While you were inside huddling from the cold, the New England Mid-Winter Surf Championships were taking place at Narragansett's Town Beach
There were also big wins from Cambridge and Boston residents.
Harvard locks the doors on local hangout the Three Aces.
Will they have the cash to carry through on whatever plans they had or will the block be shuttered indefinitely as Harvard claims poverty?
An animation model of e. Coli moving through the Charles from Ferdi Hellweger.
Sooz is reviving her freelancer community events as Free Agent Jungle with the first event coming up in a couple weeks.
It seems like a good time to for this kind of thing as a lot of people are likely turning to freelance work to increase or replace income.
When an unknown perpetrator poisoned Tylenol capsules with cyanide the resulting deaths and fear caused national paranoia. The investigation into this 26-year-old product-tampering crime that killed 7 people is going on in Cambridge and Somerville.
Federal investigators said they searched a Cambridge, Massachusetts,
building that is home to James Lewis, who served 10 years of a 20-year
sentence for trying to extort money from Tylenol maker Johnson &
Johnson.
Lewis has denied he laced Tylenol with the cyanide. But the ex-tax consultant, now 62, remains the only person ever linked to the crimes by police in the unsolved case
Some investigators have said they still consider him a suspect, while others have depicted him as nothing more than an opportunist.
Lewis admitted to sending an extortion letter to the company demanding $1 million to "stop the killing."
In addition, Somerville is also a site of the investigation.
It is suspected that the suspect used Somerville locations for either a
lab or storage area, the source states, noting the investigation has
spread to Somerville.
Surveillance cameras rejected from Cambridge by City Council despite officials trying to argue they will not be used to spy on residents.
Although one argument was that they will be used to monitor evacuation routes in an emergency it is not clear why the cameras should be on in non-emergency situations. Another problem is that it would be impossible to tell how the cameras are being used.
(Image: of Banksy's One Nation Under CCTV)
Some commentators are pleased that the Out of Town News site will continue to be a news stand. It's too bad that something more relevant or exciting won't be using the space.
A coffee shop or some third space would be better than the nostalgic fantasy of the news stand in an age of ubiquitous information from newspapers and others online.
It seems likely that there will be a similar "crisis" when the next tenant decides to shut down.
Nice developing photo set by Tim Bean of Boston-area locations mentioned in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Each photo is matched to a passage and page. Bean's image above of the Mayflower ("Live Poultry Fresh Killed") Poultry Co. in East Cambridge is described in the novel as "A store in good old English advertising Chickens Fresh Killed Daily" for example.
Interesting expansion from the Infinite Jest memorial map published by boston.com that we posted about.
via Kottke.
Boston-area Wikipedians are gathering at Wagamama in Harvard Square tonight.
Info:
Wagamama
57 JFK St
Cambridge, MA
The Time Trade Circle is a Cambridge and Somerville group that barters time spent on tasks
One problem that might discourage participation could be the differing values of various tasks being bartered. An hour of legal advice might be more valuable than an hour of dog walking for example although time for time bartering prevents taxation.
Despite the issue of differing value this seems like an idea that could become very popular in a recession when you might want to get something done but are concerned about laying out cash. And it could be very useful for people who are unemployed or don't have as much work as they want.
It's interesting to think of a purveyor of suits and bowties like J. Press selling at Urban Outfitters, purveyor of ironic Urkel t-shirts. via the very good A Continuous Lean. (Image: J. Press)
Carol Chomsky, wife of Noam, has died. Although her husband's linguistics achievements are enormously influential, Ms. Chomsky was also a significant academic in linguistics. It's interesting that acadmeic career was inspired by the potential need for her to earn a salary if Chomsky was jailed for political activities.
(Image: The Chomskys in the 1950s: UPenn)
Boston Postmortem, the monthly gathering of local game developers will meet on Wednesday, December 17th, from 7pm to 9pm, at Microsoft's Cambridge offices followed by dinner at the Cambridge Brewing Company.
Our meeting this month will be our "year in review" session. We'll be having three fifteen-minute talks.
