The Idea Factory

by Pepper White

  That makes, call it seven study breaks per term, at, say, one hour to get the milk and cookies, one hour for the study break itself, and one hour to clean up. That's twenty-one hours. Now figure five hours per term of suicide prevention duty, plus two or three hours of actual tutoring, an occasional tutor's meeting, and I'm up to about thirty hours per term of actual work, times two terms equals sixty hours. The rent's probably worth about $250 a month, or $3K a year, plus another thousand for food, that comes to $4K, divided by sixty is roughly $65 bucks an hour, tax-free, so before taxes that would be about a hundred an hour. That's almost as much as some of the profs make consulting-what a deal.

  "Would you like me to give you a tour of the dorm?" he asked.

  "Sure, that sounds great."

  We walked past the bonfire again and started with the Runkle entry. An entry is a subset of Senior House, with a separate entrance and stairway and hallways. John Runkle was an early president of MIT, whose major contribution to education was high school "shop" class. I asked Professor Dorsey whether he had any clues as to where "Sport Death" came from.

  "I don't know; it's just sort of a battle cry around here. One story has it that a Senior House student was taking skydiving lessons and his chute didn't open. That was supposed to be the ultimate in 'sporting death.' I tried to check that out and couldn't find any documentation on the story, though. Another, maybe more plausible explanation is that the first painting, here on Runkle fourth, was done by a kid whose roommate was the first MIT student killed in Vietnam."

  It's odd how traditions take on a life of their own and when you get right down to it nobody knows what they mean.

  We walked down the length of Runkle fourth, with the Hendrix music at its loudest through the open door to the speakers. Hey Joe, where you goin' with that gun in your hand ...

  "Here's the original," Professor Dorsey said, pointing to the skull mural. "Let me show you the Munch reproduction down the hall. They call it Captain Nemo."

  It was equally larger than life-The Scream, the face of anguish. I was glad Runkle fourth was not in my entry. Professor Dorsey led me to Atkinson, and on the second floor landing, a tall athleticlooking student dictated a letter: "And my computing staff will be able to complete the task within two man-months. Yours sincerely, DLM."

  "Dianne, this is Pepper White," Professor Dorsey said. "He'll be replacing Nabil as the Atkinson tutor."

  Dianne sneered a little, as if she thought, "What are you guys trying to pull? Why are you bypassing the democratic process?" I hoped that her sneer wasn't an indicator of sneers to come from the people in Atkinson. Best to nip this in the bud by trying to be friendly.

  I asked her, "Who's the letter to? Are you starting a company?"

  "I've been in computer consulting since ninth grade," she said impatiently. "I've got a staff of about eight subcontractors here in Senior House, and I provide the marketing and client servicing."

  "Golly. That's pretty impressive," I said. As Professor Dorsey and I left, she whistled between her teeth, "There's a place in France where the alligators dance." I didn't get it immediately, but in a minute I knew it was a subtle slam of my preppy appearance.

  Even so, Atkinson felt a little more friendly than Runkle; somebody had mellow jazz by Bob James playing on a stereo. Whereas Runkle reeked of pot and incense, Atkinson just smelled of one part dirty clothes, one part twenty different kinds of shampoo, and twenty parts air.

  The apartment was perfect. It had a refrigerator, sink, bedroom, living room-all the comforts of home. In its location, the rent would probably have been $300 a month, thus raising my effective hourly rate.

  Back at the office, Ari gave me some advice. "You are in a very touchy position, my friend," he said. "The students might organize to get you thrown out. You would not only lose your free room and board; I think that might hurt your performance as a student here as well. So what I think you should do is have each floor over for dessert. There are maybe eight or ten of them on each floor; am. I correct? That is a small enough group that you will be less nervous, and if you make a fool of yourself, the information will travel secondhand, not firsthand. This is what I did with my troops in Israel; it is the old principle of 'divide and conquer.' Oh yes, and one more thing. Encourage them to settle their own disputes as much as possible. Otherwise they will drive you crazy if they want to make you the referee all the time."

