tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54958470814419941382024-02-18T22:51:19.376-08:00The Blog of SticklesGeoff Baskirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05888775674568049611noreply@blogger.comBlogger130125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5495847081441994138.post-29359696368578522642018-11-04T12:15:00.000-08:002018-11-04T12:15:19.766-08:00Return of the NativesIn late August, students return to Boston to complete their higher education. MIT begins with Rush Week, which is a chance for freshmen to become oriented and upperclassmen to become disoriented. Like the Dropkick Murphys the classes start shipping up to Boston, and a school year begins (on the West Coast, students at Stanford, which operates on a more relaxed calendar, return to campus in mid-September, which is their summer).<br />
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Rush Week serves an important function at MIT, as it is during that week that the fraternities begin identifying their pledges; those chosen will have the option to spend their next four years within the hallowed halls of one of those Greek institutions. Those who are fated to end up in the dormitory system will declare their preferences and hope for the best. I was fated to live in East Campus with these guys my senior year.<br />
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By quirk of the East Campus dormitory situation, I ended up in a single room beginning my freshman year and never had a roommate until I got married, long after my college days had ended.<br />
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There is also a special group of students who become disillusioned with the social arrangements offered by the fraternity and dorm system and choose to strike out on their own, finding a residence somewhere in Cambridge or Boston to live - with their friends or a dog or a cat or who knows what. They are spared the joys of Commons and common areas, and can avoid human contact for as long as they choose not to attend classes.<br />
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Now, the means by which students get back to campus at the beginning of the year vary. Some travel by car, carrying their possessions (this option is generally reserved to students within 250 miles of the campus for whom this is not a major imposition). Some travel by bus or train. But many of us boarded airplanes for the trek back to campus. The year 1977 was still the Golden Age of Air Travel, when the airlines had creative ways to lose all kinds of money for their investors and students were reasonably assured of finding a favorite seat without having to pay an extra fee for it. It was also a time when checked bags were free and overhead bins were reserved for things like wedding cakes (yes, I did that once). These days, you pay extra for checking your bags or getting an aisle seat, and you're limited to one carry-on (whoever invented roll-aboards deserves a special place in Hell; the bags with the little wheels chew up all kinds of overhead space, which disappears usually by the time your seat number is allowed to board the plane). You can, if you choose, even pay to board the airplane in that special red-carpet lane (yippie-skip!). But when it comes to claiming your checked baggage at your destination, all citizens become equals in the eyes of God, and bags come off bag claim at the same slow pace for king and commoner alike. That has not changed much in the decades since I went to school...<br />
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The little vignette about Rosé wine-making actually happened to one of my colleagues in the consulting business when he flew cross-country. The airline may have been TWA, for which they were punished by having Carl Icahn as an owner - a fate worse than death.Geoff Baskirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05888775674568049611noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5495847081441994138.post-68414967088177885902018-11-04T09:37:00.002-08:002018-11-04T09:37:26.287-08:00The Agony of the FeetNot much has been posted here in three years - a function of a move from one residence to another, in which a folder full of strips disappeared.<br />
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But some strips got found that I had never remembered, including this threesome, drawn sometime in 1980. One of the effects of being on the once-a-week shower plan (weekly showers whether we needed them or not) is a baked-in stink. The Strategic Gamers were famous for parking themselves outside the thursday offices, often for 72 hours straight, and by that third day, they had begun to ripen into something resembling a Corpse Flower. Gaming was the most important thing in their lives and nothing could deter them. These days, there are people who spend their every waking moment playing games, but they rarely have need to leave their rooms or otherwise expose themselves to the outside world (and this new breed is nothing like the nerds with their board games).<br />
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Stinky feet, however, know no class distinctions, visiting rich and poor, bosses and underlings alike. There are various foot powders and deodorants that can be deployed against them, but feet tend to spend long days in shoes, so the aroma must always be contended with.<br />
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Or ignored, which is what creates cartoons:<br />
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I've never heard whether they ever graced the pages of The Tech - which is to where most of the thursday cartoons transferred after the newspaper folded in 1979.Geoff Baskirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05888775674568049611noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5495847081441994138.post-26769997537765549242016-12-31T18:48:00.002-08:002016-12-31T18:48:45.784-08:00Four Stars, thursday - December 31, 2016First try out of the box on getting some tunes written for this musical. Uploaded to SoundCloud with the assistance of Toxteth O'Grady. Enjoy!<br />
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<a href="https://soundcloud.com/toxteth-ogrady/12-strapped">Strapped!</a>Geoff Baskirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05888775674568049611noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5495847081441994138.post-31222947457823177942016-10-22T09:53:00.002-07:002016-10-22T09:53:33.505-07:00Four Stars, thursdayWatch this space for more details about the musical I'm writing.<br />
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<a href="http://stickles.blogspot.com/2011/01/consumer-guide-to-mit-men.html">http://stickles.blogspot.com/2011/01/consumer-guide-to-mit-men.html</a>Geoff Baskirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05888775674568049611noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5495847081441994138.post-48699737775048681062012-05-28T16:44:00.000-07:002012-05-29T07:15:03.843-07:00The KinorhynchaSome of you might be familiar with the fantasy world of Middle Earth. Today's kids have J.K. Rowling, who has made a fortune on the exploits of Harry Potter and his friends at Hogwarts. In our high school days, we had J.R.R. Tolkien, who had introduced us to Frodo, Gandalf and Gollum. They captured the rapt attention of teenagers everywhere, plus the likes of Yes and Led Zeppelin, with their journeys in pursuit of a Ring.<br />
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But for those of us who were even younger, there were nonsense poems penned by Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. Carroll is known for "Alice in Wonderland", but he also created a poem called "Jabberwocky" that began thusly,<br />
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<em>'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves<br />Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;<br />All mimsy were the borogoves,<br />And the mome raths outgrabe.</em><br />
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Carroll was perhaps more famous, but Edward Lear was no slouch himself when it came to nonsense poetry. He wrote and illustrated "The Owl and the Pussycat", and they set sail on a beautiful pea-green boat. Not to be outdone in nautical adventuring were the Jumblies, who went to sea in a sieve, they did. But the ultimate in nonsense characters was the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, whose courtship was documented by Lear...<br />
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<em>On the Coast of Coromandel<br />Where the early pumpkins blow,<br />In the middle of the woods<br />Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.</em></div>
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The Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo not only was the hero of Lear's courtship poem, but he even had a brief stint as a cartoon character on a Saturday morning TV show called "The Tomfoolery Show", back before the Power Rangers morphed into mighty and the Teenage Ninja Turtles had mutated (I know, when did Sponge-Bob's pants become square? Legend says it was the dawn of the 21st Century). This character was destined to become popular in a family with a cat named Bookalookle.<br />
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Anyway, in the intersection between fantasy and nonsense, we find science. Which brings us to the kinorhyncha, which must have livened up an otherwise boring junior high biology class many, many years ago. Look it up on Wikipedia and you get an explanation that it is a segmented, limbless animal, with a body consisting of a head, neck, and a trunk of eleven segments. Unlike some similar invertebrates, they do not have external cilia, but instead have a number of spines along the body, plus up to seven circles of spines around the head. Without cilia, it's hard to imagine that this animal moves at more than a crawl as it mucks about under water, but somehow it survives. Ask the question, "What's a kinorhyncha?", to the average mortal and you will get either bemused looks of confusion or an explanation that resembles the one found in Wikipedia. But ask a science nerd, and you're likely to get the following answer:<br />
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Which is exactly what it says in the textbook. Everyone knows this character should have had his own TV show.<em></em></div>
<em></em>Geoff Baskirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05888775674568049611noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5495847081441994138.post-80014940450780219122012-05-27T17:13:00.002-07:002012-05-27T17:17:23.456-07:00SenioritisTomorrow, May 28, is Memorial Day. This is a movable holiday that commemorates everything our armed forces ever did to keep this country from being swallowed up by foreign influences (unfortunately, they could not have foreseen <em>Citizens United vs. FEC, </em>which allows foreign corporations, including those dreaded Chinese, to take over our government by surreptitiously influencing our elections with their advertising dollars). The greybeards have returned on their Harleys to visit the Vietnam War Memorial and to cause traffic jams in other parts of town. The typical Vietnam War veteran is just now getting old enough to qualify for Social Security, which is another reason we fought the war - so that the Commie Pinkos couldn't take away our Social Security and our Medicare. We are, after all, rugged individuals who don't need government handouts; long as we still have Social Security, Medicare, the VA, the GI Bill and the various branches of the military to protect our property rights, who cares if we get hosed by the mortgage companies and the guys who make car title loans?<br />
