#MIT

[manichewitz]

some photos i took from emerson college’s encampment for palestine. most of these were taken only a few hours before the boston PD attacked hundreds of protestors and brutally arrested 118 students, most of whom were poc, jewish, and/or queer.

anyone who spent any amount of time in the encampment will tell you just how much it brought us all together—there was always food, music, arts and crafts, and hundreds of messages of support written in chalk.

after the BPD was done brutalising us for peacefully protesting, they power washed down the walls of the encampment—all of these messages are gone. theyre trying to erase what happened, but they’ll never truly be able to. everyone saw, and everyone will remember.

[memys-art-stuff]

It is vital that we keep the efforts of so many students across the United States from going to waste. We need to keep the momentum going and ensure that news of the cruelty happening to the people of Palestine is not ignored or suppressed.

Despite what many news outlets may have you believe, what is happening in our world is not minor in the slightest. It is a genocide that is happening before our eyes, day after day. Do not forget the administrative responses these colleges have given to the act of bringing attention this inhumanity. This is history happening now, and these colleges are on the wrong side of it.

These students are calling to divest college funds from Israel. Do not let the media warp their efforts and paint them as an antisemitic mob. Do not let those opposing these demonstrations hide behind claims of antisemitism to justify their actions. This is about stopping human suffering, and to believe anything different is willful ignorance.

[nasa]

Chris Williams

Born in New York City, Chris Williams considers Potomac, Maryland, to be his hometown. A private pilot and Eagle Scout, Williams is a board-certified medical physicist and holds a doctorate in physics from MIT. https://go.nasa.gov/49YJJmf

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[informationatlas]

Parrots learn to make video calls to chat with other parrots, then develop friendships with each other

Researchers from Northeastern University, in conjunction with scientists from MIT and the University of Glasgow, conducted a study exploring the impact of teaching a group of domesticated birds to communicate using tablets and smartphones. The findings indicate that utilizing video calls may assist parrots in mimicking the communication patterns observed in wild birds, potentially enhancing their behavior and overall well-being in the homes of their owners.

via smithsonianmag.com

[sayruq]

[vixen-academia]

Free MIT online courses that sound interesting

Arts & Literature

Introduction to World Music

Reading Fiction

Literary Interpretation: Virginia Woolf's Shakespeare

Introduction to Photography

Foundations of Western Culture II: Renaissance to Modernity

Studies in Poetry - Briths Poetry and the Sciences of the Mind

Studies in Literary History: Modernism: From Nietzsche to Fellini

Screen Women: Body Narratives in Popular American Film

Studies in Poetry: "What's the Use of Beauty"

Queer Cinema and Visual Culture

Monteverdi to Mozart: 1600 - 1800

Writing and Experience: Reading and Writing Autobiography

Advanced Topics in Hispanic Literature and Film: The Films of Luis Buñel

Major Authors: Rewriting Genesis: "Paradise Lost" and Twentieth-Century Fantasy

Arthurian Literature and Celtic Colonization

Contemporary Literature: Britsh Novel Now

Studies in Poetry: 20th Century Irish Poetry: The Shadow of W. B. Yeats

Writing About Literature: Writing About Love

Introduction to European and Latin American Fiction: Great Books On The Page and On The Screen

Popular Culture and Narrative: Use and Abuse of the Fairy Tale

Victorian Literature and Culture

Reading Poetry

English Renaissance Drama: Theatre and Society in the Age of Shakespeare

Introduction to Fiction

International Woman's Voice

Major Authors: Oscar Wilde and the "90's"

Prizewinners: Nobelistas

American Authors: American Women Authors

Shakespeare, Film and Media

Japanese Literature and Cinema

Woman's Novels: A Weekly Book Club

Classics of Chinese Literature

Major English Novels

Topics in South Asia Literature and Culture

Introduction to Literary Theory

History & Social Studies

American Classics

The Middle East in the 20th Century

Africa and the Politics of Knowledge

The Rise of Modern Science

European Imperialism in the 19th and 20th Century

Philosophy of Love

Human Rights: At Home and Abroad

The Nature of Creativity

Introduction to Comparative Politics

Riots, Rebellions, Revolutions

Introduction to the History of Technology

Ancient Philosophy

Youth Political Participation

[tribble-ations]

MIT ends MISTI-Israel’s Lockheed Martin Seed Fund under student pressure

“Under pressure from students and scientists of conscience at this Institute, the MIT administration has discontinued MISTI-Israel's Lockheed Martin Seed Fund and will not renew its contract.”

“You will also see the Lockheed Martin Fund was removed from the MISTI-Israel website between December 2023 and February 2024. This was a major target of our divestment action. The program ends after months of protest against it last fall, including letter deliveries, sit-ins, and public information campaigns.”

— MIT Coalition for Palestine

[i-am-aprl]

Priceless. This is an Israeli naval officer who participated in the atrocities in Gaza and who later went on Fox News and said he was “truly afraid” to walk on campus due to the protesting students. This time he walks into the middle of the MIT encampment and starts screaming for police to save him because he feels unsafe, while the students ignore him 😂

[taviamoth]

🚨 For the 5th consecutive night, students at Columbia University continue the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, undeterred by over 100 arrests, and returning with larger tents than before.

The students have declared that they will not stop until the University, with its $14 billion endowment, divests from zionism.

Despite a number of suspensions and censorship, students are not backing down. Tour guides for new students have resigned in protest of the repression. Support rallies continue outside the university.

The liberated zone at Columbia has inspired others: At Yale University in Connecticut, an encampment named Gaza Plaza with demands of divestment continues for the third consecutive night despite suspension threats. At Yale, a number of graduate students undertook an 8-day-long hunger strike to demand their university divest from zionism.

