Here's how movies are hindering society. Who knows if they're making the youth more violent. But they're definitely responsible for the tumult that has been my life for the last half-year. I don't think Boston has, by making my case public, done itself any favors. You know the story about the boy who cried "Wolf!"? Yes, it is the *job* of the state police and everybody who is at or works at an airport or any public place to keep that place safe for everyone. But showing off to the public, "hey we did a great job, we almost shot someone innocent" or "hey, we saved you from harmless electronics", when the best thing in the public's interest would be more knowledge, and not more fear, doesn't do anyone good. What about next time, when someone walks into an airport with LEDs and is shot? Will they have done a good job then? What about next time when someone walks into an airport with a bomb fashioned after mine (although mine was never intended to look anything like an incendiary device), and people disregard it because they remember the last time the police were wrong? I'm really angry. I don't think anyone should get to make the choice to end someone else's life. Ever. I almost died on September 21, for creating something. What world do I live in? Why is any part of society self-congratulatory about this? I'm lucky? Why have we given the right to destroy beings to people who don't mind? I find it endlessly amusing that the project that I gave myself no more than half an hour to build gets nationally televised. Of course it looks terrible. I guess that highlights the distinction where I consider it art. It's not beautiful, and it didn't take me a long time to make - it's a not-functional but purposeful decoration I wore, and anyone can modify it. And that makes it public art, too. Silicon, chips, circuits - these things have all been around for more than half a century, now. How is it we are still allowed to not know what they are? EVERYTHING in this world depends on them, EVERYTHING. Yet "computer literacy" is equated to "learning how to type". Whatever! Your typing isn't going to break down and require someone with better typing skills to fix, and it's a muscle skill anyway, like gym class except without the ensuing nominal fitness. Anyhow, anyone who needs to learn to type will do it anyway. You know - "kids these days and their myspace", and all that - it's not like a lack of typing is keeping anyone in a public school (where I most frequently hear of typing classes being required) from getting a job, and it's exactly the type of thing that takes something that people could be learning through fun (whatever fun you want to have on a computer, you need to type), and making it unfun. Why not learn something useful, like, how to use these things radioshack sells in any town with a mall? You don't really need to understand how they fundamentaly work, to go pretty far using them (just as with computers). Every item I had on my clothes could be got from radio shack. Probably for around $20. I got mine for free, because these things are ubiquitous enough to be given away. Not precious, not valuable, and everywhere. A small child with an allowance could save up for a few weeks and do what I did. How is it that we can have LEDs in our cell phones, on the streets, and in our new clean-energy lightbulbs, but not know what they look like, especially when the only way they're useful is when you can see them? And, no there were no exposed wires. I taped everything down so the wires couldn't short. And, no, it wasn't blinking. The story begins around 8 PM. I was nervous and excited - nervous because I had roughly 12 hours to finish two MIT problem sets I hadn't really started on. If you've ever looked at one, you know it's daunting to finish one pset alone in the space of a night. And excited, because the next morning, Tim Anderson was flying to the state I live in, from California. My plan went something like this: grab dinner, plunk myself into a study room with my books, pen, pad of graph paper, and computer, and do what's know around MIT as "tool", that is solidly work until everything was done. All night, if need be, and then go to the airport around 6:45/7, to catch Tim's flight in. Things went more or less as planned, here, but I ran out of steam around 5, and lay down on the solid hardwood floor of the study room to catch a catnap around 5:30. I think I set the alarm for 6:30. It went off, but I was so completely exhausted that I dozed in a half-awake state until with a jolt I realized it was already 7:05, and the plane was scheduled to land at 7:20. I ran down to my room and threw on some shoes, grabbed my wallet - looked outside, the early morning looked kind of dewy, so I grabbed a sweatshirt, the one I'd made a week ago that everyone I met said they loved, the one people had been urging me to copyright the design of, and sell. Tim studied electrical engineering, and has shown me a lot about how to build things, from listing his favorite chips, to describing the foundations of logic. It crossed my mind that wearing my homespun sweatshirt might make him smile. I walk outside, bleary eyed and a little wobbly from being so recently asleep, but filled with enthusiasm to see Tim again. I hail a cab and simultaneously check my wallet. It's got almost $20. The cab says it'll cost at least $30 to go to Logan, so I disappointedly wave him on and make haste to the nearest T stop. Maybe Tim knows to wait for me, I told him since I'd meet him there. After a long T-ride with some early-rising coffee drinkers who are holding a boisterous conversation all around me, I get off at the Airport stop, jump on the shuttle, and start trying to make sense of the airline/terminal tables, to figure out where I've go to go and which shuttle to take me on. I locate my shuttle, and a tired bus driver loads in passengers, shuts the door, and the bus rumbles towards the terminal. The only thing I can think about is how in about 5 minutes, I get to see Tim again, after almost a month. Why did I build my sweatshirt? A bunch of reasons. Building circuits is something almost everyone I know does, for fun. And what's cooler than people building circuits right there on my clothes? It's like I turn into a walking whiteboard for electrical engineers. Also, my major, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science does this thing where it produces unfunny yet punny shirts, like "Six Hertz", (Course 6 is the name of the department), which can be simultaneously read as "Course Six Hurts" (a throw to MIT's infamous courseload), and as a frequency specification. I thought I could do much better, in terms of EECS related puns, so I put a circuit building platform (the breadboard) on the front of the shirt, and wrote "Socket to me" on the back, as in "be creative in this space", and also 'sock it to me' (like that Aretha Franklin song), "give me what you've got [course 6]". Why the lights? After a few days of wearing my shirt, I was kind of glum that nobody had taken up the challenge, so I thought I'd kickstart it. The idea struck me in class - the MIT career fair was coming up, and I wanted to build an interesting, and appropriate circuit. My motivation, however, was far more to show people what could be done on my shirt so they'd make something better, than to be flashy or capture attention, particularly. What's the number one target of build-a-better-mousetrap style creativity? Nametags! And my name happens to be really easy to express, creatively. So I designed the (extremely simple) circuit on my head, and then gave myself half an hour to build it. That is, the 30 minutes between the end of class, and start of the career fair. I also noted, while wearing the glowing star at night, that my lights had even more wonderful uses, as bike lights, to prevent getting hit by cars again! (Just the week before, I'd been clipped by a sedan turning onto the Harvard Bridge from Storrow Dr., that didn't both ways before taking the turn. For the record, unlike most good bike lights, my star didn't blink, at all. So I How did I make it? *