is a fascinating read, especially the section on Worse is better that describes why Unix/C won. And there are other languages like the ML family and Haskell. OCaml (Objective Caml, a descendant of ML) is as concise and elegant as python, but produces native-code binaries quite competitive in speed with C, and occasionally faster. I'm wondering why anyone uses C-like languages anymore.

As a starting point, the WaveSEC homepage describes a way to secure a wireless network entirely using IPsec, without relying on WEP. In addition, for a small home network you can get away with static IP addressing instead of using DHCP, and in this way you can gain all the benefits of WaveSEC security without needing any software patches (since if you look closely all the software patches are DHCP related).

IPsec is supported in Windows 2000 and up, Linux 2.6 (natively) or 2.0 and up (with Free S/WAN patches), and FreeBSD; unfortunately I have no firsthand knowledge of MacOS support. The main drawback of IPsec is that it is a very complicated protocol and takes a lot of effort to set up. Making different systems interoperate with each other is especially challenging -- for this task, I recommend the Free S/WAN interop page which links to an eclectic pile of guides covering most of the possible combinations.

My own home wireless network is a mix of Linux and Windows XP clients all connected via IPsec, and I have much more confidence in its security than I would otherwise have with WEP.

Funny that they should mention that, being that Abelson & Sussman from MIT's own CS courses (available via video lecture make the comments that programmers who have to go through a planning phase before they program aren't real programmers. It looks like MIT made most of the programmers who have no respect for the software development cycle.

Why should any one believe your statement. Because you brashly proclaim "That's a fact." ?

I (and I'd guess I'm not alone in this) am not interested in your or anyone else's proselytizing about the evils of aspartame (or anything else for that matter). If you have strong, verifiable facts that back your claim please share them. Otherwise, please shut up.

Here are some useful links on the safety of aspartame and some of the more common "complaints" spewed about by people who apparently have nothing better to do.

A link from MIT

A link from Harvard with a reprint of an article from TIME magazine.

One, two links from the "evil" FDA.

And a reprint of an article from "The Lancet" posted at aspartame.net. These links were all from this page at snopes.com. That took me a whole 3-5 minutes to find.

I also found a lot of pages making claims about formaldehyde and brain tumors and multiple-sclerosis. All of the "aspartame alarmist" pages lacked links to any scientific studies, any papers by third-party organizations, etc..

Read a book like Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP). Not only does it teach you ways of doing things, it also teaches you ways of thinking about and analyzing those things, i.e. it should increase your understanding of the languages you have to work with. The biggest lesson the more academic languages have to teach has little to do with the languages themselves, and everything to do with gaining an understanding of the underlying concepts.

Has anyone here actually read Plato's Timaeus? The notion that Plato's account of Alantis is just a morality play doesn't wash. First, it is not presented as such in Timaeus. Second, it's not only Alantis who suffers calaimity.

"... Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. This vast power, gathered into one, endeavoured to subdue at a blow our country and yours and the whole of the region within the straits; and then, Solon, your country shone forth, in the excellence of her virtue and strength, among all mankind. She was pre-eminent in courage and military skill, and was the leader of the Hellenes. And when the rest fell off from her, being compelled to stand alone, after having undergone the very extremity of danger, she defeated and triumphed over the invaders, and preserved from slavery those who were not yet subjugated, and generously liberated all the rest of us who dwell within the pillars. But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island."

Besides giving the providence of the legend, Plato makes as explicit a claim to the legend's reality as the literary form allows. Mind you, this is only a claim that it's a real legend, not that the legend is real.

Anyone actually interested in studying the legend should stick to Plato and ignore the later accretions.

It is interesting to note that, taking Plato straight and work back to the date of Alantis's demise comes to somehere around 9500 BC, which is also the nominal date of the end of the last ice age. Which ended very quickly, and the ice melt increased the ocean depth by up to 200 meters (last I read). The depth varies because where the land was covered by glaciers, the removal of the weight of the ice results in a rebound of the land.

Since there's nothing in Plato that claims that Alantis was "advanced", there is nothing in the legend that is inherently implausible.

"The Stata Center... is composed of The William H. Gates Building and the Alexander W. Dreyfoos Building."

Looking at the GIF slideshow here, it appears that Bill's building has already crashed.

Suprised? No. Amused? Yes.

- sm

I'll let you know before you read the rest of my post that I'm a current student at UIUC.

I got into the PhD programs at Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, and UIUC--and UIUC compares very well with the rest of these schools. The only thing UIUC lacks is the publicity to go with the quality of research that happens here. On the other hand, this is a good thing since the students here can concentrate more on research instead of just working very hard at appearing smart like some other schools promote.

At UIUC, the professors are generally fairly young, which I view as a good thing. At the 'bigger' name schools you end up with a bunch of dinosaurs who may have contributed to the field in the past but are simply living off the legacy insteading doing new research. If you actually care about this, check out the UIUC research page at: http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/research/areas.html

I have personally found the AI, Databases, and Theory groups to be very impressive and have had experience working with them.

If you want an interesting comparison, check out MIT's new building.http://web.mit.edu/buildings/statacenter/ I took a tour of it, and the impression it gave me was, "Look at us, we're MIT! This building looks so crazy, we must be geniuses to work here!"

UIUC has a much more honest and less flashy style, which I find rather refreshing.
I do agree that most of the ubiquitous computing features of the building seem a little silly, but why not make your new computer science building a functional experiment in computer science itself?