Fran Sancisco and Spother Oonerisms

Fran Sancisco and Spother Oonerisms This all starts with a minister by the name of William Archibald Spooner, who  Wikipedia  advertises as notable for absent-mindedness. This from the first sentence of the introduction, where Obama is noted as the 44th President of the United States and Beyonce is identified as an American singer. Spooner was particularly plagued by a tendency to swap syllables between adjacent words, often to comedic effect. An inattentive student had tasted a whole worm (wasted a whole term); our Lord was a shoving leopard (loving shepherd); an efficient machine ran like a well-boiled icicle (a well-oiled bicycle); and so on. These became known as spoonerisms (or  oonerspisms for the similarly absent-minded), and at this rate may well outlive the legacies of either Obama or Beyonce. Spoonerisms are deathly contagious. As soon as someone sarts stopping swyllables, snoonerisms speak into speveryones eech. Please hend selp; Im luck thike stis. Anyway, Ive been living in Fran Sancisco this summer with (a sizable crew of) seven other MIT students (almost all 17s, with real jobs at serious companies) while interning at a startup. Interning in SF is a sort of rite of passage for computer science students, and Id spent both previous summers UROPing on campus, so I was hyped to explore the world beyond the MIT bubble. So this is me, reporting live from outside the bubble. The weather here is Weird. Sometimes it feels more like an MIT campus than the MIT campus does: brass rats at Taco Bell, HackMIT shirts in Starbucks, or class swag on the CalTrain dont even surprise me anymore. Everyone seems to know everyone and strangers at parties are never more than one degree of separation away. Other times its distant and foreign people talk about schools and GPAs and SAT scores and about equity and revenue and seed rounds. Introductions are a little too scripted and startup pitches a bit too rehearsed, and youre never certain if an event is casual or a networking opportunity because so many people dont make that distinction. Hacking means growth hacking. Worse, I feel a strange pressure to somehow justify my very existence: without significant evasive maneuvering, every conversation drifts gravitationally toward So what do you do? a standard formality, extended as a courtesy, as if I was a priori waiting to deliver my spiel but somehow couldnt find an opening. And then Im trapped, stammering through explaining my internship while dreaming of lost opportunities to talk about literally anything that someones genuinely passionate about. (Ive become pretty desperate to avoid this. Things to do when you become desperate include: Lie. I steal Incan matrimonial headmasks. Lie again. To combat the increasingly popular company LetsEncrypt, Ive started a company called LetsDecrypt, where instead of advocating for https adoption we go around telling people theyre fine with Windows XP. Lie again, but toe the line of reason. Im applying to YC with Doggylexa, which is an Amazon Echo strapped to your dogs collar, so that it seems like your dog answers your questions. Also your dog is harder to get angry with. These work with varying degrees of success.) I hoped to enjoy SF, but in too many ways its only highlighted what I loved about the MIT. Certainly not everyones like this, not every So what do you do? carries such one-dimensional expectation, Ive met many genuinely passionate people here, and Ive only been around for two months so Im not in any position to pass real judgement. But despite high expectations Ive found myself really, really missing home. It turns out that the MIT bubble so often blogged about is both a weakness and an incredible treasure. Inside the bubble were all the same all MIT students all human beings. There are no positions or promotions or even expectations. Youre free to change what you do, or to do as many things as you want. MITs currency is ideas and passion and curiosity, and thats only possible in radical isolation from a world that runs on literal dollars. In other news: Choud Clambers are a kind of darticle petector that let you see cosmic rays from space, and you can make them at home! I am not making this up. You need a steep temperature gradient (e.g. dry ice and a 400-degree cookie sheet) and a heavy vapor (e.g. alcohol) and an insulated chamber (e.g. an aquarium). (this all transpired with some friends at Topos House  in south SF, for whom this is apparently not particularly new or exciting) So theres dry ice below, cookie sheet above, and felt pieces soaked in alcohol pinned to the top of the aquarium. The alcohol diffuses downward and piles up at the bottom in a cloud of supersaturated vapor. Supersaturated vapor is really unstable so when its disturbed by a charged particle passing through, a little trail of condensation forms in its wake. This is all platantly blagiarized from Wikipedia; I understand very little of the funderlying isics. (actual cosmic rays from space are hard to see (although we saw some!) so there are a couple thoriated welding rods (98% tungsten, 2% thorium the thorium is just a little bit radioactive) that give off much more visible radiation at the bottom) It also turns out that you can make a homemade fog machine by boiling Glycerin (found at CVS as a laxative) and water over a stove. Laser line modules optional but highly recommended.   (my roommate, Kevin 17: caption contest in the comments) Post Tagged #San Francisco