Info on getting there follows:
Continue reading "Boston Post Mortem: Game Development Year in Review, Dec. 17" »
An interesting look at places that embody neighborhoods or city quirkiness in an age of chain stores. The article touches on streetscapes you might never have considered like Bromfield Street as well as trying to find examples of the old Harvard Square and South Boston. Development is likely to slow down considerably which may make some of these spots under less threat of vanishing.
Of course, some change is good: consider the Institute of Contemporary Art's striking new waterfront digs. But the implications of urban change are different from what they used to be. In years past, there was at least a chance that unique new establishments might replace unique old ones. Today, flux tends to homogenize: hence, the Kenmore Square of the Rat and Mr. Butch (RIP) and Super Socks having given way, in less than a decade, to the Kenmore Square of Bertucci's and Kinko's and Qdoba. This dynamic is pernicious enough if you live in Houston or Phoenix. But it's especially galling here in Boston, where the streets carry the accumulated history of (almost) four centuries.
Once you've recognized this reality, there are basically two ways to go. You can accept it passively, dispassionately, maturely, and get on with your business. Or, you can recognize the slow death of urban uniqueness as the tragedy that it is — and then commit yourself to savoring every last exception to this rule while they still exist.
Jane Holz Kay''s Lost Boston is the guide to what has already disappeared over Boston's long history.
Travel icon Rick Steves will be speaking in Cambridge on December 4th discussing the subject that made him famous European travel as well as a recent visit to a more unusual locale, Iran. The Steves approach of seeking less pricey alternatives to mass tourism should be getting renewed interest these days. Although his image is of a genial average guy, Steves is also a social activist noted for his advocacy of drug policy
reform.
Info:
Time: Thursday, December 4th at 5:00pm
Place: First Parish in Cambridge, Mass. Ave at Church Street, Harvard Square
Accessibility: Wheelchair Access at #1 Church St.
Cost: Free, Ticketed Event, Reservations Recommended. Reservations: 
617-649-5700
x21 or events@gcb.com
Does this windshirt really say Harvard Square to you? The Harvard Square Business Association should try to get their name under control.
Henry Jenkins, the head of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT and a prominent academic voice on game culture, fan fiction and other new media, will be moving to USC. He describes the difficult decision on his blog where it seems a prime cause was MIT being unwilling to invest more in the program. Given the economic downturn things were unlikely to change anytime soon.
His departure leaves the future of the CMS program up in the air. It is too bad that this had to happen as CMS has brought a lot of interesting programs to Cambridge and really seemed to compliment the geeky culture of MIT.
As this video shows, Harvard Square's Out of Town News is closing. The newstand near the Harvard T station is suffering from the same decline that newspaper and magazine publishers are. It seems like there are a lot of people who will be sad to see the change but there must not be all that many people actually buying papers and magazines. There is one other newstand on the Square and a big selection of magazines in the Coop so there is also probably an oversupply of news dealers at a time when the fortunes of the medium are declining.
Loving all mixtures of cemeteries and art this seems quite good.
Celebrations from:
Cambridge (Mass Ave.)
Harvard Square
Harvard Square
Harvard Square
Harvard Yard
Boston (BPL Copley Square)
and a slow drive through singing Boston crowds.
How Elena Kagan has helped Harvard Law School overcome its daunting reputation for dysfunctionality,
and start to make it a more attractive place to attend and work and not just have graduated from.
02138 Magazine, the Harvard-centric lifestyle publication, has stopped publishing in the current difficult economy.
In this email, Jeff Mayersohn explains why he thinks the book business still has a future and tries to allay fears about what a change in ownership means to the Harvard Book Store.
Video and images of the Honk! Festival with 25 bands marching through Cambridge and Somerville.
More images at the Honk! Flickr pool.
Former Poet Laureate and BU writing professor Robert Pinsky discusses his Inman Square neighborhood. It's not all love though. Here's the poet on the Inman branch of Bukowski's Tavern.
"It's a children's bar," he says, then dismisses the writer it's named after in the same breath. "He's a children's writer, good for 15-year-old boys."
A project at Harvard, the Personal Genome Project, is publishing the complete genomes of 10 volunteers including Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker. The project is experimenting with the consequences of revealing one's genome.