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For MIT, this is known as the beginning of Senior Week. It is the week after Finals are over, when the parents arrive to see their sons and daughters receive their MIT degrees, which for us was a sunny day on June 5th, 34 years ago. The entire week is given over to celebration, pomp and circumstance (with or without Edward Elgar). I got contacted by the Senior Class officers (well, it wasn't difficult, since I was one) to help design the masthead for their newsletter. In 1978, we are still in the Dark Ages; no SmartPhones, no Internet, no blogs, no chat boards, no MS Word, no PC Paint, not even DOS. We didn't even have word processors, just IBM Selectrics; the Tech had some fancy newfangled computerized compositers that enabled them to lay out newspaper pages on a computer screen, but that was them. The Class of '78 just had scissors, paste and access to the copy machines in the basement of Building 10. And my services. The result was the Screamin' Beaver...<br />
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All the news we needed to know about what events were where was in this handy little four-pager. Plus there was information about the Class Gift and other things that soon-to-be alumni and their parents would be interested in.</div>
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We have long since departed; now, some of our sons and daughters are graduating (some have already graduated and are ensconced in the business world). After this, there would be reunions once every five years, where we would measure how much hair we had lost and how much avoirdupois our middles had gained. Thanks to the marvels of e-mail and FaceBook, it is possible for us to all stay in contact with each other. And to suck up infinite hours of the day playing Farmville.</div>Geoff Baskirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05888775674568049611noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5495847081441994138.post-60764049692309375332012-05-26T20:01:00.000-07:002012-05-26T20:07:48.931-07:00What's the Buzz?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Of all the jokes in the world, there are probably three or four commonly repeated types. Some jokes are based on the surprise ending or punchline, one that you do not expect. The second, for cartoonists, is the sight gag, which relies on an unusual, silly or ridiculous picture of something as the punchline. But by far the most common type of gag, for stand-up comedians as well as cartoonists, is the pun. The cartoon above is one of those, based on biological facts about mosquitoes. In this instance, it refers to the insatiable appetite of the female mosquito, which, as most biologists know, bites not because it is hungry but because it is pregnant, or rather is laden with eggs that cannot be fertilized without blood from a victim.</div>
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I just returned from the Texas Gulf Coast, a land where you can wake up in the morning to see a mosquito the size of a Bell Jet-Ranger helicopter hovering in front of your eyes, looking for the most convenient place to land. Sometimes, you don't even have to see them; if you hear a sound, clear and perfect as the C in the pitch pipe used by your elementary school music teacher, you know a mosquito has homed in on you. Mosquitoes carry their own variety of GPS onboard, and they know the exact coordinates of the nearest exposed piece of flesh on your body. You can swat all you want, but for each one you kill, two more will show up ready to draw your blood.</div>
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Incidentally, this is the sight gag - a big POW! followed by a ridiculous-looking divot in the wall, made, presumably, by the throbbing human fist in the picture. I conjured up that image on a warm, stuffy October night in Palo Alto when the windows to my apartment were open. Yes, even the San Francisco Bay Area has mosquitoes.</div>
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Texas has two varieties of mosquito. The freshwater kind hatch in any rain puddle and are fairly prevalent inland in the summer (which is a season that lasts six months on the Gulf Coast). They are small and fairly innocuous; you can usually swat them away and they'll leave you alone. But the salt marsh mosquitoes are big, ornery and will home in on you thirty seconds after you step out of your car at the beach. I think they have bands on their legs, which leads to them being referred to as tiger mosquitoes. You can swat at them all you want, but they only come back faster and fiercer. They have been known to range inland all the way into Houston, which is why you can always tell Houston schoolchildren - they're the ones with the mosquito bites all over their legs.</div>
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And fire ant stings on their bodies; the "far aint", as the locals call them, inhabit every pasture and playground. They're not big ants, but they are aggressive, swarming insects that overwhelm by sheer numbers and the ferocity of their bites. Their mounds are usually ubiquitous except when you're not watching where you're stepping; then you can end up with a rash of itchy ant bites in a surprising hurry. The "far aint" has not arrived in Massachusetts yet, which is a blessing, but its advance has been inexorable; supposedly it can be found in selected spots in Virginia.</div>
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Crickets can be found everywhere; they're even mentioned in the Bible. They don't swarm like ants or locusts, but they have been known to get into places and spaces from which they are hard to extricate.</div>
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I never drew a cartoon about cicadas; these large green noisemakers show up in Houston just as soon as the temperature hits 90. Virginia has what are known as 17-year cicadas, which show up in mass quantities like a Biblical plague every 17 summers or so, then disappear a month later, not to be seen for another 17 years. Unlike their Texas cousins, these are brown with bright red eyes. In concert, they can create a din like a jet engine. They last showed up in 2005. However, the green Texas bugs have started showing up in Virginia, just like the fire ant, attesting to the agreeable nature of the Virginia climate; their recent arrival is evidence enough to me of global warming. Another recent arrival in Virginia is the stink bug; a six-sided beetle that you will not notice until you step on it, at which time it will emit a noticeable offensive odor. With that, the entomology lesson has concluded.</div>
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But let's not forget our old friend, the cockroach.</div>
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</div>Geoff Baskirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05888775674568049611noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5495847081441994138.post-65093550490520335842012-05-11T12:11:00.000-07:002012-05-15T07:19:48.602-07:00It's Go Time!In the Spring of 1978, as I was preparing to depart MIT, degree in hand, a new game craze had begun to sweep the coffeehouses of Boston (or maybe just the Coffeehouse in the Student Center). It was called Go! and it consisted of a grid on a board and two sets of round flat stones (which meant it was a game for two players). MIT had seen its share of games prior to that (and we're not counting the strategic gamers). A lot of us were pinball fanatics, but that was a game of skill and coordination. Go! was a more cerebral game of strategy, in which players try to surround each others' pieces by placing stones on a grid; whoever captured the most stones when the board was filled up was the winner. Go! was not a novel game; a similar board game called Othello had been kicking around for a couple of years. But Go! was Japanese, and Japanese things were all the rage in the '70s (what else could explain the fascination with Pachinko machines?).<br />
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In addition, there were few gaming options that were compatible with the Coffeehouse milieu, which tended to be dark and given over to butcher block. It would be a few years before the first electronic games would show up, and at least a generation before gaming apps for iPhone would give us Angry Birds. Nintendo Wii did not exist, which contributed to the ennui of those late night hours. And there was no Farmville, which was something of a blessing. But there was Go! And there was coffee, which contributed to many a spirited game around the coffeehouse tables. Go! playing was as serious as chess was to chess enthusiasts, and many of the strategies that were used to avoid losing chess matches went into a typical game of Go!<br />
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The Go! craze probably lasted longer at MIT than it did in other parts of the country, and when it subsided (about a year later), students went back to playing backgammon, which was two sets of stones on a racetrack and was always popular. These days you can play these games and many others on your phone or your iPad, which is nothing like the real thing. You can always spot gamers (and texters) by the extreme calluses that have built up on their thumbs. And by the general unwillingness of most auto insurance companies to sell them a policy.</div>Geoff Baskirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05888775674568049611noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5495847081441994138.post-43348235843030808892012-04-29T18:04:00.001-07:002012-04-29T18:07:17.304-07:00A Little Siesta<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
MIT Students were a hard-<strike>partying</strike> studying bunch. That meant the number of hours devoted to sleep every night ranged anywhere from 6 to zero, and like Elvis, many of us wished that there were more than 24 hours in a day. Every so often, lack of sleep would catch up with a student. It's just that the timing could not be predicted. Fortunately, MIT had sofas. And the sofa in the common area of our dorm floor was just comfortable enough to snooze on.</div>
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MIT also had nice cushioning on the chairs in the Student Center library, which tended to encourage certain responses that were unintended.</div>
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It wasn't just humans whose sleep patterns got thrown out of whack.</div>
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<br /></div>Geoff Baskirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05888775674568049611noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5495847081441994138.post-12423806419710099922012-04-28T15:32:00.003-07:002012-04-28T15:35:40.055-07:00Squirrel Gods<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Ping-pong was a familiar pastime at MIT. We also created some interesting games that involved five or six of us running around a ping-pong table while hitting the ball to each other. We also developed a game called "fling-flong". Let's just say we were creative with our table tennis variations.</div>
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The ping-pong ball of choice for most of us was Halex. If there could be a premium ping-pong ball, Halex made it. Halex balls were favored because they were evenly-balanced, not lopsided. You knew that by the sound...and by the way they bounced. A well-made, evenly-balanced ball goes "tink" on the table. One of those cheap Chinese balls goes "clink" and doesn't bounce in a straight line. In fact, you can't really tell the difference between a cheap ball and one that is damaged.</div>
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It was easy to damage a ping-pong ball. If you stepped on it, it would either crack or it would crease, which is almost as bad. Once a ball gets creased, it is hard to get the dimple out. Not that there aren't those who will try. The thing to remember about ping-pong balls is that they are thin, delicate membranes enclosing a volume of air. Air, when heated, expands. And that membrane is stretchable. So you can heat a ping-pong ball in a way that will cause the crease to come out of the skin, but you can't heat it too much...</div>
