DME Day 3

Greetings again! I didn't carry my camera around yesterday (Thursday) so there won't be a lot of pictures but I will post some videos of the stuff I saw. We started in Lab in the morning, tinkering with our robots. I spent all morning building a remote control for the robot by soldering big wires to tiny little toggle switches and buttons, only to find out that one of my toggle switches didn't work at all. After desoldering and resoldering (I equate that process to living in hell) I tried again. It didn't work. At this point I was out of ideas so I cut the other end of my wire off and put a new plug on it. Apparently that did it, because now I have a remote control, a robot, and both work! After working on robots we ate lunch and then took some lab tours.

I'll skip talking about 2 of the labs (they were cool but not noteworthy (which is ridiculous, because everything at MIT is noteworthy, so I guess I just don't feel like talking about them)) and skip straight to talking about the Media Lab. The Media Lab is the coolest building in the world, omg! I consider it a toy factory in all honesty, the stuff in there is just so cool! The even have a Lego room, ok, that's how awesome. My favorite thing about it, though, is that I've already seen a bunch of the stuff they're developing on TV and on the internet. It's VERY neat to see it in person. What did I see in person?

$100 laptop


LEO


(the funny part about that Elmo scene is that later on in it (we were shown the full clip in the lab) he holds up Big Bird and Leo cowers in fear, covering his face with his hands.)

Scratch


Musical Jars

City Cars

The Opera of the Future

All in all, a very cool experience. I'm going to try to get a job there doing research freshman year, wish me luck! After all the touring we went back to lab to work on our robots, where I succeeded in cleaning mine up and actually making it work fairly correctly, just in time for competition on Saturday.

After lab was dinner and then a comedy show called "Shear Madness." It was set in a barber shop and the audience was sitting really close to the stage so we could interact with the cast. It was really funny, especially after they realized there were a ton of MIT kids in the audience, they kept saying things to make us angry and we'd boo and jeer. For example, one of the main characters was talking about how she used to go to Wellesly and we all yelled and booed. That was before the cast knew we were from MIT so they looked at us like "what is going on? why do they hate that school?!" but later on when we booed at the mention of Harvard I think they figured it out. Then, later on, the detective on stage asked a suspect a question. The suspect didn't know the answer so he said "How should I know? Ask one of these Smoots from MIT out there!" It was very fun, quite hilarious. After Shear Madness we went and got some ice cream (all of this is free by the way) and then headed back to campus on the T.

A group of 5 of us, including a girl from Oregon, went to the lounge at my dorm and played wii for a while, so we shot plungers and swung cows until midnight when we decided it was probably time to sleep, so we did. Here I am now, the next morning, telling you about my exciting day and about ready to go out on another one. Wish me luck!