  "That sounds like good advice," I said.

  "Oh, and there's one more thing I forgot to mention," Ari said. "The food you serve them for the first time has to be very good and served elegantly. That's what we do in Israel when terrorists holding hostages demand food. It weakens their resistance." Mind bending 101.

  September 7

  Rush week is just the first dehumanizing experience for poor little MIT first-year students. I remembered orientation week at Hop kins. I knew who my roommate would be and where my room would be. Driving up to Baltimore from Potomac, with the '68 Mercury Park Lane stuffed full of my stereo equipment and bicycle and clothes, I was still terrified. There wasn't room for my parents, so they took the train and I met them there. I think I would have been more terrified if I were a dormless person from the beginning, as they are at MIT.

  At Hopkins-OK, it's a much smaller undergraduate school so they can manage these things more easily, and some alumni have warm enough feelings in their hearts to give it an endowment so they don't always have to be grubbing for money and cutting budgets-at Hopkins my happiest memory of orientation was sitting on the sun-drenched grass with my freshman orientation group and my adviser, Jerry Cohon (B.S., Penn; Ph.D., MIT) and talking about environmental engineering and how to save the world. Orientation week was a nurturing week, an opportunity to meet people, make friends, invite them over to my dorm room for tea.

  Not so at MIT. Boom, you sniveling little nerd, who probably never went out on a date in your life, welcome to getting your last choice in living arrangements. Welcome to fraternity brothers patting you on the back and putting a sticker there that says, "This guy's a loser" in the underground code. Welcome to being abandoned by acquaintances who promise they'll wait when you go to the bathroom. Welcome to hell.

  Howard Gelman was the first to arrive for vanilla ice cream and fresh blueberries served on glass plates with silver plated spoons from the Dorseys' flatware set. Howard was a short, fat freshman from New York. He had a whiny voice and wanted to major in Course Six. High tech. Double E. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; pronounced "EEKS" in short form.

  It was time to start earning my free room and board.

  "So," I said. "How are things going for you?"

  "Ummmm. Ummmm. They could be better. I'm here, aren't I?"

  How do you talk to somebody like this? "So," I said. Pause. "Where'd you go to high school?"

  "Science," he said, referring to the Bronx School of Science. If he were a talented musician or actor this would be Juilliard and his answer would have been the School for Performing Arts. But he was good in math, better than the best in Manhattan, and this was MIT.

  "What room are you staying in?" I asked.

  "303. It's just a temporary assignment. I really wanted to be in MacGregor but they were full. I'm going to see whether I can transfer there next term."

  Good luck. Once they see their views there's only one way a room is going to open up, and I doubt you'd want to get it that way.

  When is someone else going to show up, I wondered. This is too awkward. "Well, the rest of the people should be here any minute," I said.

  "It's a Poisson distribution, how people arrive at any queue," he said. "If eight people will arrive between now and 7:10, that will make nine total in fifteen minutes, or once per every fifteen over nine minutes. The probability that two more people will arrive here by 7:05 is e to the minus six times six cubed over three factorial. Do you have a calculator?"

  This kid's good. Let's get him trained and out of here, doing something productive like figuring out how t
o deploy troops in Europe or decoding Soviet cable transmissions.

  "No, I prefer to do the easy ones in my head," I said.

  A woman who wore a black shirt with the red letters sigma delta walked in. "Hi," she said. "I'm Cindy Brooks. I live next door."

  Brooks. That name sounds familiar. Oh yeah, Professor Brooks is teaching my advanced controls class this semester.

  "Are you any relation to the professor?"

  "I'm his daughter."

  Professor Kingfield at the law school had a daughter, too. But that story's already been written.

  "Say, I like your shirt," I said, referring to the black football jersey with red letters on it. "What does sigma delta stand for?"