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A ball in this condition is said to have elephantiasis and cannot be salvaged. The only sensible solution is to sacrifice it to the Squirrel Gods. Which we had plenty of occasions to do.</div>Geoff Baskirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05888775674568049611noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5495847081441994138.post-57166866092966168802012-04-26T20:30:00.000-07:002012-04-26T20:31:59.123-07:00Butcher BlocMIT has architecture. Architecture by I.M. Pei, architecture by Eero Saarinen, architecture by Alvar Aalto and now architecture by Frank Gehry (the Stata Center, affectionately known as Toon Town). The MIT Architecture Department is located on the upper floors of Building 7 and it has the distinction of handing a degree to the architect of Israeli settlement expansion - Binyamin Netanyahu. I took more than a couple of classes at the Architecture Department, but I determined in 1976 that architects were almost as unemployable as English literature majors and transferred into Course 1 (Civil Engineering).<br />
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To enter the Architecture Department, you had to ride up the elevator in Lobby 7 and stop at the message written on the wooden beams, "Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin". The upper floors where the architects hung out had looked like other parts of the Infinite Corridor at one time, but the architects had in the '60s decided to customize their space with nooks and lofts and gangplanks and cubbyholes, created with plasterboard and timbers, and decorated with graffiti (exquisitely Lee-Roy lettered and pithy to the n<span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span> degree), posters (hundreds of them) and Helvetica lettering. Architects in the '70s were big on Helvetica; it was a sans-serif font that was popular with advertisers, and it was clean and dynamic. Another thing architects in the '70s liked a lot was butcher-block furniture. It said rugged but polished, spare but elegant, and it reminded people of Northern California, wine and cheese. And it was comfortable, once you got used to it. Crate and Barrel was built on sales of butcher block items. Butcher block was the Birkenstock sandal of the progressives of the era. You knew you were in a liberal household if you saw butcher block furniture; it was like seeing a Curtis Mathes TV console in a household in Dallas.<br />
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Architects in Cambridge, Massachusetts, generally got their butcher-block knick-knacks and their Lee-Roy sets and their sheets of press-on Helvetica lettering from one place - Charrette's. The store took its name from the charrette, which is essentially a jam-session for architects where they all sit in a circle around a butcher block table, with four blank walls behind them and rolls and rolls of onion-skin paper and drafting dots, and they try to come up with a Big Idea. It took its pricing policies from the guys who sold Lamborghinis.<br />
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Charrette's was known to sell just about anything an architect could want, but there was one item they didn't have. It came in a cereal box and it could enable the user to reproduce a drawing by tracing the outline.<br />
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I've not been to Charrette's in decades. I've not been in Crate and Barrel, either, despite every opportunity (it has spread nationwide from Boston, like a virus). I don't know what I did with that Tricky Tracer (I suppose I could have reproduced some of my cartoons with it). These days, architects are moving ever so grudgingly away from sketchwork done with mechanical pencils on onion-skin to computers and AutoCAD. In fact, the divide between architects and engineers has been redrawn; the mathematically-inclined among us prepare our spreadsheets and our PowerPoints on Dells, while the artistically creative types flit about with those slim, shiny rectangular objects emblazoned with an apple.Geoff Baskirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05888775674568049611noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5495847081441994138.post-24965183148639786732012-04-25T18:58:00.000-07:002012-04-25T18:59:44.068-07:00The Sounds of SilenceI've written about stereos before, but I neglected to mention headphones, which are the last essential component to add after you've acquired the receiver, the amplifier, the speakers, the turntable and the tape deck (okay, this is 1980s technology - no CD player, no input from the cable box, no TV, no DVD). Headphones serve two purposes. If you live in an apartment complex and worship death metal, they help you keep peace with the neighbors. At other times they cancel out the outside noise and allow you to hear every sound your stereo reproduces. Bose has noise-cancelling headphones that are supposed to play back a sound that masks all outside noise and allow you to doze off blissfully. But for most of us, the headphones of choice were Koss products; I realize the techno DJ's all prance around with headphones from Dr. Dre, but they have those as fashion accessories. Koss not only cancelled the noise but brought it - in massive quantities.<br />
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Musical reproduction technology was made portable by Sony, which rolled out the first Walkman in 1980. The first Walkman was essentially a radio; later it was modified to play cassette tapes and compact discs. Towards the end of the 1990s, a new technology came out called DAT, but it quickly flamed out. Now, of course, there are iPods and Smartphones, and you use ear buds to listen to them; the early Walkmans had headphones.</div>
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I can't close without mentioning the headphones you find in the airliners. These days, they're padded like real headphones and they attach with universal jacks, but when stereo sound was first introduced on aircraft, the early headsets looked like today's earbuds, only they were attached to hard plastic stalks as opposed to dainty hairstrand-like wires. I still have permanent creases in my inner earlobe from listening to those cross-country. And a permanent dislike for anything by Olivia Newton-John.</div>
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<br /></div>Geoff Baskirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05888775674568049611noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5495847081441994138.post-15304039909392022812012-04-23T19:42:00.000-07:002012-04-23T19:42:55.563-07:00Pencils Down<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
I've taken many tests in my lifetime. Thanks to the wonders of multiple choice and passing grades of 70% or higher, I can now claim to be a Certified Planner, a Certified Member of the American Association of Airport Executives and a LEED-accredited professional. I'm not sure what it has done for me except add a good chunk of the alphabet after my name. </div>
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I'm certainly a better test-taker than I was in school (although I've frequently failed tests of my blood sugar). In those days, exams were important and a little unsettling. Exams at MIT were no different, although unlike high school, those tests were frequently open-book. There was a reason for that; MIT never tested you on how well you could memorize the material, it wanted to see what you could do with all you had learned. For that reason, a good set of notes was important - as long as you remembered to bring them.</div>
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As I said, MIT always tested your ability to use what you had learned. For that reason, the exams always challenged your creativity and your ability to think outside the box. It really didn't matter how good your notes were...</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH1EXx2_2v4AcrEKtfUfhaNCimr2iv6o41uHhm0EzfhyGWiLAyNRAtImoPnsXcFkqdS_uJCQLrX_iQ34jbaRaNDy3u7Xd3ks_Ixq9mAfRjOf704h-66PozkcusxhANpEDLCirytWR_/s1600/stickles+116b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH1EXx2_2v4AcrEKtfUfhaNCimr2iv6o41uHhm0EzfhyGWiLAyNRAtImoPnsXcFkqdS_uJCQLrX_iQ34jbaRaNDy3u7Xd3ks_Ixq9mAfRjOf704h-66PozkcusxhANpEDLCirytWR_/s320/stickles+116b.jpg" width="249" /></a></div>
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Freshmen got introduced to exam-taking during Rush Week. MIT featured a Freshman Orientation Exam that asked any number of strange questions, including one about the angle of the dangle that I won't bother repeating; you'll just have to take the exam for yourself.</div>
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MIT also recognized that students sometimes had a bad day, so some classes, particularly freshman calculus, allowed do-overs on the exams. Not that it helped, necessarily...</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-BlW5KLq8eqVi8TQC8i6MKN2NySfVuYrVnCNu4Ui-2yUHiO6q35O8v4si8z1WWvMICKGbmPvB6w9Duymdga15FozaGoHWFqkXovIVMrGA5SzVvazBOFhzJwUktayhf04Kar8NwbNW/s1600/stickles+116c.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-BlW5KLq8eqVi8TQC8i6MKN2NySfVuYrVnCNu4Ui-2yUHiO6q35O8v4si8z1WWvMICKGbmPvB6w9Duymdga15FozaGoHWFqkXovIVMrGA5SzVvazBOFhzJwUktayhf04Kar8NwbNW/s320/stickles+116c.jpg" width="244" /></a></div>
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Freshman calculus exams (at least in my day) also had the unique feature that you always reviewed the results with the proctor immediately after the exam, and in doing so, it was possible to improve your score (or in some cases to lose points) by showing how you did your work. It was Tom Lehrer's New Math, in that it was more important to understand what you were doing rather than to get the right answer.</div>
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However, if all else failed, MIT had another lifeline for overwhelmed students.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOII2S-06GSEGmSV6SgIWuvezXFLXNdaBo17Yn3fMJKyc5jB1uJNbKSxVyvDXLKKM2V3rcGaMd0vVcEeySJAnT09ifcmN2Km4l_Ch-dL_o7vbbHDlkrndzrW_SujwvzY4PZDl3PeG3/s1600/stickles+116d.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="105" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOII2S-06GSEGmSV6SgIWuvezXFLXNdaBo17Yn3fMJKyc5jB1uJNbKSxVyvDXLKKM2V3rcGaMd0vVcEeySJAnT09ifcmN2Km4l_Ch-dL_o7vbbHDlkrndzrW_SujwvzY4PZDl3PeG3/s320/stickles+116d.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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A final note: test-taking was not quite over after the last Final of your senior year. Those of us who entertained thoughts of going on to grad school had one more set of tests to take - the GRE's. Students wishing to get into law school took the LSAT's, and there were exams to get into medical school or business school. These were fairly rigorous exams built around multiple choice questions. Unlike MIT, however, there were strict rules about analytical aids in the exam room.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJpUZNFWr3YZHEsXwSgLemffW8ykT-6lDd2yJ4qkgk6ZO-ZWQ3wvWKbIg-c6xltMFpOjSffXVEdlsqb5IGMj6ORUCTG7hhKFl7GcXzirP2uljTbJqJOOGcPLoAqias3zLJW-kr1Wuh/s1600/stickles+116e.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJpUZNFWr3YZHEsXwSgLemffW8ykT-6lDd2yJ4qkgk6ZO-ZWQ3wvWKbIg-c6xltMFpOjSffXVEdlsqb5IGMj6ORUCTG7hhKFl7GcXzirP2uljTbJqJOOGcPLoAqias3zLJW-kr1Wuh/s320/stickles+116e.jpg" width="250" /></a></div>
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Technology is a wonderful thing, however; now the proctors will strip-search you to remove your Smartphones and iPads.</div>
