MIT Networking Reception

Johanna Westcott is our contact in the MIT Alumni Office, and she is in town for a conference.  She and a few others from the Alumni Office are hosting a reception on 1 August 2018 at the Charbar in Westport.  Mark your calendar!  Details will be sent in an email.

Summer Send-off Picnic 2018

Our Summer Send-off Picnic will be hosted by one of our alumni in the area, and will be held on Sunday, 5 August 2018.  Look for an email with details.

Spring Kinetic Event-2018

Three of us (Deb, Jenny and Cherry) participated in the Tower2Tower5K in Lenexa, and then had breakfast together at the Whole Foods, just south of the race site.

MIT history - the move from Copley Square

This short film is terrific:  http://mit2016.mit.edu/ more specifically: https://youtu.be/obD_nK9VanE

IAP Event

Six of us (plus a wife and child) enjoyed a pleasant evening at O'Neill's in Overland Park for the IAP event.  We had some great discussions about the future of the MIT-KC group (mostly everyone is happy with the activities), which, hopefully, will include some Sloan-focused events and some activities for our alumni/ae in Wichita.

Boston (the band)

I was listening to the first Boston album on my drive in, and was wondering if Tom Scholz (BS and MS Mechanical Engineering) would ever be in KC where we could host his visit, but when I looked them up, I found that they're still touring and making albums:  https://bandboston.com/ As a 1979 graduate, I remember BIG speakers on the steps of the Stratton Student Center blasting the 1977 album every day that summer.  He might just be too busy...

(Note posted later on 2/1/18:  There's an article in the Tau Beta Pi magazine about Tom Scholz.  You can read it for free.)

Fall Cerebral Event at Linda Hall Library

We spent a fascinating morning in the Rare Book Room at Linda Hall Library.  Dr. Ben Gross (Ph.D. History of Science, Princeton) put together a cool set of old books for us.

London (Hooke's Micrographia (1665), Willughby and Ray's De Historia Piscium (1686) and Sir Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica (in English, 1729)):

Hooke's microscope

Willughby & Ray

Newton's first law

Then on to Paris (Émilie du Châtelet's Principes mathématiques de la philosophie naturelle (1759), Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie (1751), Lavoisier's Traité élémentaire de chimie (1789)).

Lavoisier

To Germany (Haeckel's Kunstformen der Nature (1904), Rontgen's Ueber eine neue Art van Strahlen (1895), and.... Einstein's Zur Electrodynamik bewegter Körper (1905):

Haeckel's art in nature book

Rontgen's famous hand X-ray

And then a real treat for us: three wonderful MIT books: Edgerton's Flash! (1939), Wiener's Cybernetics (1948) and Vannevar Bush' Science: The Endless Frontier (1945)

Here's a photo of some of our alumni that morning:

Steve, Deb, Eric and Eric's wife