MIT Stuff

I was just given an article called "MIT Nerds" from the June 2005 issue of Discover. It captures the spirit of the place very well, and brought back lots of fond memories (with 10 semesters across 11 years at the place, I've got a few!). My buddy Eric Vesper refers to MIT as "a place for the terminally curious", and that sums it up in a nutshell. The aforementioned Discover article mentions a bunch of famous MIT alums (Hugh Lofting, author of Dr. Doolittle...I had no idea!), and notes that "At a guess, none of them were normal, either. No one seems to be normal at MIT." Nice to know some things never change.
Personally, I think this is one of the great strengths of the place. There's such acceptance of intellectual and personal exploration (to the beat of one's own drum) that folks can really push the limits.
As another example of why I love the place, I attended a musical performance a few weeks ago that included some works by Prof. Peter Child. He played some piano works in which each hand was playing in a different key. Challenging stuff, but it really worked. It was interesting to hear the implied mode change within a couple of notes... Peter wrote some of the pieces for his daughter, who at 11 or 12 played them in one of the best renditions of the piece Peter has ever heard. Shortly after playing them, she quit piano (though he said he's not willing to attribute any causal relationship between the two events). I'll do another post at some point with my thoughts on MIT, both good and bad. I'm actually President-Elect for the MIT Club of Boston this next year, so I'm spending a fair bit of time thinking about it.