The goal of the project, which hopes to expand to 100,000
participants, is to speed medical research by dispensing with the
elaborate precautions traditionally taken to protect the privacy of
human subjects. The more genetic information can be made open and
publicly available, nearly everyone agrees, the faster research will
progress.
In exchange for the decoding of their DNA, participants agree to make it available to all — along with photographs, their disease histories, allergies, medications, ethnic backgrounds and a trove of other traits, called phenotypes, from food preferences to television viewing habits.
Including phenotypes, which most other public genetic databases have avoided in deference to privacy concerns, should allow researchers to more easily discover how genes and traits are linked. Because the “PGP 10,” as they call themselves, agreed to forfeit their privacy, any researcher will have a chance to mine the data, rather than just a small group with clearance.
The project is as much a social experiment as a scientific one. “We don’t yet know the consequences of having one’s genome out in the open,” said George M. Church, a human geneticist at Harvard who is the project’s leader and one of its subjects. “But it’s worth exploring.”
A new federal law prohibits health insurers and employers from discriminating against individuals on the basis of their genetic profile. But any one of the PGP 10 could be denied life insurance, long-term care insurance or disability insurance, with no legal penalty. And no law can bar colleagues from raising an annoyed eyebrow at a PGP participant who, say, indulges in a brownie after disclosing on the Internet that she is genetically predisposed to diabetes.
The MIT book sale is coming up. Always an good opportunity for some interesting books.
In order to make the sale a more pleasant experience for everyone, we're going to try something new this year. Please read on for more details. If you have any concerns, suggestions, or questions please email us at books@mit.edu
Info:
When: October 18 - 19, 2008, 10:00am to 7:00pm
Where: MIT E38 Loading Dock, 292 Main Street, Cambridge
IBM is the latest big company to move into Kendall Square in Cambridge with the development of a social software center joining Google and Microsoft
MIT prof Henry Jenkins on the myths of video games.
Harvard's Berkman Center will be hosting a panel discussion on internet policy issues called: The Uncertain Internet: Core Net Values for the [TBD] Administration. The discussion will be on October 9.
Now
is a critical moment for defining and reinforcing the best features of
our communications platforms. What do we value about the internet and
what should be the focus of the next administration? This event will
be a discussion exploring the Net’s benefits and its increasing
vulnerabilities. How do we maintain the network we know, and
anticipate the network it is becoming? What issues emerge in the era
of "cloud computing" and the mobile internet? How do we ensure
broadband for everyone? What can be done to promote open networks and
open devices? Join us for a wide-ranging discussion with leaders from
the legal, technical, and political fields.
The panel will include:
Info:
When: Thursday, October 9, 6:00 PM
Where: Austin East Classroom, Austin Hall, Harvard Law
School
Cost: Free and open to the public, no RSVP required.
The Purple Blurb digital writing series has an interesting series of speakers lined up including Steve Meretzky of Blue Fang Games in Waltham and local film maker Jason Scott. All events take place at MIT. The first event with Steve Meretzky is tonight!
Frank Kramer reveals he has found the purchaser of the Harvard Book Store in Jeff Mayersohn (scroll down).
Some good business news for a change.
The IgNobel Prize 2008 Ceremony takes place tonight at 7:30pm at Sanders Theatre.
Unfortunately, the tickets are a pricey $39.
Fortunately, there are two cheaper alternatives.
Info:
THE IG INFORMAL LECTURES AT MIT
When: Saturday, October 4, 2008 at 1:00 pm
Where: MIT 10-250, 222 Memorial Drive, Cambridge
Cost: Free
In a memorial to David Foster Wallace and his novel, the Ideas publishes a map of Infinite Jest's locations around the Boston area.
The Boston/Cambridge branch of Reading for the Blind & Dyslexic will hold an open house on Wednesday, October 22 for people interested in volunteering to record books for people whose vision problems interfere with their ability to read. RFB&D is the "nation's educational library serving
people who cannot effectively read standard print because of visual
impairment, dyslexia or other physical disability" and a great cause. The organization recently moved to the Henderson Carriage Building near Porter Square so it is pretty convenient to get to as well.
