Tech Model Railroad Club

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 14:44:09 GMT

Tucked deep within MIT's campus is a miniature world of model trains, elaborate miniature buildings and detailed sceneries. Now entering its 65th year, the Tech Model Railroad Club of MIT (TMRC) still caters to model railroaders, rail-fans and hackers alike.

In this video we take a tour of the layout and the history through the eyes of club members Quentin Smith, Rebecca Perry and John Macnamara.

TMRC: http://tmrc.mit.edu/

Baker House Piano Drop 2012

Tue, 01 May 2012 07:03:04 GMT

This video shows the 2012 Baker House Piano Drop captured in real time and with a 2000 fps high-speed camera. It assembles some of the footage shot by Kyle Hounsell, MIT EECS '13 (with Kyle's permission) from the 2012 Baker House Piano Drop on April 26th, 2012. The high-speed footage was shot with a Photron SA5 high-speed camera at 2000 frames per second. The camera was borrowed from the MIT Edgerton Center. The original images from the camera are 1024x1024, but they were downsampled quite a bit for size. Gamma was also changed. Noise and artifacts in the video are mainly from that, not the original captured frames.

Where the Sun Shines, There Hack They

Wed, 26 Jun 2002 04:00:00 GMT

Jay Keyser, Peter de Florez Emeritus Professor of Linguistics. Description: Even if the typical MIT hacker doesn't qualify as a secret agent, he or she is to be admired for pulling off the collegiate world's most surreptitious, elegant pranks, believes Jay Keyser. While Harvard students get a chuckle out of "putting panties over statues," MIT students have placed a telephone booth and a police cruiser on top of the massive MIT dome, and landed and then safely exploded a weather balloon on the field of a Harvard-Yale game. Keyser is a fan of these generally anonymous and extremely clever technical pranks. And he's burrowed into the psychology behind them. The students "are thumbing their nose at the Institute. 'You want us to be engineers. You're so damn hard on us. We'll show you what we think of you.' So they take us down a peg or two." In fact, "hack culture is an important component of the mental health of the MIT student body," Keyser claims. The difference between MIT and every other university, he says, is that MIT students "have bought into the value system of the university." They're under the constant burden of judgment and struggle every day with the knowledge that they're among the best and the brightest. So hacks are "a coping mechanism, a way of putting on sunglasses on a very bright summer day." About the Speaker(s): Samuel Jay Keyser is professor emeritus of linguistics and holder of the Peter de Florez chair emeritus at MIT. He was associate provost for institute life from 1986 through 1994 and came by his experience with hacking through his many roles at MIT, including his tenure as housemaster of Senior House. Keyser's most recent book is The Pond God, published by Front Street Books More on Professor Keyser The Reluctant Traveler--Jay Keyser's travel blog Host(s): Office of the President, MIT Activities Committee Tape #: T20363

Recent Videos tagged 'Hacks and humor' on MIT Video

Tech Model Railroad Club

Baker House Piano Drop 2012

Where the Sun Shines, There Hack They