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<br /></div>Geoff Baskirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05888775674568049611noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5495847081441994138.post-56422440942366371582012-04-22T16:56:00.000-07:002012-04-22T16:56:24.605-07:00The Sound of Music<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSMFmFYE_z9grDbuEpQOj3H58fUtks9WkBl_1QBT4niN1upWUz8L5KxdfPV-FRtLcF_sMjZfxRi1zvl81xnU_5h9B3jXYzyFISpfbMSf5iwJjorPdksw0hGl98bB4MSEYXBdEL3911/s1600/stickles+115A.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSMFmFYE_z9grDbuEpQOj3H58fUtks9WkBl_1QBT4niN1upWUz8L5KxdfPV-FRtLcF_sMjZfxRi1zvl81xnU_5h9B3jXYzyFISpfbMSf5iwJjorPdksw0hGl98bB4MSEYXBdEL3911/s320/stickles+115A.jpg" width="243" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div>Tom Lehrer once remarked, "I'd like to take you now on the wings of song and help you forget for a moment your drab, wretched lives". MIT was a contributor to the musical scene, and it's not just because Tom Scholz had a band or Charlie Bruno once dropped a piano off the Baker House roof. Despite our penchant for science, MIT had its own musical influences, from the radio station known as WTBS (that is, until Ted Turner bought the name for $25,000) to the Glee Club to the Chorallaries to the Musical Theatre Guild to the All-Tech Sing (where the student group with the best set of vocal chords was rewarded with the opportunity to carry home the heaviest object the MIT Student Center Committee could filch from the streets of Cambridge). Music was in the air, and it wasn't just because the Coffeehouse had brought in a folkie from off the streets of Cambridge to help the late-night studiers snooze the early morning away.<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKAoN7X_Xm8NekqRaOb4dr1MoHNBoG4b4EGG3J3ag0fKZHKXkgbcPNWOLC2GL4sLi8wSaF0y_2AM_7ZgXrKhG6jVOeX0fY10f-PWsKHk8AtAfnSWVPxZfWzCBSiwPFDKbzXgjCcpiO/s1600/stickles+115E.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKAoN7X_Xm8NekqRaOb4dr1MoHNBoG4b4EGG3J3ag0fKZHKXkgbcPNWOLC2GL4sLi8wSaF0y_2AM_7ZgXrKhG6jVOeX0fY10f-PWsKHk8AtAfnSWVPxZfWzCBSiwPFDKbzXgjCcpiO/s320/stickles+115E.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;">I went to a performing arts high school myself, so I had an appreciation for instrumental and non-instrumental music. In the '70s, music, particularly popular music, underwent a technological revolution. First came the first crude synthesizers, capable of playing a single note that sounded like it had been produced on a synthesizer (that meant a variation of a sine wave, or, getting creative, a square wave). Then followed quadrophonic stereo reproduction, which was based on the theory that if two speakers produced a sound twice as good as mono, then four speakers were twice as good as stereophonic. It was like a musical hologram, so lifelike, you could swear the musicians were in the same room with you (and if you played your AC/DC record loud enough, you could almost believe Angus Young was shredding on top of your bed). Soon would come revolutions in musical portability, from the boombox to the compact disc to the Walkman, eventually leading ear buds and iPods (though that happened much later). You could improve on the sound quality all you wanted, but the musical quality didn't always follow.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcqBy35B0h5Q2hFtnvUXyNr_Nso1-mhjRjN6hK9XvIOUicpaEljDhMjLgrJKuUDJjfd9KAaJqVIbxYMoYxFWVVhpryMFesS3VJ5OVgBLXuhANrVJ4-dwR5iC7mhIyS4aZF79XbF1fX/s1600/stickles+115B.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcqBy35B0h5Q2hFtnvUXyNr_Nso1-mhjRjN6hK9XvIOUicpaEljDhMjLgrJKuUDJjfd9KAaJqVIbxYMoYxFWVVhpryMFesS3VJ5OVgBLXuhANrVJ4-dwR5iC7mhIyS4aZF79XbF1fX/s320/stickles+115B.jpg" width="243" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Incidentally, this strip got changed a couple of times as the musical fashions changed; this version featured a recognizable Van Halen lyric, while an earlier version had used the lyrics of a Parliament-Funkadelics song.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Being MIT students, we were always in a perpetual arms race regarding the size and power of our electronic stereo equipment. It was not enough to be able to throw the sound of your stereo system off the far wall of the building across the courtyard; being heard in Kendall Square from the confines of your modest dorm room on Ames Street was the objective. Some of my dorm mates had stereos with floor- mounted speakers that could faithfully reproduce the scratch in a record such that it could be heard at dinner in the Walker Dining Room. But try as we might, we could not get a reproduction clear enough to identify that curse word that got slipped into "Louie, Louie". (A note: some of you might not be familiar with the hissing, crackling and popping associated with vinyl records, having grown up with nothing but compact disks, or for the even younger among you, an iPod full of MP3 files. There are esoterics among us who will argue till the cows come home that long-playing vinyl produces a much richer, fuller sound than a compact disc, even if CD reproduction is clean, clear and accurate, and has none of the pops associated with scratched vinyl. I never got that far; I just know that it's a lot easier to produce that wikka-wikka sound that rules hip-hop by scratching a vinyl record than by trying to manipulate a sound file you filched off of SoundCloud.)</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhI2SIgT0WNk0UajS9pO2XP3ZGeUkI9RGWOpAgmfHBnV9UNTJhWekOk2WL0mMTDtr6j_zLb_nawj-kPN4WGAZeyzQnraZbsBdmI_FmMlalMe7ONY3GENzOiBZTsLt6TeB8JCSBNxyq0/s1600/stickles+115D.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhI2SIgT0WNk0UajS9pO2XP3ZGeUkI9RGWOpAgmfHBnV9UNTJhWekOk2WL0mMTDtr6j_zLb_nawj-kPN4WGAZeyzQnraZbsBdmI_FmMlalMe7ONY3GENzOiBZTsLt6TeB8JCSBNxyq0/s320/stickles+115D.jpg" width="246" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">People know Bose for Wave Radios these days, but at one time, the House of Bose produced some of the most massive stereo speakers ever conceived. They ruled the roost until miniaturization made it possible to render ground-shaking sound out of little table-top units. This led to the consolidation of stereos from piece-together systems plugged together with jacks and speaker wire down to single piece boxes decoratively configured to look like they got pulled out of a Jedi warrior's fighter jet. Nowadays, you can create a decent clangor from a couple of speakers jacked into your desktop computer or from that docking port your iPod uses.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">There was only one problem with stereos loud enough to wake the dead - they frequently did.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1P3Eg1aQD7D2ndHl7SHLnDC5z7gV8WQZSnqPg_yHqimd6hrq0WnisOmm6Z-yanXlKniW1FiGTPwkvjS3mjEd_ayx53L6FpMBU7RwhO-uPNJpvVHV7cWFSHsfY3dYMQkpODUMajHp9/s1600/stickles+115C.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1P3Eg1aQD7D2ndHl7SHLnDC5z7gV8WQZSnqPg_yHqimd6hrq0WnisOmm6Z-yanXlKniW1FiGTPwkvjS3mjEd_ayx53L6FpMBU7RwhO-uPNJpvVHV7cWFSHsfY3dYMQkpODUMajHp9/s320/stickles+115C.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I had to redraw this strip, too. You see, the normal person (or one who does not live in Manhattan and attend the theatre regularly) would consider midnight to be way past their bedtime. The typical college student (and in this regard, MIT students were all too typical) would consider midnight to be the early evening. Later, I understood that 1:00 am was a good time to go out to a rave, but by then I was an old fogie of 35...</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>Geoff Baskirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05888775674568049611noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5495847081441994138.post-40875787115651957892012-03-10T12:14:00.000-08:002012-03-10T12:14:47.230-08:00Hearts and MindsThe Reagan Years were a curious time. For one thing, they caused a rethinking of the fashions of the time. There was the Preppy look, which made button-down shirts and Dockers popular with college students who only a few years earlier were content to wear their hair shaggy and show up for the lectures in gym shorts, flip-flops and tee-shirts (weather permitting). This was an outgrowth of the whole "dress for success" movement, which tried to convince young professionals that looking good was a sufficient substitute for being competent. Along with that went the fraternity-bred notion that anything Greek was cool, which caused some of the dormitory living groups to slip Greek letters into their names.<br />
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The early '80s also caused a reconsideration of certain discredited products, whose manufacturers must have decided that if Ronald Reagan could beconme popular with the electorate, then Taster's Choice Instant Coffee could once again be taken seriously (especially if it was hawked by a Ronald Reagan lookalike). Spam, which had been the butt of a Monty Python skit, was dusted off and promoted as a tasty and nourishing treat (that is, until it became the common reference for electronic junk mail, which it did, starting in the Clinton Years). The selling of Spam became so successful that the makers of Velveeta returned it to the grocery shelves, along with a sister product, Mexican Velveeta. There was no single cheese like Velveeta (a clever way of saying that it was a gooey amalgam of multiple cheeses), and best of all, it made a creamy Mac and Cheese (unlike real cheese, which tended to break down into clumps of protein and oil when melted, unless you blended it with flour to make it smooth). It seemed there were no end to the possibilities for rehabilitating the image of discredited products...<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghJcxAtQke0U1Obn-OCFUCDHtJa8QIy2O4uhkYEN2aMxBJwt7jm0_y09C8QP0NrZ0ER0x16rnAyF7KnxFeu-i7i3uywHA1ezb3abBVxTDNjQTvF0wz4SmjkotZTO3G3sjNkgNRQE9l/s1600/Stickles+114.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghJcxAtQke0U1Obn-OCFUCDHtJa8QIy2O4uhkYEN2aMxBJwt7jm0_y09C8QP0NrZ0ER0x16rnAyF7KnxFeu-i7i3uywHA1ezb3abBVxTDNjQTvF0wz4SmjkotZTO3G3sjNkgNRQE9l/s320/Stickles+114.jpg" width="246" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">In fact, William Westmoreland went to his grave believing the Vietnam War was the right thing to do, and he even wrote a book stating as much.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The final act of attempted rehabilitation was the brief boomlet of attention Richard Nixon received just before his death; the party line was that he was a misunderstood forward thinker who, except for one little mistake, did a lot of good while he was President (and guess what that one little mistake was). While having George W. Bush in the White House did make him look good by comparison, the most recent Gallup survey shows the public still regards Nixon as the worst President of all time. But he enabled comedians Rich Little and David Frye to have illustrious careers.</div>Geoff Baskirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05888775674568049611noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5495847081441994138.post-7836959885275640772012-02-07T21:31:00.000-08:002012-02-07T21:34:30.000-08:00Party Animals<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>I attended many parties in my time at the 'Tute. Some were good, some were bad, some were pretty ugly. We were a segregated floor, so we had a little bit of a challenge getting a good coeducational dance party to happen. But our social chairman in my freshman year had a girlfriend (and so did a couple of the other upper-classmen who handled our social committee) and our hall tutor that year was hitched to someone from Simmons, so we had ways to draw a half-decent crowd to Fassett Lounge (that dungeon downstairs from the East Campus desk and the mailboxes) where we held our parties. Eventually they graduated, taking their mixtapes of Queen, Clapton, Montrose and 10cc with them, and our parties went progressively downhill from there. But Ed (who was hall tutor both before and after the hall tutor who was there my freshman year) had a car, so when we couldn't bring the party to us, we went to where the party was. And we had a way of bringing the party back home with us.