  "Sport Death. Sigma Delta is the Senior House sorority. Actually we're looking for guys who want to be little brothers for some of the pledges."

  "What does that involve?"

  "Well, everyone is born with 100 purity points, or things they haven't done," she said. "Our pledges have to fill out the form, and that's how they get their preinitiation score. To get admitted, they have to reduce their score by 10 percent. The postinitiation score is the number on the back of the shirt. As a little brother you would help them accomplish that. The list is on the computer system in Building 35."

  Everything can be quantified.

  "Well, I don't think my friends at church would approve. Maybe you ought to talk to Howard here."

  Two others came in and took their ice cream out of the freezer. One was from Ghana; the other was a sophomore math major from Poland. Dianne, the woman dictating the letter to her client the day before, walked in.

  "So what's the deal here?" she asked. "Are you trying to butter us up floor by floor so we won't organize to get you kicked out and then select a tutor democratically? Are you playing some 'divide and conquer' game?" She was smiling, as if she didn't mean it, but was just testing me, seeing whether she could put a verbal service ace past me.

  "Say, who do you think is going to win the World Series this year?" I asked. That works in most circles; in most circles no one even notices it's an evasive maneuver.

  "No no no no no. You're not getting off that easy," she volleyed back.

  "Well, what would you do in my situation?"

  "No answering a question with a question. I asked first," she said.

  The other six students ate their ice cream, half-listening to the Polish mathematics student say that everything is mathematics and all engineering is just glorified technician work, half-listening to the verbal exchange near the door.

  "OK, Yes," I said.

  "Yes what?"

  "Yes, like everyone else on the winning side of this con game, I'm a money-grubbing sleazeball who greased my way into this position. What do you want to do about it?"

  "Oh, nothing. I was just curious. Say, is that an Italian racing bike you've got there? Maybe we can go riding sometime."

  September 15

  The phone rang; it was my mother.

  "Pepper, your father's in the hospital again. They don't know whether it's a heart attack or cancer or what. He's got a fever and he's on all kinds of medication. They don't know whether he's going to make it this time, and maybe you should come down to-"

  "I'll be on the next plane."

  Alone with him in the hospital room, I looked at my father. He was asleep, with electrodes taped to his bare chest underneath the hospital gown; the fever hadn't left him. Next to the bed there was an oscilloscope with a blue screen, monitoring his vital signs. It was like the oscilloscope in my cell at MIT.

  I wondered whether the nurses and doctors looked at him the same way I looked at the rapid compression machine, as a device with inputs and outputs, generating points on a graph, points to be analyzed, discussed, reasoned through, argued about. Maybe they did think that way so they could distance themselves from the ones that didn't make it.

  Please don't let him die now. Please. Let us have him for a few more years, maybe long enough to see his grandchildren.

  The nurse came in to take his temperature.

  "That's odd," she said. "It went down a degree in the last half hour. Maybe he's turning the corner and getting better."

  It was probably just a coincidence.

  Or was it?

  C H A P T E R

  12

  Two Seventy

  Enough of the Calorics were still at the institute to field a C-league soccer team again, although many had moved outward and upward to professorships at good schools or high-paying jobs in industry. Carlos was still here, though, and Dave Orlowski, too.

  The score in the game with TEP was 0-0 late in the second half. I was at left wing as usual, Carlos at right, Dave at center.

  Robin, the left halfback, passed up to me; I one-touched it to Carlos. He shot toward the goalie but Dave deflected it and we won in textbook style.

  October 19

  We define suboptimization," Professor Wilson lectured the design class, as elegantly solving the wrong problem. Rearranging the deck chairs on the sinking Titanic is an example." Speaking of sinking ships, I wondered how Wilson had progressed with the pedal-powered crew shell we'd launched almost a year before.

  Course Two Seventy, Introduction to Design, was on my list of required undergraduate courses. It was the scariest, biggest hurdle between me and my master's degree because two seventy had The Contest. Engineers and designers compete every working day of their lives to make the best product at the lowest cost. What better way to round out your engineering education than to compete directly, in a contest to build the best device to perform a stated task?

