In the first Patlabor movie E. Hoba, the author of the Labor virus, graduated from MIT, and one or two mentions were made of efforts by people at MIT to eradicate the virus.
Reminds me of the time I wrote RMS an email telling him he should watch that, as a parable on the importance of using free software in public-works infrastructure. He said it looked really good but that he'd have to try to find a copy on VHS.
Impressive, very nice. Let's see Harvard's mentions.
Is something wrong? you're sweating.
i found the Gavin Belsome (sp?) character interesting in Silicon valley when i first saw him because he was noticeably more dominant than the previous role I saw the actor in American Psycho. Same with the Aviato guy versus his previous sidekick role in Deadpool.
This is what professionals call "acting"
you'd be surprised: many actors play the same character in every movie they are in. Harrison Ford and Ryan Reynolds in my opinion.
A lot of the truly-good actors get called character actors and are considered less important than less-versatile leads. And of course sometimes (often, perhaps) leads are good, versatile actors but every director keeps demanding the same, proven-bankable performance out of them. You see this with someone like Adam Sandler, who plays the same couple easy-to-play characters in most of his movies that make him serious money, but can absolutely act when he needs to (which is mostly in movies that don't make him serious money).
IMO Brad Pitt is an example of a "leading man" who's actually at his best in character-actor type roles. He never quite developed that reliable-draw narrow tyepcasting that defines a lot of leads (Reynolds and Pratt are prime examples—you cast them in a big-budget movie for a specific reason, like, there's little question what sort of character they're gonna play) and seems more at ease as a rather offbeat lead or as a supporting character.
Completely agree about Adam Sandler. Loved his performances in Uncut Gems and also Punch Drunk Love. I also enjoy him in his usual typecast.
There are hundreds of thousands of professional actors in the world. Very few of them are able to get away with playing the same character, because that rarely pays the bills.
But for a few select leading actors, playing the same character in different films (mostly, action flicks) allows them to create generational wealth.
I was surprised when I learned Gavin Belson (Matt Ross) wrote and directed one of my favorite movies of the past few years, Captain Fantastic
I hardly think so. It’s impossible to sweat when you burn zero calories.
Kintaro Oe, Golden boy (translation)
Any west coast representation from Stanford/Berkeley/Caltech?
Caltech is too obscure. Stanford starts gaining provenance with Silicon Valley Internet tech bros I believe.
P.S. I believe MIT has strong prominence in Asia is mainly due to its proximity to Harvard.
I believe MIT has strong prominence in Asia is mainly due to its proximity to Harvard.
I don’t know that that is true — when my parents decided to visit the US for a couple of years in the late 60s my Indian grandfather apparently said that I would end up at MIT.
At that point I was just a little kid with no bias for science vs arts, but apparently didn’t consider Harvard relevant, even though one of his brothers was a diplomat and another a literature prof and he himself surely would have heard of the place.
(I’m glad my parents didn’t tell me this “prophecy” until long after I graduated as I did end up going back and attending MIT!)
Caltech is too obscure. Stanford starts gaining provenance with Silicon Valley Internet tech bros I believe.
Caltech is much smaller than MIT. It’s true that Stanford was still not well known outside the western US into the early 80s, but its global prominence increased significantly long before those “tech bro” carpetbaggers showed up — the causality runs the other way.
Walter White was Caltech, Sigourney Weavers character in avatar was Stanford
Stanford is mentioned in Kaguya-sama love is war
Not sure about within anime, but back in our fleshy human realm, Crunchyroll was founded by Berkeley graduates and is now the go-to anime platform. I suppose if you can't beat 'em, join 'em?