Students at the New School in New York also began an encampment, as did a number of students in Boston, creating three encampments at MIT, Emerson, and Tufts to demand divestment and cessation of attacks on students. Encampments are also taking place at the University of North Carolina, Washington University, and Miami University in Ohio.

[oldguydoesstuff]

In 1978 MIT CS students Danny Hillis and Brian Silverman designed a working computer capable of playing tic-tac-toe against a human opponent entirely out of Tinker Toys.

The machine consisted of 10,000 wooden parts and fishing line, and was designed with the help of a LISP program running on a DEC PDP-10.

In a letter to computer pioneer Gordon Bell describing the project, Hillis said the machine could have been built by any six-year-old with 500 sets of Tinker Toys, and a PDP-10.

[mulcheon]

i’m actually kind of nervous to be posting this ajdjd but i’ve been loving the if “remember, you will die”, by @vapolis , i replayed it yet again recently, and in an oc fuelled craze i cranked out all of these

so here’s my merc! they named themself merc as a bit x0 to fuck with jax and echo

also i read that jax likes ass so it’s a good thing i gave them major cake lol

original sketches under the cut!

[girlactionfigure]

awiderframe

[hunter-husky]

September 2024 Secret Santa

I think I forgot to upload this, if I DID upload it well you get to see it TWICE September SS for @/AvocadoTiger were training baby

[paper-mario-wiki]

I've got a question to someone more Mathematically Learned than me:

What is the current Edge Of Human Knowledge in regards to the origins and fundamentals of the natural world? What's the current thread that most people are trying to follow to get down to like. The exact reason for the nature of the universe? I've heard that in the first second directly after the big bang, things were quote "a little weird," unquote. And I want to know what that means. I'd like to know what gaps in our knowledge of physics we are most focused on trying to fill right now.

[sayruq]

[gunsandspaceships]

Tony’s behavior: Teenager/Young Adult (17-18 years old)

In the First part (Kid) and the Second part (16 years old), we learned that at least for his first 16 years, Tony did not have an Alter Ego. He was brave and smart, as we all know him, but also surprisingly calm and quiet. Despite the popular opinion about him, he was not a spoiled bragging brat. He was the opposite.

However, in this part we will see some changes. What caused these changes will be discussed later in another series of posts.

What sources we have on 17-18 year old Tony? Just a few: What If? S2, E2 and an MIT Alumni article.

Let's start with the article:

“I saw him a few times at the chess boards near Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square. There was this guy down there, a chess master, and you could give him five or ten bucks and he'd play you a game. A couple of times I remember [Tony] breezing in and throwing money on the table, and kind of wiping the floor with the guy.”

What can we get from this?

Tony is exceptional at chess. Well, no surprise. He is in every universe.

Despite his repeated victories against the chess master, he never participated in professional chess championships. As we know from the previous part, he was interested in robotics competitions, but it seems like he did everything else just for fun, not for recognition or a list of his achievements.

He never mentioned being good at chess or actually playing it in the MCU. I guess he was waiting for the right partner (Reed Richards).

He was the smartest, most skilled and capable guy on campus, but again, we can see how little we hear about him from that time.

“No one really knew him, he was just a rich kid. Everyone wanted him around, though, because he'd always bring something fun for the party.”

By this time he was already partying. Too bad we don't know what that "something fun" was.

"No one knew him". Still. He didn't really interact with other students and didn't have any relationships with them. He met Rhodey at that time though.

Despite that, they all wanted something from him. In this case - being around and bringing them fun. Nothing has changed decades later, has it?

“I remember him at after-parties on Thayer Street. He was up later than anyone else. But you could always get a ride home with him, because he always had a car.”

Wait. Did they just say he gave drunk students rides home from parties? He was SOBER?! What the heck was he doing there then?!

And did they just say that he helped everyone, even if they were all strangers to him? And like, always?!

"He was up later than anyone else". Tony is definitely not a morning person. We all knew that, this is just for official confirmation.

Next we have Henry Jenkins, the former co-director of MIT's Comparative Media Studies:

“Some students are larger than life—they leave a trace across the entire campus, and people talk about them well after they have left the building, so to speak. Stark was one of those people.”

“And don't get me started about the hacks that have been ascribed to Stark through the years. I have heard all kinds of claims about what Stark put on the Great Dome to the ways he rewired the elevators in the Green Building. They can't all be true, can they?”

That means:

This is the first time we hear about Tony's sense of humor. We know from AoU that he was already a great hacker. Maybe the best. But it seems he did it for fun, like chess. "Cracked the Pentagon firewall in high school on a dare", "put something on the Great Dome", "rewired the elevators". Did he do it to "bring fun to the parties"?

He was popular on campus. People were probably interested in a relationship or "friendship" with him. But we've already heard that "No one really knew him". If others tried to get closer to him, and still got this result, then it was he who tried not to get closer to them. Still, he was at the parties, providing them with entertainment and helping them get home afterwards. Strange.

What If? S2, E2 - 03:43

Tony is 18 years old, and this is the first (actual) time we see him (or, in fact, Howard) having father-son relationship issues.

We don't know why he was "a pain in the ass" to him. Maybe because of hacking, maybe because of pranks. Or parties where he didn't drink? Maybe because he wasn't a blond super soldier with a shield? Or because he was a kid? I don't know.

But Peggy seemed to see deeper and respect him, unlike his father. And she didn't really like Howard's attitude towards his son, judging by her expression in that scene.

Here she also confirms what was already said about him in the 1986 article (see previous part) - "has spunk", "has single-minded determination". Courage and determination were not part of his "character development." As I already said months ago, Iron Man was not born in the cave - Tony has always been like that.

Here we see 18-year-old Tony starts to put on a mask: the quiet nerd who is always ready to help anyone begins to pretend to be someone else.