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivbHASJCzipPkRtP_B3U2zt2B4Qh0Bfr7pOcRALw2OgsNPLoVdFfNBmh6l5qvQvTdm2yag7JUynHicVkfXgkNWpAm4P0AClUyninhaXMCXlE4nJH25lsL9poF-nmMMHvHhp3UzXmHL/s1600/Stickles+126.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="103" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivbHASJCzipPkRtP_B3U2zt2B4Qh0Bfr7pOcRALw2OgsNPLoVdFfNBmh6l5qvQvTdm2yag7JUynHicVkfXgkNWpAm4P0AClUyninhaXMCXlE4nJH25lsL9poF-nmMMHvHhp3UzXmHL/s320/Stickles+126.jpg" superadblocker_image="0" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Everyone knew what a good party needed <strike>booze, drugs, loud music, coeds</strike> publicity. Boston has dozens of colleges in the area, and that meant usually dozens of events each weekend competing for the youthful college partygoer (MIT had its share of those who did not go to parties - they could be found living in the Student Center library or working diligently on the problem sets posted on the wall in the Math building. There were also those amazing creatures who hung out in Walker Memorial all weekend playing strategic games). Two things were necessary for a successful party to happen - the right audience had to know about it, and they had to have a way to get there. A couple of us had cars, so that part was taken care of. But to get the right audience, we had to get the word out in the right places - Wellesley, Simmons, Emmanuel, Wheelock (all women's schools) and McCormick Hall (MIT's women's dorm). That meant a road trip the weekend before to put up posters. Being a creative sort, I ended up designing some of the posters.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAxF8ybCSgmuzaKT4yjx7dyr_v2M39CLCEfoDeiUMlwAM7Ks0pEEBXObt5A_g55IOdWPyROEayi2E6uYheVhB3PUV1NpCkHjywoWY765TUW8VnL1Ykl-0G4b2sl20ahy4AOLlHZnwd/s1600/Stickles+126A.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAxF8ybCSgmuzaKT4yjx7dyr_v2M39CLCEfoDeiUMlwAM7Ks0pEEBXObt5A_g55IOdWPyROEayi2E6uYheVhB3PUV1NpCkHjywoWY765TUW8VnL1Ykl-0G4b2sl20ahy4AOLlHZnwd/s320/Stickles+126A.jpg" superadblocker_image="0" width="247" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This particular event was one of the last parties I ever witnessed at East Campus. Within six months, I would be off to Stanford, where I learned that a grad student lives an even more reclusive existence than the typical MIT undergrad. This was the late '70s. I had yet to find out about Ladies' Nights, Million Dollar Legs Contests and mechanical bullriding, which were all things single people in Dallas did for entertainment. I was too early for mosh pits, hip-hop, grunge and all night raves. But I was just in time for music videos; many a dull Strat's Rat could have been saved by a Michael Jackson moonwalk.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>Geoff Baskirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05888775674568049611noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5495847081441994138.post-66689882245202481592012-01-29T14:51:00.000-08:002012-01-29T14:52:12.485-08:00Cucaracha Cha-Cha<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfmExAvvodaXKTYagAoGe0JtvxS9jfJBbk2XbhPc46r1FBZp6jgu9vwL2x34OzkaUHAksUIzAwIBFyy7PmLYxaMJTLpZqdd29Ayqph3F1lKqthAwBZh1Ck0Lif7ZLnsAOa4n8vyrvt/s1600/Stickles+125.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="104" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfmExAvvodaXKTYagAoGe0JtvxS9jfJBbk2XbhPc46r1FBZp6jgu9vwL2x34OzkaUHAksUIzAwIBFyy7PmLYxaMJTLpZqdd29Ayqph3F1lKqthAwBZh1Ck0Lif7ZLnsAOa4n8vyrvt/s320/Stickles+125.jpg" superadblocker_image="0" width="320" /></a></div>This is a typical morning at MIT, circa 1976. While most students were usually sound asleep until 9 or 10am, the cockroaches were already awake when the sun came up. That's because they were nocturnal.<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">MIT had roaches for the same reason most urban spaces had roaches: there were plenty of things for a roach to eat. In addition, the roaches bred faster than we could kill them off. They knew how to get into any space, and their adaptability made them indestructible. We did not have medicine cabinets in our dorm rooms, just open shelves, so roaches could get into our toiletries. Fortunately, we had dresser drawers, so we never found roaches in our personal effects, although I did end up squashing one inside my sneaker once (yecch!)</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The cockroach is one of those creatures, like the shark, that has been around almost since the beginning of time and will be one of the last creatures remaining on Earth when it gets swallowed up by the supernova-ing Sun. In fact, if Christian potboiler novelist Tim LaHaye wanted to be factually accurate, his end-times milieu would have an Earth inhabited by nothing but sinners - and cockroaches.</div>Geoff Baskirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05888775674568049611noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5495847081441994138.post-4166497544422365312012-01-28T21:07:00.000-08:002012-01-28T21:07:54.679-08:00A Dirty Little Secret<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">MIT has a Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The Department is home to the Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel and the Flight Transportation Lab, and that Lab is home to one of the four university campuses of the National Center for Excellence in Aviation Operations Research, better known as NEXTOR (the other campuses being at the University of California at Berkeley, Virginia Tech and the University of Maryland). In addition to that, MIT sits under one of the departure tracks for Boston Logan International Airport, which was and still is one of the busiest airports in the country. Logan Airport is located just east of downtown Boston in a community known as East Boston, separated from Beacon Hill by the Harbor. In our day, 1974-78, there were two parallel tunnels that brought traffic from Boston out to the Airport; thanks to the Big Dig, there is now a third tunnel, named for Ted Williams, that crosses the Harbor. There is also the Blue Line, a creaky old subway not as creaky as the Green Line (nothing could possibly be that creaky), that brings passengers to a depot where they catch a shuttle bus to the airport terminals. And recently, there has commenced a new sort of bus/subway combination that runs between South Boston, Downtown and the Airport.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>Logan Airport's location means that airplanes cross to the north, the south and across the MIT campus. In fact, when the wind is from the south, one can look south across the Charles and see the 747's come swooping in a low turn south of the Prudential Building, then thunder north above the Green Building and East Campus on their way to Europe or the West Coast. There may have been louder airplanes (the DC-9 and the 727 were plenty loud), but nothing was quite as menacing.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhI8hWkaHf3asXSuofpL3mDmnbDn5zvyCuj8iajs_C40ShzWiG5Coue7rdhBNijO67hlYFBJqQvuYlwTj_HHo9Wlp7LdCJAcvQYtylNiyTrhlVZ-WtrQxzw-bpOB3Lwu-SDdgeU0l4z/s1600/Stickles+124.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="104" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhI8hWkaHf3asXSuofpL3mDmnbDn5zvyCuj8iajs_C40ShzWiG5Coue7rdhBNijO67hlYFBJqQvuYlwTj_HHo9Wlp7LdCJAcvQYtylNiyTrhlVZ-WtrQxzw-bpOB3Lwu-SDdgeU0l4z/s320/Stickles+124.jpg" superadblocker_image="0" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The toilets on aircraft are not supposed to vent to the outside the way old trains did (in fact, they warn you not to flush the toilets while the train is in the station), but airplane toilets do have vents to the outside that are used by siphon trucks that suck out all that blue liquid in the plane's toilet holding tanks and take it somewhere to get disposed of. Occasionally those vents malfunction, and if the malfunction occurs when the airplane is in the upper atmosphere, the blue goo leaks out and freezes to the outside of the airplane...and sometimes those frozen chunks of goo break off and fall from the airplane; people whose houses lie under the approach to an airport have reported being pelted with "blue ice".</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Plane toilets present other hazards, but mostly to the passengers who use them. Some passengers have reported sitting down on the seat, doing their business, then flushing the toilet - and getting sucked in so tightly that they need help being dislodged. New model aircraft toilets have a vacuum boost that enables them to carry away waste products with minimal use of flush water. Buildings that are designed to environmentally responsible standards have a similar toilet hazard; they also come equipped with toilets that reduce water consumption by use of suction. You can tell a vacuum-assisted toilet by its flush, which sounds like the approach of a tornado. Again, anyone who sits too firmly on the seat is at risk of having their posterior sucked in. However, Man is an ingenious animal who has discovered that the suction can be defeated easily by dropping a cellphone in the toilet (this is what is meant by a dropped call)...which must explain why so many people insist on taking cell phone calls in restrooms.</div>Geoff Baskirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05888775674568049611noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5495847081441994138.post-18787522555397441032012-01-21T09:58:00.000-08:002012-01-21T09:59:55.393-08:00Look What the Cat Dragged InI introduced Walden to <em>Stickles</em> readers about one semester after I had introduced Cindy, the cat's owner (I say "owner" because I've yet to find anyone who is a cat's master; "owner" defines someone who pours the cat food out of the bag). Walden was modeled after a real cat named Woodstock, and Woodstock had become famous for being a write-in candidate for president of the Class of 1978 in my sophomore year (I wrote about Woodstock in an <a href="http://stickles.blogspot.com/2010/12/cat-for-class-president.html">earlier blog post</a>).<br />
<div style="text-align: center;" superadblocker_div_elements="3" superadblocker_div_firstlook="0" superadblocker_onmouseenter_hooked="0" superadblocker_onmove_hooked="0"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiahx41e-C8oz4rNvAWi9Augid1Ylc63AfQa7rJ00tPgOrMarwWKsVk3TXtmBER2-aPHkn3cWUgayVTTH9I8iXsFR7Ystd7AehxqKJ5h-FwN67KIQKO6w4NEX1eYzNQYpZcvkff5VYo/s1600/Stickles+10.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="166" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiahx41e-C8oz4rNvAWi9Augid1Ylc63AfQa7rJ00tPgOrMarwWKsVk3TXtmBER2-aPHkn3cWUgayVTTH9I8iXsFR7Ystd7AehxqKJ5h-FwN67KIQKO6w4NEX1eYzNQYpZcvkff5VYo/s320/Stickles+10.jpg" superadblocker_image="0" width="320" /></a></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiahx41e-C8oz4rNvAWi9Augid1Ylc63AfQa7rJ00tPgOrMarwWKsVk3TXtmBER2-aPHkn3cWUgayVTTH9I8iXsFR7Ystd7AehxqKJ5h-FwN67KIQKO6w4NEX1eYzNQYpZcvkff5VYo/s1600/Stickles+10.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiahx41e-C8oz4rNvAWi9Augid1Ylc63AfQa7rJ00tPgOrMarwWKsVk3TXtmBER2-aPHkn3cWUgayVTTH9I8iXsFR7Ystd7AehxqKJ5h-FwN67KIQKO6w4NEX1eYzNQYpZcvkff5VYo/s1600/Stickles+10.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><br />
