The Fisher Files

MIT Physics professor Peter Fisher (with whom I took 8.033 12 years ago) produced two seasons of podcasts back in 2007 called the Fisher Files. Unfortunately something disastrous happened to the stylesheets or something because the website is basically unusable in its present state. I had stumbled across this a few months ago but was put off by the wreckage of the site. TFazio recently mentioned it and this time I put the effort into downloading all the actual podcasts.

The podcasts revolve around the Getting Things Done philosophy of how to collect and organize the myriad daily tasks which make up our lives. Fisher nicely applies GTD ideas to many specific scenarios of academic life, making the ideas more directly applicable to me. He also goes further than just discussing ways to be productive, though, and tries to bridge the gap between accomplishing today's tasks and the almost spiritual goal of loving one's work and balancing it with other parts of life.

I'm so glad I went to the effort of grabbing them, because they're incredibly relevant to me right now. And in the hope of making them more widely available, I've collected the links below. I hope others will enjoy them as much as I have begun to!

Season 1 (largely about GTD)

1. Introduction
2. Buckets & Weekly Review
3. Projects
4. ToDo
5. Calendar
6. Putting things together [broken link]
7. Email
8. Files
9. Feeding the Bad Wolf
10. Gadgets
11. Multitasking
12. Reading

Season 2 (the academic life)

1. Impostor!
2. Screwed!
3. Thesis
4. PostDoc
5. Travel
6. Vacation [broken link]
7. Junior Faculty
8. Giving talks
9. Tenure
10. Teaching
11. What to work on
12. Summary

Quote of the day

“One of the most important things I learned at MIT was from Bill
Lobar, Lou’s [Professor of Physics Emeritus Louis S. Osborne's]
technician. I asked him one day to show me how the oscilloscope worked,
since I’d forgotten whatever I’d learned in undergraduate labs. Bill
said, ‘fiddle with the knobs, you’ll figure it out.’ He was right, and
it works with almost everything in life. I’ll bet Lou fostered that
kind of thinking.”

Virgil Elings (Cousre VIII PhD '66, founder of Digital Instruments Inc.)

Carboat 06

I wasn't around for the frenzied month of building and subsequent disappointment that was Carboat 2005. Luckily my Summer holiday travels this year brought me through Boston the weekend before July 4th. LB and I spent most of the days leading up to the 4th at Cruftlabs (and cruising to Kresge Mart to get the most awesome boat seats ever). Benoc has a good number of photos from the construction phase as well as a writeup of the weekend. A selection of my photos (possibly the only ones from our crue of the boat in the water?) is up in the new album.

After last year's no-launch fiasco, Scott implemented Plan Failure-is-not-an-option. Not only did he get the Carboat registered as an official MA vessel (MS 5481 AN) but he and Steve planned to launch on the evening of July 3rd to avoid crowds at the ramp and the State Police. In keeping with Carboat tradition, preparations went down to the wire and the convoy with Carboat departed Cruftlabs shortly after midnight on July 4th. We arrived at Nonantum to find the ramp deserted and proceeded to launch the Carboat. Initial tests (while tethered) indicated functional steering and propulsion, so Steve and Scott tried to fix a few slow leaks and prepare for the slow journey downriver.

It was at this point that we encountered the first of what would be innumerable people gawking at the contraption. A dude on a solo river cruise at 2AM pulled up to the ramp. We were at first nervous that we were blocking the ramp which he wanted to use, but in reality he just wanted to slowly circle around and take 500 photographs of the Carboat. Scott was feeling a little stress from many sleepless days of working, so I tried my best (along with Benoc and LB) to field what would become the standard questions (Is it a real car? How does it float? Does that thing have a hemi?)

The next morning I radioed Scott on the MIT repeater and we discovered they had docked at the Harvard Sailing pavillion. LB and I rode down to meet them and saw the Carboat in action, looking pretty sweet in the water which concealed its uglier areas. The MIT sailing pavillion was under strict orders not to allow strange vessels to dock, so they had gently booted the Carboat earlier that morning. Luckily nobody was at the Harvard sailing dock so we worked unmolested on fixing the steering. It was at this point that I learned from Steve about the first of what would be many propulsion failures: the gears from the bike chains to the paddlewheel had been badly stripped.

Steve and I pedaled gently (to avoid destroying what little remained of the gears) while Scott drove and LB manned the rest of the boat. Our destination was Josh's WhatBoat mooring to tie up so we could head back to Cruftlabs to perform emergency repairs on the propulsion system. We were quite a hit with the folks who were already hanging out on the riverside to get a good spot for the night's festivities. This was also the first time we attracted the attention of a Cambridge Fire Department golf cart (with two firemen) who seemed to spend their whole morning buzzing around following us to watch what happened.