If you're the kind of person with a folder full of files, you might try something like
find . -name '*.mkv' -o -name '*.mp4' | while read -r f ; do if ffmpeg -hide_banner -loglevel error -txt_format text -i "$f" -f srt - | grep -Ei 'Stanford|Berkeley|Caltech' ; then echo "# found in ${f}" ; fi ; doneMIT is special. Stanford maybe, others are irrelevant in anime scene
There's a Caltech reference in Maria+Holic Alive episode 5: https://imgur.com/a/XUP62sN
At 1:13-2:20 and 3:55-4:35: https://www.hidive.com/stream/maria-holic-alive/s02e005 (requires paid subscription)
This is my favorite anime/MIT association: The "SICP anime opening"
Living proof that Touhou fans will stop at nothing.
in this case it's more an artifact of the now-defunct 4chan textboard culture
implying it wasn't defunct from the start
/prog/ was okay. okay enough that there's still a community of EXPERT PROGRAMMERS lingering, and probably will be for a long time.
...Which is a parody/edit of a famous IOSYS song, "Marisa Stole the Precious Thing"
...Which itself is adapted from Alice's boss theme, "Doll Judgment."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVwstM4vZC8
The Touhou rabbit hole goes deep.
Ah yes, the puppeteer of Bucharest, isn't it?
I thought this would give more context but now I am even more lost and amazed at the same time -- thank you.
I think this helps but also doesn't: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/marisa-stole-the-precious-thi...
For those unfamiliar with Touhou, the main character of this video is a human girl who turned herself into a magician (they are considered a different species in series lore) through intense study and practice of magic. As an outsider, I imagine that successfully working through SICP is a similar experience.
MIT somehow has the best esprit de corps around. I went to a little nowhere college, and managed to get into an R1 Uni for my doctorate, but I'll never have the feeling of "That's my place!" that it seems like these guys do.
One thing that has kept me from ever returning to MIT (where I did my PhD) is that I don't think I could bear the feeling of loss that I am sure would overwhelm me when confronted with the sights and smells and memories of that period of my life that I can never go back to live again. I have lived in quite a few different places during my life, and have pleasant memories from all of them, but my time at MIT feels completely different - it's not just memories, but it feels much more personal, as if it's not just a place but represents who I really am. I have often wondered whether everyone feels like that about their PhD years, but your comments seems to suggest that it is not universal.
I also went to MIT for a PhD: 2009-2015. Definitely around 2012ish was the most memorable: in particular the simple stuff like walking down mass ave from central every morning, stopping by Flour bakery for an oatmeal + egg sandwich, going to LaVerdes for snacks, Anna's for burritos. Staying in office til 10pm messing around with research, then taking no 1 bus (or often red line from kendall) back to central, rinse and repeat. That IAP of Jan 2012 was really nice too, was able to dabble a bunch in really interesting stuff like painting classes and such.
And then there's Texas A&M
and Virginia Tech. probably the other Senior Military College schools too, though I have no firsthand experience with them.
glances around at GT memorabilia strewn across the room
Y-yeah, those MIT people are crazy...
Ok GT is a close second.
And for third place I'd say anyone who rowed crew at an Ivy League school. I've met several of those, too. Nice enough but always in their own league.
University of Chicago did have an excellent spirit of nerdiness throughout the 80s-90s. Don't know how well its retained it through the recent changes and rankings improvement they've gone through, but I hope so.
It’s a transformational place, with both enormous hard work (so you feel a sense of relief when you get out) and at the same time much more of an opportunity to do “real” things.
At an institution where teaching is important there’s more “infrastructure” for it so you can manage to be exposed to less of the research side. At MIT research is most of the institute’s activity, so you get to be part of significant and/or obscure work if you want, and most do.
Plus, as I like to joke, that “if you aren’t arrogant when you get there, MIT will beat it into you”.
I played disco elysium so I know what that term means
NERV First Division is in Massachusetts but that doesn’t mean it’s at MIT!
Could be Lincoln Labs, Draper, Hanson Air Force, or MITRE. But those are all MIT-adjacent anyway.
Don't forget Boston Dynamics
I'm not so sure I'd want the distinction, since the American division was the one that produced an angel-infected Eva that (almost?) got a pilot killed.
I know it's not likely, but I'll always pretend it's at WPI.
Related to that, the "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" book is quite often featured as the go-to programming book in manga, creating the meme of the anime girl holding a copy of SICP.
Most of those are edited though
Are there any that arent?
https://github.com/cat-milk/Anime-Girls-Holding-Programming-... has a subset.