<div style="text-align: left;" superadblocker_div_elements="0" superadblocker_div_firstlook="0" superadblocker_onmouseenter_hooked="0" superadblocker_onmove_hooked="0">Walden was a male cat, and males of the feline persuasion are known by a particular characteristic.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieBn206xFaP5X1kvPRK3Shyphenhyphen6HlAjZ9yDXVijOA1gHKKncYU0oykGmVL5VJaxpPdzrivHHD2ePpgHI6Kb0cijXhHJF9P7VFzOX0FS1ae2gm6Q9kf9AXqYENcy8Cop7iYiQTMU4TmJ9s/s1600/Stickles+123A.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="103" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieBn206xFaP5X1kvPRK3Shyphenhyphen6HlAjZ9yDXVijOA1gHKKncYU0oykGmVL5VJaxpPdzrivHHD2ePpgHI6Kb0cijXhHJF9P7VFzOX0FS1ae2gm6Q9kf9AXqYENcy8Cop7iYiQTMU4TmJ9s/s320/Stickles+123A.jpg" superadblocker_image="0" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Veterinarians will tell you that male cats that are not neutered will continue to engage in marking activity even after they have been spayed. It's a sort of an instinctive action that does not turn off once it has been turned on.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc3U296SjDCQFLih4C38mpN-SMoHsxF_ghvNkVgk1sDvBA3Gs2wvg8A97oNHBLxdxrU9rzvJ_MNRgyImcfVF8tVyAQYpGEQl8jSdVaWTVnxyVwklObZiJKWbOk74s6s0xnFp69Xn3G/s1600/Stickles+123B.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="105" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc3U296SjDCQFLih4C38mpN-SMoHsxF_ghvNkVgk1sDvBA3Gs2wvg8A97oNHBLxdxrU9rzvJ_MNRgyImcfVF8tVyAQYpGEQl8jSdVaWTVnxyVwklObZiJKWbOk74s6s0xnFp69Xn3G/s320/Stickles+123B.jpg" superadblocker_image="0" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Walden was also a curious cat. Curiosity will get a cat into all kinds of trouble...</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjselhe-zTIYXNlkXN9cLF20mKXQ5GN9N4lYCatzEpWNJVhNG3IrT1rw9S6OVZxN2psgDJaWb_qfUllsfXCOmrI2CeH1Nc367CYu2gZdoyZWhAgX5AI9yKOhkDr9my7QI6NQZIKYaeo/s1600/Stickles+123C.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="196" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjselhe-zTIYXNlkXN9cLF20mKXQ5GN9N4lYCatzEpWNJVhNG3IrT1rw9S6OVZxN2psgDJaWb_qfUllsfXCOmrI2CeH1Nc367CYu2gZdoyZWhAgX5AI9yKOhkDr9my7QI6NQZIKYaeo/s320/Stickles+123C.jpg" superadblocker_image="0" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-tBzZFt-Qew1Pq3EO7lIEbC77nUK8MJvYJAg_JD36NVRkTXnOPsGCP6mZkbgZ9qhu7MusWkol8G41Vo0HwonDDkLBh6KWQmo98MkqSD_RoTl5xRMJjhl_AORkMxS-3bcZTCRK06lV/s1600/Stickles+123D.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="193" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-tBzZFt-Qew1Pq3EO7lIEbC77nUK8MJvYJAg_JD36NVRkTXnOPsGCP6mZkbgZ9qhu7MusWkol8G41Vo0HwonDDkLBh6KWQmo98MkqSD_RoTl5xRMJjhl_AORkMxS-3bcZTCRK06lV/s320/Stickles+123D.jpg" superadblocker_image="0" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Nitrous oxide was a hot commodity in our dorm; it was usually dispensed in little canisters called Whippets which were used to discharge whipped cream on top of ice cream sundaes. It could also be procured in balloon quantities. It livened up many a party; people who inhaled it would fall down laughing (or just plain fall down). Helium, by contrast, just made you talk funny.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I've owned many cats in my life. I've only owned one dog, and <a href="http://www.belaandvivian.blogspot.com/">he tends to drive my current cat nuts</a>.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"></div>Geoff Baskirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05888775674568049611noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5495847081441994138.post-75652887840760003792012-01-19T21:12:00.000-08:002012-01-19T21:14:39.902-08:00Rush LimboIn Boston, there is a ritual that is as old as time and as regular as clockwork. Just as the swallows return annually to Capistrano and the buzzards return to Hinckley, Ohio, the college students return to their various campuses in the Boston area. It is a congregation that can be detected in the increased traffic on I-95 and the larger than usual clusters of backpacked, unruly ragamuffins clustered around the bag claim at Logan Airport. <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFcY5KgVorycMOQTA3qAQqTADPizg3NAKF8eLAqzigI3TnVKFB2Fa0iGhv_HJMekxTrcfsCiZ62gKUSXUSJMpcqdI9ShJ1KElHewA2lm_EYxeANXD9iNATO3EJ5IcNYMKO2gejULhA/s1600/Stickles+122B.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="190" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFcY5KgVorycMOQTA3qAQqTADPizg3NAKF8eLAqzigI3TnVKFB2Fa0iGhv_HJMekxTrcfsCiZ62gKUSXUSJMpcqdI9ShJ1KElHewA2lm_EYxeANXD9iNATO3EJ5IcNYMKO2gejULhA/s320/Stickles+122B.jpg" superadblocker_image="0" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1qfbiQcJl0jTZToImffA_aFR6w2obBVO4JbFAFJ1wHQVYtlwrZ2gTm1QAOX_KQ_GQDh_8DI1-WDQNgX2MM43ii09txa5pUyIa0CfW7MZv7KYFZI39BTcnLUEKc5ILJVox4Qr4HRgx/s1600/Stickles+122A.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="191" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1qfbiQcJl0jTZToImffA_aFR6w2obBVO4JbFAFJ1wHQVYtlwrZ2gTm1QAOX_KQ_GQDh_8DI1-WDQNgX2MM43ii09txa5pUyIa0CfW7MZv7KYFZI39BTcnLUEKc5ILJVox4Qr4HRgx/s320/Stickles+122A.jpg" superadblocker_image="0" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The freshman arrive at MIT, usually in the last week of August (Stanford, being on a more relaxed, California-style timetable, usually doesn't see its first students until the third week of September). They begin the unusual mating process known as Rush Week, at which time they will decide their living arrangement for the next four years. The frats choose first, rushing their picks of the young, peach-fuzzed frosh who wander by looking for a good time and a warm place to sleep for the night. The leftovers stumble their bewildered way into the dorm system, and the dregs drift into Bexley to plot their careers as MoveOn organizers (okay, we didn't have MoveOn in my day, but there were any number of radical causes about, including <em>thursday</em>).</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">You'll notice I haven't mentioned the co-eds (ladies, if you will); in the '70s, MIT did not have sororities, so the fairer sex was doomed to end up in McCormick, although there were options - Baker, East Campus, Senior House, WILG, Burton, No. 6, and so on. One of the fraternities, Sigma Nu, actually decided to admit women - and was promptly drummed out of the national fraternity by its incensed elders, whereafter it became known as Epsilon Theta. No other frat followed in their footsteps, formally, although some informal living arrangements were arrived at by consenting couples in both the fraternities and the dorms. One dorm acquired a Combat Zone hooker that way.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Bag claim is always an interesting place; it is the only time you will see your fellow passengers in an upright position. It's always entertaining to play Match the Passenger With the Bag. Airport adminstrators are no fun at all, though; they warn you politely that some bags may look alike, so be sure to check the claim tag first before grabbing your suitcase. Except in Philadelphia, where in true Brotherly Love fashion, there is a rather stern warning that "This Is Not Your Bag!" affixed to the ugliest green Samsonite ever manufactured.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Two end notes: as I mentioned before, I have a terrible time drawing dark faces in a comic strip, which explains why <em>Stickles</em> had no African American characters. This strip has one, and as my father hastened to point out in politically-correct tones, it is one of the baggage porters. I corrected that injustice by casting a dark-faced Harvard student in a later 8-panel strip - also set at an airport. The second has to do with the intro; it never happened to me, but one of my colleagues from my early consulting days told me that It Actually Happened to Him that a flight attendant mixed white wine and red wine together to produce rosé. He also told me a story, about a young man with a severe lisp who wanted to become a Fuller Brush salesman, that I shall not relate here, but I will tell it to you sometime in a bar somewhere after a half-dozen beers.</div>Geoff Baskirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05888775674568049611noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5495847081441994138.post-1878425767714907522012-01-14T12:07:00.000-08:002012-01-14T21:46:04.155-08:00The Dismal ScienceTo show you how little things change over the years, here is one of the earliest "Stickles" cartoons to ever be printed in the MIT student newspaper.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMgAUhf4PW48LwDpt-NuPLhmLZHJ9WCUS5b6Ktf64PiVUZeYnmFxrL_QDQwxOcQ2-lz5O_7ZsrRB_nNiZT_MVuJ2917ss3fVP06KdhWPfqevBSacco64tXM_JMnsFIRONfbYp35Rb8/s1600/stickles+113.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMgAUhf4PW48LwDpt-NuPLhmLZHJ9WCUS5b6Ktf64PiVUZeYnmFxrL_QDQwxOcQ2-lz5O_7ZsrRB_nNiZT_MVuJ2917ss3fVP06KdhWPfqevBSacco64tXM_JMnsFIRONfbYp35Rb8/s320/stickles+113.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br />
According to the notation, the date is March 17, 1975. The economy is in recession (sound familiar?). We have a president who is coming up for re-election. And gas prices are high ("high" in those days meant over a dollar a gallon). Because the price of oil is on the increase, inflation is a concern.<br />
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On the other hand, America in the '70s had not experienced the kind of mortgage meltdown that was to occur in 2008. In fact, the first time American banks got into trouble was in the '80s, when a rogue office of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC for short) decided to practice extreme laissez-faire regulation, cozied up to the Texas banking industry and allowed them to engage in acts of finance you can't show on television or print in a family newspaper. However, instead of home mortgages, the catastrophe was precipitated by commercial lending. Billions of dollars were lent to build office buildings, subdivisions and shopping malls with money presumably set aside to finance homes, to the point where there were not enough tenants to fill all the spaces. When the price of oil suddenly and precipitously dropped in 1986, the real estate brokers ran out of tenants to fill their properties and went bust, and their problems became the problems of the Texas banks and savings and loans. In the end, the taxpayers were called in to bail out the lenders (to the tune of about $500 billion), a new agency called the Office of Thrift Supervision was created to clear up the muck, and the FSLIC was no more. The taxpayers were probably still paying to untangle the mess when 2008 came along and with it a new set of problems. It seems we never learn from our mistakes.<br />
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But that was not the proximate cause of our miseries in 1975. Instead we had runaway inflation - nothing like what we would experience in 1980, but bad enough, and triggered by gasoline getting expensive. In those days, we did not have solar and wind power, and we didn't have hybrid cars; the average Chevy got about 15 miles to the gallon, which is about what the average Hummer gets today. Our leaders vowed to Whip Inflation Now and our Fed raised interest rates, which led to a sharp, nasty recession in 1974 that spilled over into 1975. The cycle would repeat itself in 1980, which is when we experienced interest rates that briefly touched 20% (try getting a home mortgage at those rates!)<br />
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Today, of course, inflation is under 3% and interest rates, which were sky-high all throughout the '80s, are so low that you can get a 30-year mortgage for less than 4% fixed. But the bankers give you the stink-eye when you come in looking to borrow for a home. They ask you for everything but a blood test and your next of kin. Hence demand for homes continues to drag along. And people who depend on homebuilding for a living can't find work. But if you want to borrow $20 billion for a leveraged buyout, bankers can't do enough for you. After all, debt is therapeutic.<br />