Once moored we inflated the deflatable raft we had so that we could ferry supplies and people into the dock. Laurie and I took the first trip, along with a load of gear. While we knew the raft had a slow air leak, we did not know until I hopped into it that it also had a slow water leak. Laurie and I raced to shore while the raft slowly deflated and slowly filled with water. Upon arriving I discovered my camera was sopping wet, which is why there are no photographs from that point forward. After a couple of thunderstorms passed through we had tarped up the boat, brought in all passengers and the parts which needed repair.

After a lunch break and repair session at Cruftlabs we were ready to return to the boat (during lunch Josh received a call from the MA Environmental Police saying, "Sir, there's a car parked at your boat mooring."). The repairs of the paddlewheel were not as easy as expected. We tied up to the dock near the mooring and attracted all kinds of attention, including numerous offers for a tow if needed. Scott, Steve and Josh were determined to get the paddlewheel functioning, though, and created a miniforge on the sidewalk, with Josh blowtorching and Scott hammering the hot steel. The field operation eventually included a pair of drills, several hammers and an invaluable file.

After approximately 3 different failed attempts the paddlewheel was again functional, but without any mechanical advantage and directly chained, which meant the pedallers had to pedal backwards at an extremely slow cadence with immense force. Still, it meant that we proceeded all the way upriver to the Harvard bridge under our own power, which was pretty awesome. Nine of us were on the boat for the fireworks, which were fantastic. A wearying but wonderful 4th of July.

The CP's are still cocks

Glad to see the MIT Campus Police are still assholes. When the Caltech dudes showed up to retreive their cannon, they evidently decided to courteously inform the CP's that they were planning to reclaim it. According to the LA Times:

But they decided to quietly alert MIT's campus police about their
intentions an hour beforehand. It may have been a tactical error. The
police wanted to see "proof of ownership" for the cannon.

Almost as good as when the CP's had our LN2 container sent to the State Police drug lab.

MIT Cannon

This is totally awesome. It sucks that it happened just after my visit to Cambridge. I'm a beaver, you're a beaver, we are beavers all. And when we get together, we do the beaver call:

E to the U dU dX, E to the X dX!
Cosine, secant, tangent, sine, three point one four one five nine!
Integral, radical, mu dV, slipstick, sliderule, MIT!

Go Tech!

MH2K6

One of several reasons that I extended my holiday break to nearly a full month in length was to make sure to be in Cambridge for MLK weekend and the Mystery Hunt. I had a much better time this year than last year (when I was so sick with the flu that I could only stay out of bed for a few hours on Saturday). I solved some puzzles, saw some old friends and generally had a good time. Unfortunately, our team pretty much sucked again this year.

Following Rhode's tradtion, I thought I'd list off a few of my favorite hunt moments:

• Sixteen Blocks: clever idea for a puzzle, you get the lists of words from two players who played boggle and you must back out the arrangement of boggle cubes that allowed that game to be played. Unfortunately the testsolvers let it through without realising that there's a boggle backsolver on the web which can generate the layout in about 5 seconds. Josh and I did that so quickly that we didn't even look at the layout because it seemed too easy. After a few minutes I took the layout and confirmed by hand that it contained all the letters. I gave it to some other people working on the puzzle, explaining that if they were trying to get the layout we already had that step done. Turns out it was the only step, because when Erin took the layout from me she read around the grid, "THE ANSWER IS POTATOES"


• The Cambidge AgentLocation puzzle was staightforward and simple, but fun to do. I think sometimes people try too hard to make the Hunt impossible. I thought PhysPlant did a good job of leaving a few openings early on in the hunt for novices to crank through some puzzles.


• The Cambridge meta was pretty cool too. I especially enjoyed clueing TTY with "zephyr mode".


• Blue Steel: Josh decided to bypass the solving stage of this puzzle and just ripped the diskette open to find the information "inside the computer".


• Connect Four: probably my favourite puzzle from the hunt. We had a lot of manpower when it was released to us, so about 12 of us cranked it out in under half an hour. Just nicely constructed through and through, from the clue solving step to the answer arrangement to the final clue phrase.


• Handbook Fragment: this puzzle was annoying as hell, but really satisfying when Josh and I defeated it at 6AM. It involved classifying grammatical mistakes in a writing sample and looking up the mistake code in the Mayfield manual of style. Made more difficult by the fact that the puzzle author did not appear to have much style to begin with.


• Decode This: I was in the middle of this puzzle along with zoz and sbj when the hunt ended. It's another example of a well constructed puzzle in all phases. It uses the same scrambling/decrypting steps repeated 5 times, reducing the total size of the data by a factor of four each time. A 1024 character paragraph thus produces a four letter answer. I enjoyed it enough that I actually finished it at home with Laurie after the hunt ended. (On a side note, she got right into it and definitely should've been working on puzzles for the whole hunt.)


