from the desk of stinkpot

i met the founder of zipcar and goloco today (robin c.) at sloan. neat things involved:

• i was sitting in a sloan class on creating technology startups. i get to take classes on the science of starting companies with some of the country’s best business students for free. being a phd student and in the 2nd lowest tax bracket has got some perks at least.
• i ran into robin after she had finished answering questions and we were walking to our bikes; i got to pick her brain for a couple of minutes on why ridesharing isn’t working in the US. [it turns out americans just aren’t ready for the idea of letting strangers into their cars.]
• i also got some advice on how non-mbas can be useful at their startups and not get themselves fired, despite having helped to start a company: [hint: try and work at a startup in an industry you have some skills in. be indispensable.]

i’ve discovered a new program for my mac this weekend that should make for a lot of fun w/ our summer backpacking pictures: autopano pro.   checkout what it did with 9 hand-held photos from bohol, philippines:

my server has been down for the past couple of weeks as i completed my move back onto MIT’s campus.  now that the server is back online, i should hopefully be able to update this forlorn blog in the near future.  it’s been an eventful summer.

‘been practicing my trackstand for months now whenever i ride my bike to the lab

initially, i’d treat drivers at intersections to morning real-life youtube blooper clips. as i tried to keep my balance and avoid taking my feet off the pedals when stopped at red lights, i’d wildly thrash around on my saddle like an epileptic being stung by bees, until — at the last moment — i’d yank my shoes out of my toe-clips with the agility of a spastic panda bear.  all in the name of one day, being able to execute a trackstand at an intersection and impress some pedestrian i didn’t even know was looking at me.

well, my friends, i’m proud to report that june 6th, 2008, is that day.

sometime last week, i realized i could finally pull off an indefinite trackstand.  and, on my way home this very evening, i was trackstanding at an intersection when a dude strolled by on the crosswalk and said, “hey!  that’s really cool!”  i knew that what he said carried special significance, because he was wearing sunglasses in the early evening and he therefore had to be cool himself.

my ego is going to trackstand in front of christina all night.

it’s about 4pm on a tuesday and i’m ensconced in a glass atrium 5 stories about the street.  in front of me is a 60 foot high wall of glass, unbroken by frame or girder.  beyond that, a shrine to architecture is the horizon.

due to it now being summer vacation at MIT, and this atrium being behind a maze of locked doors and elevators, it’s just me in here.

i’m doing science on my laptop and there’s an epic thunderstorm going on about 3 inches of plate glass away.  i hope the lightning comes closer, since i can see so much sky out of these windows.  i crane my ahead all the way back to see drops of rain begin their long meandering journey down the plate glass and to my desk.

this is bliss.

i’ve only recently discovered: a) text messaging on my phone; b) t9 word completion.  i’m going to argue that i was born about 5 years too early for texting to be second-nature to me, the way using google comes so instinctively to my generation.

in any case, a texting feature i discovered on my phone today made me so happy.  i wanted to text the name of a restaurant to christina and i was in t9 mode.  i figured that since the restaurant’s name was an obscure proper noun (Montien), my plans would be dashed and i’d have to go back to the old hunt-and-repeatedly-peck of standard text messaging.  but as i hit the number encoding the last character in the restaurant name, “Montien” suddenly popped into my text message.

and then it hit me: all the names in my phone’s address book had automatically been added to my phone’s t9 dictionary.

i’m not quite sure why that discovery brought me so much geek joy.  perhaps it was the knowledge that enabling this feature would never be advertised; it would never lead to more phone sales.  i’d be surprised if the anonymous programmer (or his/her manager) even won any accolades in their design team for adding this feature.

no, it’s my belief that some anonymous soul at LG took it upon themselves to add that feature simply because it would make a better phone.  someone took pride in their technological creation.

kudos to you anonymous worker, for going out of your way to make my life just a little bit easier.

i got a little distracted lately and began designing our lab website.

i ended up getting a lot distracted; iweb is incredibly easy to use and making extremely visually appealing websites with very little effort is addictive.

if you’re interested in getting to see what happens when abercrombie & fitch meets a microbiology lab, check it out here.

i’m so excited — i’ve just walked out of the most enjoyable talk i’ve seen in my three years here at mit.  david macaulay, author of several architectural-themed books that i cherished as a child, just gave a one hour tour of how his imagination works over in the stata center.  there is no way i can even come close to capturing the excitement of his talk given the limitations of blogs and my storytelling capabilities.  instead, i thought i’d just note here some of the things i observed, in the hopes that these cues will help jog my memory for at least a couple years and thereby prolong the enjoyment i experienced tonight, past my recollection’s usual limit of about 3 days.

• i gained a much deeper appreciation for the decision processes illustrators make.  macaulay kept asking himself: “how can i choose the viewpoint to a scene that will most strongly engage and involve the viewer?”  or, “am i conveying enough movement?”  he also constantly grappled with twisting perspectives: “how far can you bend straight lines so that the viewer sees everything that she needs to see to understand a composition?”
• over the course of his whirlwind passage through at least 100 drawings and sketches, i grew more and more convinced that david macaulay cannot be human.  no man could possibly: a) possess an imagination that playful and rich; b) turn out such a prodigious amount of work in a single lifetime.  the detail in many of macaulay’s sketches is so meticulous that i’m convinced it would take me hours to simply trace, let alone conceive of one of his drawings.  (what’s perhaps even more astounding than what macaulay has published is what he hasn’t; so many of macaulay’s drawings that “weren’t good enough” or “weren’t quite right” would probably have been considered masterworks for normal illustrators.  it reminded me of the quotation attributed to gauss: “few, but ripe.”)  
• it was breathtaking to be taken on a guided tour through the imagination of a certified creative genius.  to play witness to ideas’ first conceptions, to see how they’re folded and batted around, to watch them get crumpled up or occasionally refined and even finished.  all the while reflecting on macaulay’s punctuated, but still quite funny and witty narration. 

ok, it’s time for dinner — enough hero worship for now.  final words for future lawrence: “don’t forget this lecture!  this was one of the reasons why you spent 5 years of your life living in the second-lowest tax bracket.”   oh, and a little something to jog future lawrence’s very visual-based memory:    (i’m just blown away by how decent the camera is on my phone.  although future lawrence probably won’t be as much.)

arthur c. clarke passed on today.  i just read his obituary and learned that he was the original author of the aphorism:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

the next time i try and explain microbial evolution to someone, i think i’m going to quote mr. clarke.

auntie danielle, my sister’s godmother and my mother’s best friend passed away last night.  i thought i’d leave a photo here of danielle that i took on our way to the philippines two years ago.