Today, computers have language, culture, and manners. But in the 1950s, they were wild animals who communicated only in the raw grunts and growls of binary or hexadecimal numbers. So when the late J.C.R. Licklider—for many years the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s most folksy and sagacious philosopher of the Internet—met his first computer, he stood face to face with an inscrutable savage.
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Lissa Harris
Play Ball!
by Lissa Harrisposted August 7, 2008 at 4:18 pm
It’s a rough life playing catcher on a baseball team — they spend most of the game crouched down, taking foul tips and bounced pitches off the body. But a few players on the MIT team are trying to do something about it. Dan Hyatt and Mike Vasquez talk about their work in MIT’s Sports Innovation Lab to develop a better chest protector. Produced by Andrew Moseman ’08, Megan Rulison ’08, and Lissa Harris ’08.
The Jurassic Age of Computers
by Lissa Harrisposted May 6, 2008 at 4:41 pm
J.C.R. Licklider
Photo courtesy of
the MIT Museum
Heredity Blues
by Lissa Harrisposted May 6, 2008 at 4:35 pm
It is a marvelous piece of luck that I am not in any way related to my friend Dean. If his family had gone back just a generation or two more in rural Delaware County, New York, we’d be cousins six ways from Sunday. When you’re going through your address book for a father for your baby, these things matter.
About a year ago, four of us—me, my girlfriend Julia, Dean, and his girlfriend Sarah—sat down at a big farmhouse table with a couple of legal documents and hammered out the details of what we were about to embark on. Six months ago, all our work paid off. I got pregnant.
Clearly, it would have been easier on everybody if I had just ordered anonymous sperm off the Internet, like a sensible person. And I’m sure the chemists at Cryogenic Laboratories would have mixed me up a fine baby. But when it came right down to it, the prospect of calling up a sperm bank and ordering a shot of Donor No. 3924 triggered a nasty bout of what bioethicists call the “ick factor.” I wanted to know who my baby’s father was.
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Atomic Alchemy
by Lissa Harrisposted March 12, 2008 at 2:04 pm
It was 1901, and Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy were in trouble. They had broken an unwritten rule in science: Thou shalt not prove anything silly.
“Don’t call it transmutation. They’ll have our heads off as alchemists!” Soddy later remembered Rutherford saying at the time. The pair had figured out why the thorium in their laboratory was perpetually putting out radioactive gas: leaking electrons and helium atoms, it was slowly turning into lead.
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IBM One Nano-Step Closer to Single-Atom Data Storage
by Lissa Harrisposted December 12, 2007 at 1:47 pm
As a corporate logo, Don Eigler’s picture wasn’t much to look at: a bunch of dour-gray dots spelling out the letters IBM. But it did the job. The year was 1989, the dots were individual xenon atoms, and the world was astounded.
These days, Eigler’s lab, at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in California, is still looking for new ways to make stuff ever more mind-bogglingly tiny. Their ultimate goal: to store digital data on single atoms, each representing either a zero or a one in binary code. Recently, they got a little closer. Well, maybe a lot closer.
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Mathematics Could Make Busses Run on Time
by Lissa Harrisposted December 12, 2007 at 1:45 pm
As many city commuters know, it is the nature of buses to be late. Traffic, weather, and fate conspire to create delay and fray riders’ nerves. But while there may be no sure cure for late buses, three mathematicians think they have found a way the system can do better.
A University of Southern California trio—Maged Dessouky, Jiamin Zhao, and Satish Bukkapatnam—last year developed a set of elegant equations for increasing the efficiency of bus schedules. Full Article »