I just clicked on a random image and the girl has the book upside down I am laughing so hard haha thanks.
Regarding the knights of the eastern calculus, what is this phrase they are referring to?
What probably happened is two independent sets of people were inspired by a cool phrase from hacker lore (given LISP’s long-time popularity at MIT, it’s reasonable to suppose that the phrase may have originated here).
It’s a joke about the Knights of the Lambda Calculus, itself a Sussman joke on things like the Knights of Malta or the Knights of Columbus. Even in the SICP days of 6.001 not everyone outside MIT AI & LCS considered lisp or the lambda calculus relevant to the “real world”, whatever that is.
From my own (possibly limited) anime viewing experience, the US surprisingly doesn't feature as a setting in anime quite that often, in fact, I've seen more K-dramas set in the US than anime.
Instead it's countries like UK and Germany that I feel have far more of a presence in anime settings. Not sure why that is the case.
Japan had close relationship with differnt European countries, before USA was having any official contact. So for historical settings, these countries are maybe more familiar.
For worlds timed to circa 1000 - 500 years, US was pretty different from Europe.
Also remember close ties between Japan and Germany during certain war.
I can say that, at least back in the year 2003, it was quite popular in Japan to wear MIT branded sweatshirts. Even for people who did not watch anime. I'm not sure if that's just a trend or a persistent style.
MIT is really good at branding itself as the place for smart people to do stuff.
The height of the cliche imo is Half Life 1's intro sequence. The only info you get about Gordon Freeman is that he is a young PhD graduate from MIT with a specialization in theoretical physics. It was a "this guy is the smartest guy around" line.
Being adjacent to MIT, the inflated egos are very exhausting. It's the top reason I would avoid working for them. That and academia is toxic with half market rate pay.
That old MIT logo is great! (Or it is for the Scheme programming language? I'm not sure)
It's the Knights logo†, and yes it's great. :^)
† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_of_the_Lambda_Calculus
interesting..!
And featured more substantially in a video game series (spoilers): https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/The_Institute
Kintaro Oe in golden boy translation? Oh wait that was Harvard.
A missed advantage of MIT: Massachusetts is difficult and fun to pronounce for Japanese
I think uWaterloo's official anthem is the Steins;Gate Op
I swear more fictional people have matriculated from MIT than actual humans. Seems like every bit of media has 'a scientist from MIT' as a character.
I love how I know RMS = Richard M Stallman, but my brain always auto expands it to Root Mean Squared first. Definitely up there in the divine rankings of the three letter acronyms of old.
RMS is not at all mean.
Try to use GPL-licensed software in your proprietary software without releasing it under GPL. You'll see how mean he is.
Why shouldn't he? If you do, you're breaking the license.
Of course he should, but I was attempting to make a joke, since I thought that the parent comment was also a joke (word play on two meanings of the word "mean").
Apparently I failed. Sorry.
i found it funny
Because he built his career on "freedom" advocacy? Doesn't he support pirating ebooks? Didn't he plagiarize, then just copy, emacs source? Turnabout's fair play.
For whatever reason, I've always associated the acronym "RMS" with Stallman. (Even though I have no idea what the "M" in his name is.) I then immediately think of the famous "Stallman Jesus" photo.
In the '90s (or early 2000's?), I remember seeing a photo of Stallman Jesus on the left arrayed against Bill Gates on the right, with Stallman being the figurehead for the open-source coalition arrayed against the might of Microsoft. I've not been able to find that photo since though.
Matthew, which goes well with his moniker of Saint IGNUcius.
For some reason, I immediately thought "Milhous" when I read the parent comment, and then after seeing your response, it took me a moment to realize that somehow got confused with Richard Nixon.
Long ago (a decade or more before the GNU manifesto) he would sometimes sign his name as the root of the square, in ascii art.
I guess this habit wasn't deeply rooted, else we'd still see him doing it.
/joke
For me, whenever people mentioned CRT monitors my mind always first went to "Chinese remainder theorem."
He should really change his first name to "RMS" to make it another recursive acronym.
That's a cool story. What did RMS think about QGF?