Click on images below to enlarge:
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| The Biscuit
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I tried another muffin from The Biscuit, the place that disappointed
me the previous week. This time I tried a low-fat banana nut
muffin. Given my past experience with low-fat muffins from them, I was
planning to avoid them. But, I was in the mood for banana.
The muffin was spongy. Bleh! I threw most of it away. Incidentally, it
had a few small nuts.
Can I generalize about this joint after trying two low-fat muffins?
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| Work
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From Harvard, I took the train to MIT and found my company's building and
floor. It's a comparatively small office with an unusual layout which I
won't describe here. While I looked around and got settled to work for a
couple of hours, I enjoyed the view from the seventh floor windows.
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In the office, I ran into an old friend from high school. I hadn't seen
him in ten years--I'm amazed he recognized me. We caught up briefly. Given him and the other people I wanted to talk to, I felt guilty
and disappointed that I only had time to spend roughly two half-days
in the office.
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| M.I.T.
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| MIT's Stata Center. From this angle, it looks like a relatively normal
building.
| From another angle, the Stata Center's strangeness is evident.
| Sweeping stairways in the Stata Center bolster the center's open feeling.
| Food trucks in a nearby parking lot. Why didn't any college I attended
have such food carts?
One truck is clearly much more popular than the rest.
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MIT certainly has some ugly industrial buildings on campus.
It has some nice buildings too, but they're fewer and farther between.
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| M.I.T. Museum
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The MIT Museum.
It looks as ordinary as most other buildings on campus.
| Various cool walking, running, hopping, and rolling robots.
| The kinetic sculpture Cloud by Arthur Ganson is a delicate,
complex wire contraption.
| Another Dream is an apparatus that spins, flips, rotates, and
clacks in interesting ways.
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A machine that demonstrates how gears can cause orders of magnitude
change in the rate at which things happen.
The next picture explains the device.
| An explanation of the machine in the previous photo.
| A section relating to capturing unusual images has a demonstration: a
very high speed strobe lights up two steams of water (made of droplets,
I think). The light allows one to see the individual drops. By
adjusting the frequency of the strobe, I can make the drops appear to be
moving down the streams, to be moving up the streams, or to be hovering.
| In this video, I change the speed of a rotating disc. In person, I
could see how the circles in the middle row achieve different levels of
distinctness and line up, and see how the inner row moves in different
directions, and see how the outer row changes its level of blurriness.
These effects, however, are much subtler in the video than in person.
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| A story about a big strobe. Such confidence!
| An ingenuous strategy that allows one to take ultra-short camera
exposures, such as those necessary to photograph a nuclear explosion.
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| More M.I.T.
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| Although fundamentally a city campus and certainly less green than
Harvard, I took this overly dark picture to remind myself that MIT does
have some green spaces.
| A puzzle/Game clue made by the MIT Library. The answer
is now available.
The MIT Library published three such
puzzles fall semester 2007, all of which implicitly taught students
how to use library resources.
| Looking out through the entrance of building 7 (Rogers Building), the
building with MIT's information center. Taken to capture the interior
and the window framing.
| Ibid. Taken to capture the view outdoors.
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I walked down part of MIT's long corridor. The countless fliers,
decorations, and posters give it character. I enjoyed reading
enlargements of MIT student newspaper stories from more than a
century ago.
| More greenery near MIT, plus one of MIT's funky sculptures. MIT has a good
number of unusual pieces of campus art.
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| The Helmand
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| I met an old friend, N, and one of his friends at The Helmand. The
Helmand is an Afghani restaurant in San Francisco that I love. The only
other Helmand in the country is in Cambridge. Hence, I knew I had to go
when I was in town.
If anything, this Helmand was even better than SF's.
Sorry, I didn't take any photographs.
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The meal started with good Afghan bread accompanied by a very good,
addictive cilantro sauce, a red chile sauce which was too spicy for
me, and raita.
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We split an aushak appetizer: "ravioli with leeks and scallions with yogurt
mint." It was good: light and interesting.
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We also split a kaddo appetizer. Kaddo is pan-fried then baked baby
pumpkin, topped with yogurt and, in this case, beef sauce. This version
was better than the SF's Helmand's version. It wasn't too sweet and
hence worked well as an appetizer. (I often think SF's version only
really works as a dessert.) The meat sauce was mild and spare,
complementing the pumpkin nicely.
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