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Gerald Ford lost the election in 1976; the electorate remembered how bad things were a year earlier and gave the Republicans a thrashing. Barack Obama stands for president again in 2012, having only a marginal amount to show for all his efforts since 2009 to revive the economy. That he stands any chance at all of re-election is testament to the quality of his opposition.Geoff Baskirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05888775674568049611noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5495847081441994138.post-40175534470786253412011-09-06T19:17:00.000-07:002011-09-06T19:17:05.622-07:00The Merits of Scholarship<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKp-WFONu2jxXKoffm0iccNdQWVL3vgDL05og9mHlINaU-TFrJWhtRT2_XnF3-Fkt_UO6_pJpNJNMSmC7BQnDnLIt73dA2YrrDU9VCYmkxZkeLfPv6Bz6hF6Z5mfvZaKuQOhcCXgym/s1600/Stickles+121.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKp-WFONu2jxXKoffm0iccNdQWVL3vgDL05og9mHlINaU-TFrJWhtRT2_XnF3-Fkt_UO6_pJpNJNMSmC7BQnDnLIt73dA2YrrDU9VCYmkxZkeLfPv6Bz6hF6Z5mfvZaKuQOhcCXgym/s320/Stickles+121.jpg" width="250" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I was one of those people. I had a merit scholarship. It paid a nice chunk of my tuition, so it was nothing to sneeze at. The National Merit Scholarship Program was and probably still is one of the most prestigious programs for young scholars, providing stipends to gifted students for tuition at the college of their choice. Many students who went to MIT in my day had the benefit of a National Merit Scholarship. For some, it was $500 a year, but some received stipends as high as $1,500 a year (and as tuition got progressively more expensive, that limit was raised to $2,000 a year).</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Getting a National Merit Scholarship was nothing more difficult than scoring well on the National Merit Scholarship Qualify Test. Most students know this is the Pre-SAT or PSAT. It's supposed to be a warm-up for the Scholastic Aptitude Test or SAT, which students take in their junior or senior years (or both; some students try to improve their scores so they can improve their chances of getting into the college of their choice). But, if you were intent on qualifying for the scholarship, that practice SAT was anything but, and it gave you a good reason to sweat out the spring months of your sophomore year.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Like the SAT, the PSAT came in two parts - English and Math, but unlike the SAT, the English score counted for twice what the math score counted (and I understand that the SAT as administered these days is scored differently than it was in my day). The emphasis on the verbal score did not work to my advantage, since my math score was about 80 points higher than my verbal score. My total score was not good enough for the National Merit people to give me a stipend, but there were several companies that pitched in with scholarships of their own that they handed out to the children of their employees based on their NMSQT scores. I was fortunate enough to score a scholarship through Shell Oil, and because I was bound for MIT, they were especially generous; they had heard horror stories about MIT's tuition.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">As I mentioned, the scholarship paid a substantial portion of my tuition. Of course, this was back in the '70s, when tuition at MIT was about $3,500 a year (and it was still Too Damn Much), so a four-year scholarship that paid $1,500 a year went pretty far. Since those days, tuition at MIT has soared into the stratosphere - to over $50,000 a year. Room and board hasn't gotten any cheaper, either. And then there are books, computer accessories, lab materials, condoms (this assumes that the average MIT student was ever going to be in a situation where usage was going to be a concern) and all the other things you need to succeed at MIT. Plus, you need some walking-around money, especially if you intend to go out on the town with your sweetie (which also presumes you might need condoms).</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I'm not sure if the merit scholarships have kept up with inflation, much less tuition increases and the prices of books and condoms (don't laugh - I was one of those young men who got the condom lecture from my father on my way to the 'Tute). These days, most students still have to find an after-class job, and even then, they will still take out a sizable student loan, to which they will be enslaved for many years. Even then, the scholarships, loans and the extra money from the after-hours job may not be enough to cover everything, so many colleges end up subsidizing tuition for the students they want. This they do by hitting up the alumni for money and by soliciting research grants and cranking out publications and patents. That's why it's a publish or perish world in academia. A college administrator's lot is not a happy one.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">While the National Merit Scholars still have to struggle to make ends meet, there is one group of scholars that, then as now, continue to do well - the student athletes. Their scholarships not only pay tuition, but they also get their meals taken care of; they have the training table. And if you believe those nice folks at Ohio State and the University of Miami, there are any number of business opportunities that enterprising student athletes can avail themselves of. One day, MIT will be a nationally-ranked football powerhouse and can make those sorts of enterprises available to its students. Till then, there's always Draper Labs.</div>Geoff Baskirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05888775674568049611noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5495847081441994138.post-63373771417065509292011-08-24T18:26:00.000-07:002011-08-24T18:38:53.934-07:00Shakedown StreetWe had an earthquake in Washington, DC, yesterday. Not just a slight trembling of the ground, mind you. This one was a magnitude 5.8 (or 5.9), which is a good-size temblor, even for places that get earthquakes regularly. For us, it didn't feel like anything unusual, but then, my office is on the first floor and our building has only one floor. At first, I thought the airconditioner in our building, which is on the roof and had been having issues for the past month or so, had kicked on with a vengeance. But then our emergency crew evacuated the entire building to the parking lot (later, we learned that's <em>not</em> what you're supposed to do in an earthquake). I've been through quakes before, when I was at Stanford, and I didn't think this was much of a shake - until news reports came in and said it was 5.8 and centered around Mineral, Virginia, which is not far from Fredricksburg. The news also mentioned that this one was felt as far north as MIT.<br />
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DC reacted the way it usually does to things like this - or snow events. Everyone went into a controlled panic, which is kind of like the controlled skid an SUV does on black ice - right into the guardrail. An hour later, all the Federal employees were sent home, and that's when the chaos began. Metro was first shut down and then reopened at slower than normal speeds - trains were running at 15 miles an hour. Freeways and downtown streets clogged up suddenly and so firmly that people didn't get home for hours. The next morning, several school districts decided to close; it seems they hadn't determined that the buildings were structurally safe. The Feds went on liberal leave. Three of the parapets on the National Cathedral had cracked and fallen off (it took them 90 years to finish the building, and look what happens!), and even the newly restored (in 2000) Washington Monument had developed cracks in some of the marble blocks.<br />
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Sure it sounds bad, but the Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco was worse. Occurring in 1989 at the very moment the World Series game between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics was in progress, the temblor heralded the birth of my nephew and Barely Brothers bassist, Earthquake Sam, in a Bay Area hospital. It measured 6.9 on the Richter scale, which is a pretty good jolt. Buildings collapsed, water lines and gas lines ruptured, a section of the elevated freeway in Oakland collapsed onto the level below it, huge fires started in various rowhouses and a section of the Bay Bridge collapsed, snarling the commute from Oakland to San Francisco for months thereafter. Portions of the Stanford campus were damaged as well, but my aunt's bungalow stayed upright. There were only 63 deaths reported, which is incredibly fortunate.<br />
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I missed it all, being in Texas. But when I was at Stanford, there were no fewer than three earthquakes. These were not terribly big shocks; I don't think there was anything greater than a 5.3 magnitude. But I did get to spend an ominous couple of minutes one afternoon on the 12th floor of a San Mateo office building watching the light poles in the parking lot outside swaying back and forth like a metronome set on 212. And my supervisor's bookshelf collapsed onto what would have been his head had he not been in St. Louis on business.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgI3i-LAtxR00Uh9TEJPeKDsQLSEbXtuRVmOih9LNEwDJJr3UkpuD9QvT0uYv4boaF3XJh8bkXB_CbDxXD1vLLg4pr4J3rPbnGmNVw3M17HoxCpwNT4X64L1OWsB4ZnOk5uzc35IDZ/s1600/Stickles+120.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgI3i-LAtxR00Uh9TEJPeKDsQLSEbXtuRVmOih9LNEwDJJr3UkpuD9QvT0uYv4boaF3XJh8bkXB_CbDxXD1vLLg4pr4J3rPbnGmNVw3M17HoxCpwNT4X64L1OWsB4ZnOk5uzc35IDZ/s320/Stickles+120.jpg" superadblocker_image="0" width="247" /></a></div>Texas does not get earthquakes. Or rather it didn't - until the Barnett Shale got drilled. About ten years ago, a very lucrative deposit of natural gas was discovered under the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, and every exploration company wanted a piece of it. The problem was getting the gas, given its location. The gas companies had always been capable of directional drilling (which in the '50s was called "slant hole" drilling and was a clever bit of piracy that allowed an enterprising wildcatter to filch his neighbor's oil or gas deposits) to get at the gas without disturbing the airport, but the gas was trapped in rock layers that wouldn't yield very easily - unless high pressure fluids were pumped in to break the rocks and push the gas out. This process - hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" - is sort of like a power enema and has proved very good at dislodging the gas deposits. But recently, residents of Tarrant County noticed that a whole lot of "fracking" earthquakes were occurring, as the ground settled into the pockets where the gas had been. These were not big shakers - averaging no more than 3.0 on the Richter Scale, but they were noticeable, and they occurred with unnerving frequency. The same thing has also happened in places in Arkansas where gas deposits have been tapped, and appears likely to happen in Pennsylvania when those gas fields get drilled.<br />
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That's Fort Worth. Houston is very seismically inactive - probably because it sits on a thick layer of sedimentary clay, or gumbo. It doesn't shift so much as it oozes, and it has a tendency to shrink and swell with the amount of groundwater that accumulates during the rainy season. When it oozes (which it does constantly), it plays havoc with foundations and pavements - so much so that homes have been known to slowly grow wall cracks and cracked foundations (and for some reason known only to the shoddy workmanship of the local homebuilders, those show up rather quickly on homes built within the past ten to twenty years).<br />