• Space Invaders: this one was a lot of fun too, involving figuring out special rules for each sentence in a crazy paragraph. Some frosh (whose name I forget) was really good at this one and was totally psyched to figure out some of the rules. The best one was when some girl said, "This sentence seems to have all short words." Josh replied, maybe there's some sort of pattern in the word lengths. She started reading word lengths, "Three one four one five nine..."


• The Kuala Lumpur meta used a very elegant method that we unfortunately missed until we had way more answers than we should've needed. Credit goes to Dustin for finally spotting it.


• The Scrambler: another fairly straightforward puzzle that just required some grunging and a bit of general knowledge (not even much googling really). zoz and I basically did this one to chill out for an hour.

We'll get 'em next year!

Technically...

Here I am, 3000 freaking miles away and one of the respectable English daily papers, the Guardian, is reporting on Amal's time travellers' convention. It's a simple idea, really: if you publicize a time-traveller gathering event scheduled for tomorrow (or Saturday in this case) well enough, and the evidence lasts far enough into the future that people living in some distant time when time travel is possible, you may just get a future time traveller to show up. When I first heard about it, I smiled and remembered all the stupid shit we did in college.

Now this has evidently become a worldwide news story. There are acid-free paper slips being hidden in rarely used tomes, radio waves being broadcast into space and print media coverage from newspapers all over. Congrats to Amal, I hope you get lots of future-attendees. I'll nip into the Bodelian (2nd largest library in Britain) and leave a note about it in some 11th century manuscripts.

H4X0R

Caltech hacked MIT's prefrosh weekend like whoa. And so far I've seen lots of MIT reaction along the lines of, "Oh that was totally lame." Plus, the CalTech hack site mentions that some goons from MIT tried to DOS their webserver. In my opinion, these were some pretty sweet hacks, especially since they were done at the expense of the reigning hack-masters. I was a little riled up by being one upped by those So-Cal bumpkins, but come on, give credit where it's due!

Roof Raising

I spent 6 hours in a construction-crane parking lot yesterday. The occasion was Ehren's bus-roof raising. While we never did get the roof off, it was still a lot of fun. Evidently they're finishing the job today (unfortunately I couldn't attend day 2). If you check out the big version of the photo you can see approximately the state of affairs at the end of the day. We had erected the wooden superstructure to be used to lift the roof off, including the installation of the pipes over which the ropes hung and winches on the side. The free standing towers were a bit wobbly, so we bolted them to the bus frame itself and then attached guy-wires tied off to nearby Big Things to stabilize the whole assembly. I conveniently feature prominently in the photo, lugging a 2X4 off to be chopped into smaller pieces. And yes, the sunset really was that gorgeous.

I really regret having forgot my camera because there were some great opportunities for photography. Especially awesome would've been shots of Ehren doing nighttime cutting of the bus frame. There would've been lots of great shots of him illuminated by cascades of sparks both in the bus and shooting out through the hole he was cutting in the roof. There were a ton of cameras floating around though, so I suspect more photos will surface on the web before long.

Erection Party

Well we successfully erected something this weekend, although it wasn't actually an LME (Lightweight Maintenance Enclosure). Instead it was a pair of smaller lightweight tents with a TENT: GENERAL PURPOSE, MEDIUM awaiting additional poles for later erection.

Quite the crowd assembled at Josh's Ossipee land, including the A-Side, Josh & Erin, Scott & Ehren, Brad & Delphin, mdakin, eahearn, Beth Dakin and her friend, paladin, lael, lindsay, mbroxton, greddy and kailas. We sort of arrived in bits and pieces on Saturday. I was originally part of the main car convoy that had departed from Cambridge/Somerville/Revere around 12:30 on Saturday. While we were stopped at a WAL*MART in southern NH, however, we received a distress call from the bicycle party in Pittsfield, NH. Scott and Ehren had left at 6AM to cycle the 135 miles from Boston to Ossipee.

MRhé and I diverted from the rest of the group to go fetch Ehren, who's body had given out on him after 90 miles (which is approximately 85 miles farther than I would've made it). Because my sense of direction is so abysmal we first of all cruised right by Ehren at 50mph before realizing it 5 miles later and doubling back to get him. Then I absentmindedly took the wrong route somewhere in the vicinity of Wolfesboro and wasted another hour heading back and finally getting on track. In the end we arrived only 10 minutes before Scott did on his bike.