Info:
Time: October 22, 10am - 1pm and 6pm - 8pm.
Location: RFB&D, 2067 Mass. Ave., Cambridge, MA
Boing Boing has a long interview with Star Simpson, the MIT student at the center of the Logan security debacle, where she gives new details about her arrest and why she is disappointed in MIT. They also put a transcript.
An mp3 file of Junot Diaz, author of the great Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and MIT creative writing professor, reading his new story in progress Flaka at the Brattle Theatre
A really interesting Q&A with Esther Duflo, the co-director of MIT's Poverty Action Lab where she responds to some very thoughtful reader questions about the problems of developments.
Nobel laureate MIT physics professor Frank Wilczek has received death threats because of his involvement with the Large Hadron Collider.
If you're worried about whether the hadron collider has destroyed the world you can always bookmark this site.
Providence will get its own Fab Lab to be developed in a collaboration between MIT's Fab Lab project and the Providence arts group AS220
Great to see the Fab Lab initiative spreading in New England as well as overseas. Another example of the maker renaissance trend.
Gizmondo has put together a secret history of the Cambridge-based One Laptop Per Child project whose revolutionary project pioneered the way for the ultraportable over the last few years even as the project itself has been criticized. The article does a good job of pointing out the achievement of the OLPC project in the development of cheap ultraportables even as OLPC has been plagued with internal dissent and management issues.
Harvard Book Store will be hosting the latest of its Winedown events on Friday Sept. 12. They'll be serving free food and wine. In the era of Amazon, this seems like a great way for a real-world store to distinguish itself - by positioning itself as a place where people can participate in a community.
Info:
Time: Friday, September 12th, 7:00pm
Location: Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA
Cost: Free
Jon Radoff of GamerDNA, the Cambridge-based gamer social network, will be speaking in Waltham on Wednesday at Boston Postmortem, the local video game developer meeting.
Info:
Time: 7pm, Wednesday, September 10
Location: The Skellig, Waltham, MA
Cost: Free (Including free food and drink courtesy of Gamer DNA)
MIT loans out art from its collection to students to live with while at school.
Why did the MBTA sue the MIT students who exposed their Charlie Card problems and not the vendor of their system. A plausible theory:
“As Chris stated in his own article, “…Doesn’t this seem backwards to you? Shouldn’t the MBTA be suing the vendor who sold them the flawed system? Security problems go away by mandating independant security testing before a product is accepted, not by trying to get security researchers to be quiet. This is a good example of how the reactive approach doesn’t work. The flaws are still in the system and suing researchers has just shined a bright light on them…” - Unfortunately, in a typical bean-counter response to a threat to the profit model, this comes down to protecting an expensive investment and in a free market economy, the investment many times wins over blatant, slap-you-in-the-face logic.
Although to the observer it makes more sense to attack the source of the problem, profits reside in the path of the easiest hill to overcome. I would speculate that it was determined the three MIT researchers were the less likely candidates to put up any relevant fight equaling less expense long-term in costly litigation as opposed to a well-funded vendor who would be adamant and ferocious about protecting their own bottom-line. This means that from a budget perspective, the corporation will traditionally move towards the least cost initiative counting on their shark-like aggressiveness to payoff - they didn’t count on the MIT students to be resilient, spiny blowfish… ouch.
This fits in with Bruce Schneier's essay on the MBTA issue that we posted about recently.
Reminiscent of the MBTA's loose physical security raised in the MIT case, Richard Kasperowski discovers an unlocked traffic signal box in Porter Square. (Image of the control switches above: Richard Kasperowski)
Neal Stephenson, author of a long string of geek icon titles like Zodiac, Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon and the trilogy the Baroque Cycle, will be presenting his highly anticipated new book Anathem in Cambridge on September 20th but tickets go on sale at the Harvard Book Store today, Friday, August 29th. Run, don't walk!
Date: September 20 at 7:00 PM
Location: First Parish Church Meetinghouse
Cost: $5
Boston comics creators meet weekly in Harvard Square as the Boston Comics Roundtable. They have their first anthology "Inbound" available now. Looking forward to checking it out.