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Meanwhile, back on the East Coast, earthquakes, while infrequent, have been known to occur and to be intense enough that there are seismic requirements in the building codes for communities in the Washington region. This seems prudent, given the worst earthquake to occur east of the Mississippi hit Charleston, South Carolina, in 1886 and registered 7.3 on the Richter scale. The Mississippi River itself was the scene of the strongest earthquakes in the Lower 48, which hit New Madrid, Missouri. There were at least four them over a one-year period beginning in 1811, with the strongest being perhaps an 8.0, or greater than the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. And the grand-daddy of them all was the Good Friday Earthquake that hit Alaska in 1964 and measured 9.2. While we were not hit as hard as either San Francisco or Charleston or Alaska or Missouri this time, the odds are that we were be due for one. And when the next big one hits, people will again react like there's 10 inches of snow on the ground.Geoff Baskirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05888775674568049611noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5495847081441994138.post-43605591663131130312011-08-18T20:57:00.000-07:002011-08-24T17:22:48.261-07:00A New Weird OrderThe '70s were a good time for cults of personality and conspiracy theorists. It had nothing to do with whatever nefarious devices the folks at the Charles Stark Draper Labs were working on at the moment (and indeed, they had come up with a secret weapon that could bulldoze entire neighborhoods in East Cambridge and disguise it all as urban renewal). No, we're talking about the really kooky stuff. Sun Myung Moon was head of a weird cult, but he was not a conspiracy theorist (he was more likely to hatch the conspiracies). L. Ron Hubbard was out there (and I mean really out there), and he and his merry band of Scientologists were all about self-help and science fiction. Hubbard wrote a whole series of best-selling books of very bizarre science fiction, and he also wrote "Dianetics", a self-help book that was being revised into new editions long after Hubbard's death in 1986. You always knew you had encountered a Scientologist on the street if they offered you the opportunity to take a free psychoanalysis test. The ads for "Dianetics" were always hard to miss; they always asked profound questions like "Why does life suck?" (Page 11), followed by the erupting volcano.<br />
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But when it came to off-the-wall conspiracy theories and dogged persistence, no one could touch the followers of Lyndon LaRouche, the third member of that Unholy Trinity. In the early '70s, LaRouche became convinced that Henry Kissinger and Nelson Rockefeller were plotting the end of the world; by the mid-70's, he decided it wasn't world destruction they were plotting, but the wholesale de-industrialization of America (and damned if that didn't happen!), for the benefit of that secretive world order that included the Queen of England, the Bilderbergers, the Council of Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. In 1984, LaRouche decided that the worst thing that could happen to America would be to freeze all our nuclear weapons production; he preferred to build defensive beam weapons in space to shoot down the incoming nukes of the bad guys (because it was high technology, man!) He was also convinced that movements like Greenpeace were part of the Trilateral conspiracy, because nothing symbolized deindustrialization like environmental stewardship.<br />
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LaRouche's minions could be found in some of the largest airports in the country hawking their wares and trying to warn the rest of the world about the coming global conspiracy. And they could be found on college campuses like MIT, trying to get nuclear power plants built over the dead bodies of baby seals. They were the sworn enemies of the Clamshell Alliance, which was trying to stop the building of a nuclear power plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire. And they were the only thing standing in the way of the Queen of England's plot to take over the world by getting us hooked on drugs.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFwL2murPpifJgdwuzc97TNWlNv64xDhs6CsT4zsM3hBIR1bs6IGWBBRkjFFXRFYprsYC2RSWe3w0XO1JsiSLjfU4pm0G-QJU8zGK01-8Rn-zNPHuMi98uhI4atTMBOLW2moExymzR/s1600/Stickles+119A.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFwL2murPpifJgdwuzc97TNWlNv64xDhs6CsT4zsM3hBIR1bs6IGWBBRkjFFXRFYprsYC2RSWe3w0XO1JsiSLjfU4pm0G-QJU8zGK01-8Rn-zNPHuMi98uhI4atTMBOLW2moExymzR/s320/Stickles+119A.jpg" superadblocker_image="0" width="244" /></a></div>You could always tell LaRouche's followers by their neat JC Penney dress pants, no-iron white shirts, clip-on ties, short hair and glasses. And you could never get rid of them. Once they glommed onto you, they woudn't let go until you'd bought something, anything from them. And signed a petition. They claimed to be Democrats; LaRouche himself ran against Congressman Frank Wolf of Virginia in 1990 while he was serving a prison sentence for tax evasion. LaRouche has largely dropped out of sight in the last couple of years - although some people maintain that he is secretly Lou Dobbs.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBaf_s4yp8eztgde17uZOAzlK9IzrnPrHQ4Z70HqMkVeZ7j0lX-Hammxky0m4tRVjzUQ3a30DSRojbX6-DoCmZim-NIu3-OTOOB-AGlW7tsmkTHPZqhXEReQA8LN7PETgMqrouBcZw/s1600/Stickles+119B.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBaf_s4yp8eztgde17uZOAzlK9IzrnPrHQ4Z70HqMkVeZ7j0lX-Hammxky0m4tRVjzUQ3a30DSRojbX6-DoCmZim-NIu3-OTOOB-AGlW7tsmkTHPZqhXEReQA8LN7PETgMqrouBcZw/s320/Stickles+119B.jpg" superadblocker_image="0" width="247" /></a></div><br />
Geoff Baskirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05888775674568049611noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5495847081441994138.post-90629238026259151492011-08-17T18:14:00.000-07:002011-08-17T18:14:28.020-07:00Technology Squared<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWoGSvcERoMVA9EgWGjhDePGiHp6M-6rz1LfDl_BGw9CH2Ry2xYC7ZxkiujgDcPtwB1LKQvy7JgkrGdU2XvPAcy4gemKo0lv0zum4FZgQTVaWbrQs49PnbXcsSQCBFBFn_vRREcez0/s1600/Stickles+118B.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWoGSvcERoMVA9EgWGjhDePGiHp6M-6rz1LfDl_BGw9CH2Ry2xYC7ZxkiujgDcPtwB1LKQvy7JgkrGdU2XvPAcy4gemKo0lv0zum4FZgQTVaWbrQs49PnbXcsSQCBFBFn_vRREcez0/s320/Stickles+118B.jpg" width="243" /></a></div>Welcome to the '80s! It is a time before BlackBerries, Kindles and Facebook. Bill Gates and Paul Allen have yet to create Windows, but DOS exists and Steve Jobs has already been hard at work in his Cupertino garage with another fellow named Steve Wozniak, and together they have created the first portable computer, the Apple (actually, they're already up to the Apple IIe, a nifty little box with a typewriter and a whole 8 kilobytes of memory!). The rest of us are still used to doing things like tapping out punch cards in a language called FORTRAN to use on one of those big, massive IBM mainframes. There is no Excel, but there's Lotus 1-2-3. There is no PowerPoint, but we have Harvard Graphics. And while there is no Word, or even WordPerfect, there is a nice little gadget known as a Selectric typewriter, and it can type in different fonts! (All you need to do is pop in a different ball). And we can all network socially, thanks to a wonderful thing called Prodigy!<br />
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But all is not rosy with this wonderful new high technology. First of all, your KayPro is a heavy sucker. You might have one of those newfangled Compaq boxes, but when Texas Instruments perfects the TI-99/4A, it's going to blow away that Compaq (why did I ever buy 100 shares at $10 a share? I must've been crazy!). The second problem is that those IBM PC's that Charlie Chaplin sells, which are the gold standard, don't have accuracy beyond 8 significant digits (you can get a co-processor that boosts that accuracy to 16 significant digits, but that's money, and who's doing higher-order regressions, anyway?)<br />
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Moore's Law has yet to really kick in. We had random access memories, but they had yet to develop amazing superpowers. Bubble memories are only a couple of years old.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO4W53I6n5dwLgqYkQoX7PT-fg_rG91o3lw6w0LmwvnBZc5ZhgWGUguXt6X-ZUGTa3yyLgO_sBpq6NUsnzPWteX_FvIZtg6xjpjzA-j38R4sVoxRhj0QZfE2v5hOmNqUL-LCWzJrj6/s1600/Stickles+118A.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO4W53I6n5dwLgqYkQoX7PT-fg_rG91o3lw6w0LmwvnBZc5ZhgWGUguXt6X-ZUGTa3yyLgO_sBpq6NUsnzPWteX_FvIZtg6xjpjzA-j38R4sVoxRhj0QZfE2v5hOmNqUL-LCWzJrj6/s320/Stickles+118A.jpg" width="241" /></a></div>Within ten years, computers will have 128k of memory on the hard drive and 16k of RAM, and won't we be flying then? As it is, we've still got the 8086 chips, but pretty soon we'll be moving up to the 80286 (and with an 80287 math co-processor, you'll be able to run those 1-2-3 spreadsheets without having to turn off the automatic recalculation). Those guys at Lotus are geniuses. I don't know what you can do with Symphony, but I hear that Jazz is even better than Symphony.<br />
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Actually, that's not what was so amazing about the '80s. Steve Wozniak was one cool guy; he got a whole bunch of bands together and created the US! Festival - three days of fun in the Inland Empire east of Los Angeles and west of the Joshua Trees. The Clash were there, and so was Van Halen, and I hear that U2 played an amazing set. On the other end of the country, this guy named Grandmaster Flash was doing absolutely weird things with a couple of turntables, and kids were break-dancing in the streets (did you ever think you'd see someone spin around on their heads?). Cum on, feel the noize!<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQHJA6RmcC71PEWx13VHdE37VryV1oVveBBbQQwrJARUPUERWmCfcySP5muPBRqdbFccBiX18z1E9UVlbsD9R_THjQrnsPYHa1o1zAEnSqPU08ydjlQilv3Q-IsiPEcyvNvtWZSxc2/s1600/Stickles+118C.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQHJA6RmcC71PEWx13VHdE37VryV1oVveBBbQQwrJARUPUERWmCfcySP5muPBRqdbFccBiX18z1E9UVlbsD9R_THjQrnsPYHa1o1zAEnSqPU08ydjlQilv3Q-IsiPEcyvNvtWZSxc2/s320/Stickles+118C.jpg" width="243" /></a></div>The '80s also made a bona fide celebrity out of Erland van Lidth de Jeude. If you did not go to MIT, you remember him as the big, mean, bald-headed dude who sang "Down in the Valley" in <i>Stir Crazy</i>. Those of us who took Computer Lab remember him as one of the TA's, a resident of East Campus, an imposing Greco-Roman wrestler (he weighed in excess of 300 pounds, had Size 18 dress shoes and was once measured to have more explosive power than a horse). He was also The Voice, whose larger-than-life presence filled many a Musical Theatre Guild production. When he sang a tune from "1776" in Building 10, they could hear him in Lobby 7. When he wasn't in films, he was a highly paid computer consultant (although he could have made a mint on the WWF circuit). This was probably the only <i>Stickles</i> cartoon that pictured him.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDCmydW_UUjPSiAaeE5DCSSUVLIch4I1BL4T_OfC3Hnw3iiE-irUzFPkY982Em6l5DLcpUK28GNfygsJ6P4O8ypGZ_N3nCL3huPOfio2i0h4z9HAYTduh0S5RY2zlSndY4M3QuTHXw/s1600/Stickles+118D.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDCmydW_UUjPSiAaeE5DCSSUVLIch4I1BL4T_OfC3Hnw3iiE-irUzFPkY982Em6l5DLcpUK28GNfygsJ6P4O8ypGZ_N3nCL3huPOfio2i0h4z9HAYTduh0S5RY2zlSndY4M3QuTHXw/s320/Stickles+118D.jpg" width="245" /></a></div>These days, we use Control-Alt-Delete instead of Control-C to unstick a frozen computer.<br />
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One of the great MIT hacks dates back about ten years, when the first voice recognition software was introduced. Supposedly (and I was not there to witness it, so I am going strictly on news reports), the software was being demonstrated before a rapt audience, when a lone voice in the audience barked out, "Format C, Enter!" It was followed almost immediately by a second voice in the audience, "Yes, Enter!" The software worked perfectly.Geoff Baskirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05888775674568049611noreply@blogger.com0