I’m trading essays with Kristina. This is my MIT life/childhood essay. In my childhood, I was a gadget-destroying beast. Anything that broke, as well as a few perfectly functional things, went under the screwdriver, hammer, hack saw, or whatever else it took to break them open. I would reduce the unfortunate gadget into a pile [...]
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A little over four hours ago, Steven Swanson and Richard Arnold of STS-119 finished deploying the fourth bank of solar panels on the S6 truss of the International Space Station, pushing the ISS past Venus in apparent magnitude and making it the second-brightest object in the sky. The ISS has long been a visible object [...]
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You know how experiments sometimes don’t always turn out as interestingly as you imagined when preparing them? This is one of those. In the days leading up to MIT’s RA decisions, I had an idea: someone should track what percent of applicants checked decisions.mit.edu in the minutes and hours following the release of decisions. I [...]
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Matt McGann’s post announcing RA decisions has been generating quite a few comments. With less than three days remaining, it’s becoming the sounding board for hundreds of anxious applicants. I can’t help but feel the decision buzz all over again, so much that an innocuous reply count on the Admissions blog homepage caught my eye. [...]
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It’s my birthday today (barely, and only if I write quickly). Earlier, I was contemplating what someone is saying when they tell you “Happy Birthday.” The statement is a noun with a single adjective. There’s no verb. It’s equivalent to walking up to someone and saying “soggy turnips.” What? So, I headed to the great [...]
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As a longtime Gmail user, spam isn’t something I see in a typical day. That is, unless I open up my spam folder for a bit of entertainment, as I did today. I wasn’t disappointed. I’d make a Twilight reference, but I just can’t bring myself to do it, so I’ll leave that as an [...]
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Several months ago, Wikipedia’s search box got an auto-suggestive upgrade. You can now begin typing what you desire to know, and a whole list of articles will present itself from which you may choose. I was doing this earlier today, searching for MIT’s article. I reached about “Massachusetts Ins” when the list of choices appeared, [...]
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