Linkdump: Smart Leaves, Burritos, and Shaq by Chris Peterson SM '13

I think I get my need for notes from my mom. Every day of my childhood was a festival of notes. I’d wake up to a note on my bedside reminding me to brush my teeth; on the bathroom mirror a note would remind me to read the note that would be waiting next to my breakfast. This is how my mother “recycled” the reverse sides of our old drafts of papers and things, with small instructions and reminders and smiley faces. And even now, as a grown man, when I go home I’m liable to wake up buried under a snowbank of mom’s making.

But I’m a modern man, so instead I just use TextEdit. My external monitor is layered with little textboxes with lists of todos, instructions to myself, things to check up on, and so forth. I never used to have to do this. When I was a kid, I was the king of baseball trivia. It was like magic tricks. I could tell you everything about Babe Ruth’s pitching career or who had held the home run records in the dead ball era. Same for songs. I swear I remember the lyrics from every song I ever heard at a dance from 6th-8th grade. Could my brain be put to better use than a repository of the Ruff Ryders Anthem? Probably. But that’s outside my control.

Where was I. Right. Notes. One of my notepads is just an ever-growing list of blog ideas. Some of them are for longer narrative pieces, with a lot of meaning and effort behind them. Others are just cool links for things that happened at MIT. The former will arrive eventually, but the latter are often too short to merit their own entries.

So here’s a linkdump of some cool stuff MIT I’ve come across in the last few weeks and months:

• Boston Globe: “And the band is set to play on after students’ efforts for Kendall Station” – a bunch of MIT students finally repaired the Kendall band
• Boston Globe: “MIT student hiking Appalachian Trail to raise money for diabetes research” – sophomore Gabriel Blanchet is taking a semester off to hike 2,179 miles.
• USA Today: “10 great places to bite into a big burrito” – Anna’s Tacqueria, in MIT’s student center, is #3
• Boston Globe: “Toiling with toilet paper in MIT’s Infinite Corridor” – some students broke the world record for folding paper down the Infinite
• PopSci: “MIT’s Quadrocopter Carries a Kinect for Autonomous Flying” – one of the more awesome Kinect hacks I’ve seen
• PCWorld: “Researchers Develop Artificial Leaf; Your Marigolds Cower in Fear” – artifical leaves may one day provide us with all the electricity we need
• NYT: “Energy Geeks Converge on M.I.T.” – “few [energy conferences] match the unbridled enthusiasm of the annual energy fête — entirely organized by students — at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”

And some videos!

• BoingBoing: “MIT Researcher records 90,000 hours of home video, analyzes the hell out of it” – Media Lab researcher Deb Roy tracks how his son learned to speak, available here:
• MotherBoard: “Carlos and His Heavy Metal Toys: The Man Who Built a 20-Foot Flamethrowing Exoskeleton” – title kind of says it all. No direct MIT connection, just awesome. Watch:
  
• Deleted Scenes from “The Association” – Shaq knows what’s up:
  

There! Now you’ve got some cool MIT-ish stuff to see, and I can clear a tiny corner of my desktop…to uncover a dozen more notes behind it.