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paradise risen
Aug. 9th, 2013 08:49 pmMy plan was to go to the Harbor Islands, but the weather was like last year's Sugar Festival without the lightning or the morning warmth. I guess there was a tropical depression passing through.
Central Square does not exist according to Google. But in reality, it does, and it's reasonably close to the MIT museum. My umbrella only inverted itself twice.
This place is very popular amongst German tourists, apparently.
There was a video game that worked, but you had to use the keyboard placed under the joystick and buttons.
http://gambit.mit.edu/loadgame/elude.php
It's flash based; you can play it if you want. A metaphor for depression.
And you could play Tetris with a very disorienting touch setup. See, the pad to rotate is between the move left and move right pads, and I'd have moved the rotate off to the side and had the drop pad between the left and right pads. But that's just me. Some people may feel differently.
You could play some other video game programmed by an MIT student but it was under German occupation. Ok, I'm likely wrong but I wanted to say it. It was under some kind of occupation, anyway.
There's a drawing of a burnt owl, a metaphor for students during finals week. Also, I find it hilarious that owls are not the smartest of birds, crows are.
One of the rooms had robots and a board where kids wrote down their suggestions for robots, including a robotic Justin Bieber (believe me when I say we all need one of these for when missionaries or spambots come to our door), a robot that is a dog and can drive. A time machine that sends us back to the mesozoic. And a robot that can cook pancakes.
There were machines: a feather that played the violin but made no sound, a mandala that assembled and dissembled a chair, a self-oiling machine, a dancing chair, a wishbone that pulls a cart, brownian rice, moving lampreys, a gear that moves at the rate of one revolution every 13.7 billion years, paper birds that flap their wings and a machine that writes "faster" when you push the cart and faster when you push it faster, scraps of paper that fly like birds and a chair that dances around a cat.
There were holographs. Iñaki, I've learned, is a Basque name. Holographic video, I've learned, was around in the 1980s. John Brunner was right again.
I told someone we need to make a mechanical orchestra. Not just violins, but other things too. And maybe a machine that waves a baton around.
There was a photography exhibit which depicted empty towns in Greenland and Nepal and empty cities in South Korea and Japan and a rather ugly-looking West Bank settlement. Nobody travels to Israel for the architecture and they certainly don't travel there for the seafood.
There were two kids playing with one of the lightning thingies, one was shocking his friend and saying "the power within!" in a dramatic voice. And a mechanical mouse built by Claude Shannon.
I saw a woman reading a book in Albanian on the red line.
There was a woman with plastic tyrannosaurus earrings and I didn't have time to say anything to her and completely regret that.
One of these days, I swear I'm going to walk around Boston with a sketchbook.
burning question: what do you want robots to do for you?
Central Square does not exist according to Google. But in reality, it does, and it's reasonably close to the MIT museum. My umbrella only inverted itself twice.
This place is very popular amongst German tourists, apparently.
There was a video game that worked, but you had to use the keyboard placed under the joystick and buttons.
http://gambit.mit.edu/loadgame/elude.php
It's flash based; you can play it if you want. A metaphor for depression.
And you could play Tetris with a very disorienting touch setup. See, the pad to rotate is between the move left and move right pads, and I'd have moved the rotate off to the side and had the drop pad between the left and right pads. But that's just me. Some people may feel differently.
You could play some other video game programmed by an MIT student but it was under German occupation. Ok, I'm likely wrong but I wanted to say it. It was under some kind of occupation, anyway.
There's a drawing of a burnt owl, a metaphor for students during finals week. Also, I find it hilarious that owls are not the smartest of birds, crows are.
One of the rooms had robots and a board where kids wrote down their suggestions for robots, including a robotic Justin Bieber (believe me when I say we all need one of these for when missionaries or spambots come to our door), a robot that is a dog and can drive. A time machine that sends us back to the mesozoic. And a robot that can cook pancakes.
There were machines: a feather that played the violin but made no sound, a mandala that assembled and dissembled a chair, a self-oiling machine, a dancing chair, a wishbone that pulls a cart, brownian rice, moving lampreys, a gear that moves at the rate of one revolution every 13.7 billion years, paper birds that flap their wings and a machine that writes "faster" when you push the cart and faster when you push it faster, scraps of paper that fly like birds and a chair that dances around a cat.
There were holographs. Iñaki, I've learned, is a Basque name. Holographic video, I've learned, was around in the 1980s. John Brunner was right again.
I told someone we need to make a mechanical orchestra. Not just violins, but other things too. And maybe a machine that waves a baton around.
There was a photography exhibit which depicted empty towns in Greenland and Nepal and empty cities in South Korea and Japan and a rather ugly-looking West Bank settlement. Nobody travels to Israel for the architecture and they certainly don't travel there for the seafood.
There were two kids playing with one of the lightning thingies, one was shocking his friend and saying "the power within!" in a dramatic voice. And a mechanical mouse built by Claude Shannon.
I saw a woman reading a book in Albanian on the red line.
There was a woman with plastic tyrannosaurus earrings and I didn't have time to say anything to her and completely regret that.
One of these days, I swear I'm going to walk around Boston with a sketchbook.
burning question: what do you want robots to do for you?