  Wilson continued, "Now I'd like to change the subject a bit and talk about The Contest. This year The Contest will be a little different from those of years past. Instead of giving you all the same bag of materials, as Professor Flowers has done, this year you'll have to buy things from a 'store,' and we'll give you a 'budget' of $12,500. Also, you'll have to put in some microelectronics. One of the teaching assistants, Nigel Adams, thinks that no mechanical engineer should leave MIT without having wired up at least one integrated circuit. The point of this year's contest is to lift the most weight up a hill, and you'll receive a 500-gram bonus weight if your electronics works. Furthermore, this year we'll have preliminary elimination rounds during the third week in November, in which you'll be able to test your device several times. The Contest itself will be on Monday night before Thanksgiving."

  I really should read some of those handouts, I thought. All I knew was that some weight had to go to the top of a ramp in twenty seconds, and with just a little tiny electric motor and two little tiny springs, together with whatever else was available in the "store." All the components had to fit within a geometric space about as big as a breadbox, and within a financial space of 12,500 funny dollars.

  October 26

  "I better get moving on this stupid thing" was going through my head with nagging regularity, so I finally went down to the shop of the 400-pound technician named "Tiny" and looked at the course. It had two halves; The Contest would be run one-on-one, and the halves were mirror images of each other. Scales were on either side of the center line, and it looked as if there were several ways to go up successfully. There was a plywood winding road on one side of the terrain. Bounded by the road was an astroturfcovered obstacle course, including a "cactus" (a metal green U on a stick), designed to prevent us from all going up the middle.

  I looked at the course and couldn't decide what to do, so I checked out the sample "store" items: a 2-watt motor for $1,000; wood strips, $250 each; screw, $50; copper welding rod, $75 per meter; tongue depressor, $25; rubber band, $100; and a four-gate microcomputer chip for $500. When I'd finished handling all the items, I looked at the course again. A couple of ideas had come to me during the inventory. I met two juniors at the course.

  "I think the road is definitely the way to go," one of them said.

  I agreed. "All you have to do is build a little truck that goes up the road; it
would be pretty easy to make something that carries a Coke bottle full of gravel and steers itself up the road," I said, "or you could go underneath the 'cactus' here, or build a wide off-road vehicle that goes around the cactus, or how about a counterweight system that lifts the weight up like the elevator in the Eiffel Tower?"

  We talked a while longer, and they, too, had many ideas. I went back to my office. The stew had begun to simmer.

  "Why don't you build something that extends an arm out there like a crane?" Ari suggested. Not only had he driven tanks, he'd also designed them, and I valued his opinion. Extending an arm out would add another dimension to the problem. How could I fit something 41/2 feet long into a 2-foot-long bread box?

  October 28

  9:47 P.M. "A fire truck!" It came to me as I walked out of the Sloan Lab on my way to Senior House. I'd build an extension ladder just like the ones on fire trucks, and it would push the weight onto the scale.

  October 29

  At noon I went to the fire department to see how these things work in real life. There was a hook and ladder truck at Lafayette Square; the truck had been built in 1941, and the ladder was mounted in 1960. It was a huge aluminum structure, and I looked at all the cables and pulleys for almost an hour and couldn't for the life of me figure out how it worked. Lieutenant Shaughnessy offered to take the ladder out for me on Saturday morning and demonstrate its extension, but Saturday was to be a study day, so I just sketched a few mechanisms and left.

  November 5

  The class of 160 students was divided into 10 "recitation sections." These met for an hour once a week for more interactive instruction than was available in the larger lecture format. Tom Bligh, the professor who'd known more about Lindbergh than I did the previous fall, and with whom I'd proposed to heat Kansas farmhouses with windmills and heat pumps, was my recitation instructor. He gave personal consultations to about 20 of the 160 students in the class. Tom would determine my grade.