Saturday was a lot of brush clearing with the string-trimmer and reorganization of vehicles before dusk fell. Josh, greddy and Brad (with a little late help from me and Ehren) felled a dead tree in the nearby bog (yay, ticks!) and there was much drinking and grilling and revelry into the night. I woke early on Sunday and puttered about the camp site (it was fixing to be a gorgeous sunny day). At around 8:30 I dragged Josh out of bed so we could head to the Indian Mound Hardware Store to purchase a machete for some more heavy-duty brush removal than the string-trimmer was capable of. We arrived just as they were opening (most of the aisles were still clogged with the wares they wheel out front to lure customers in) and the entire store was populated by crochety old men wearing shirts with "INDIAN MOUND" and their names embroidered on the front. Eventually we escaped with a spatula, baking pan (poor man's griddle), bow saw, machete, scythe stone, honing oil, sheath, 100' tape measure and a bottle of syrup from the Valu-Land next door.

Upon our return to camp we had a few people get the fire going to make pancakes while others finished the clearing, measuring and demarcation of the tent site while still others begin inventorying our parts. This last group came to the conclusion not too much later that we did not, in fact possess an LME, but rather a mish-mash of other tent assemblies. After a bit of disappointment we decided to build what we had and ended up with something which could at least shelter the two boats.

Anyway, some photos to come soon, although Amrys's are more plentiful anyway.

Nerds

During one of my standard interwang browsing sessions at the office I stumbled across this essay by Paul Graham about nerds and the American secondary school system. I think he has a lot of interesting observations, although I think he extrapolates too far in his "secondary schools are little more than prisons" arguments. My favorite quotation:

There was something else I wanted more [than to be popular]: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things.

This is, I think, what makes MIT such a wonderful place; it's full of people who want to make great things. That's why the Arts really flourish at MIT too, despite what nearly everyone expects—the same people who want to build rocket engines also want to write poetry.

More thoughts on Bldg 32

I was walking from my office (9 Cambridge Center on Main St.) to building 26 tonight and I noticed that they've finally removed the temporary office for the construction dudes which had previously prevented cutting across the Stata lot toward 26.

I climbed up the inside of the weird brick amphitheatre and discovered that the top edge is actually bordering on a nice little roof garden. And the back edge of this roof garden opens onto a huge staircase that winds down toward the breezeway near 26-100. This made it quite perfect for me since I was heading right in that direction.

I had a number of thoughts about various aspects of the building as a result of getting this closer look at it.

First, I'm amazed that someone could take plans or models of that building and make it happen. The view I'm used to (from Main or Vassar St) doesn't do the whole building justice. I mean, for one thing, it's massive. And another cool thing about it is that when it's totally done I bet it will really nicely integrate with the campus around it. They're just now removing all the construction debris and they've put a ton of trees in different places (albeit mostly not yet physically stuck in the ground).

I suspect that the whole effect will be very nice when done but it might fall prey to the same sort of thing that always happens to really nice outdoor installations. The lights will be cool looking and high tech for a year and then the bulbs will die and PhysPlant won't bother to replace them. The grass will die and they'll get sick of resodding and all that sort of thing. Take as another example the very nicely designed little walkway between the CBC and the Kendall theatre. How long did that blue "light path" last before the bulbs all died? Now it just looks lame.

Anyway, the Stata looks pretty hot if you get a look at it up close and from the angles that have been blocked off for the last few years. I suggest everyone cheggidout.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

In September of 2002 I wrote a letter to the editors of The Tech. My point was that it's important to keep in mind all the good things that continue to happen at MIT while we bemoan the things we think the next generation will have to do without. Amrys and Rodin have both been talking about the disgusting lump of brick and steel that replaced the magical incubator; more specifically, they have been complaining about how the attitude projected by MIT about the new building conflicts so much with the virtues of Bldg 20, which many might say epitomizes the things which make MIT special.

Building 20 holds a dear place in my heart. The moment I decided to come to MIT was when I came to visit as a high school senior and we stopped behind Building 20 on our campus tour to watch some students do time trials of a go-kart. When I arrived on campus as a frosh, it was always the "ugly go-kart building" to me. It was scheduled for demolition during my freshman year and I regret not joining johnston, jrandall and mmunsey on their trips to scavenge cruft and kick in door frames. I won't argue that the Rad-Lab electricals throwing up this POS while soldiers were bunking in East Campus doesn't have an element of romance.

But let's not be too curmudgeonly. I've talked to a couple of people from CSAIL who are psyched to be moving into a brand new building and something tells me that in 5 years time people will have long forgotten the aesthetic rules about what kind of desk you're supposed to have. Hell, my office window looks out on Building 32 and I've watched them construct it over the last couple of years. I agree that every month that went by made the building look less finished and that the final product looks like a bombed out apartment building from the 70's. But I also have faith that in 50 years time Building 32 will have its share of broken electronic equipment and hundreds of Engineers telling stories about their time there.

I'll happily raise my glass to Building 20 and times gone by, but let's also drink to the opening of a new chapter of the corner of Main & Vassar.