A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

You know, it's harder to blog when things are right with the world. I have nothing to be sarcastic and cruel about. This weekend was a delightful weekend, with a visit from the Claire Bear and Dave. Yesterday, we walked all of Boston (or at least it seemed like that: we started out in Allston, walked through Harvard Square to the MIT Museum, and then traversed Newbury Street and finally made our way over to the North End). Today was spent eating waffles at home and then apple picking. Now, I need to figure out what to do with that massive bag of apples.

The MIT Museum is probably the coolest thing to do in Boston. Granted, it's no Spam Museum, but it's still definitely worth while. The section on robotics and artificial intelligence was quite interesting, even with the film narrated by Alan Alda, who didn't always seem to be getting what was going on. One thing pissed me off though: the sections on the male scientists always referred to them by their full name ("when Adam Medros invented this, he...") or their last name ("Medros was the first to realize..."), but the one female researcher was referred to continually by her first name ("and then Jenny created..."). How bizarrely and obnoxiously sexist is that? What I found really interesting, though, is that all the male researchers were trying to create these robots to do physical things, but the one female researcher, Dr. Cynthia Breazeal, is working on a robot that is a sociable robot. Kismet is made to resemble a human (with eyes, ears, mouth, and even eyebrows) and to mimic their emotions. I just find it intriguing that the women have gravitated toward this "emotional" kind of robot. I'm not exactly sure what to make of it. Anyway, there was also an exhibit of these cool mechanical sculptures by Arthur Ganson, the photography of Harold Edgerton (he's the guy who took the pictures of bullets going through cards and apples and whatnot), a holography exhibit, and then a history of MIT. Oddly enough, in the MIT history, they had two yearbooks out for folks to look at, and it just so happened that I saw one and thought, "That looks awfully familiar!" Of course it did. It's the same one sitting on my dad's shelf at home, so I got to show Adam, Claire, and Dave what my father looked like at 21.