Margaret by Moonlight ~ Making Mirrors Display!

Epic homage to Apollo software engineer Margaret Hamilton!

Golden Gate ~ Building This Epic Infrastructure!

Arguably the most amazing piece of civil engineering infrastructure -- or certainly a Top 10 together with Roman aqueducts, the Suez & Panama Canals, various Chunnels, transcontinental railroads, the Hoover Dam, and more -- is surely building the Golden Gate Bridge as documented here... And look at those dimensions! Huge!

Engelbart's Mother Of All Demos @ 50years!

SRI's Augmentation Research Center (ARC) director Doug Engelbart gave the Mother Of All Demos on 9 December 1968...

"...demonstrating experimental computer technologies that are now commonplace. The live demonstration featured the introduction of the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, and a collaborative real-time editor."

There's going to be a celebration!

Totality ~ Amazing Eclipse Image from the Air!

Photographer Jon Carmichael captured an epic image of solar eclipse totality from the air! It's a photo-montage...

"Within a matter of seconds, it goes from broad daylight to completely nighttime," Carmichael recalled. "Everybody just kind of gasped and went silent. And I'm just focusing on getting these shots. [...] I took over 1,200 photos." The final image shows the eclipse just as the plane passes over the Snake River, separating Oregon from Idaho. It took close to a year after the flight for Carmichael to assemble the final print."

R.I.P. Peter Spier ~ Epic Dutch Inspiring Illustrator

Richard Sandomir in the NYTimes shares the sad news that inspirational illustrator Peter Spier has passed away at 89 from congestive heart failure. My very earliest favorite book -- i.e. when I was a toddler and my parents read to me -- was about Hendrika the Cow Who Fell in the Canal but as a teen I really spent endless hours on Of Dikes and Windmills. Amazing stuff about Dutch history, epic civil engineering, and the power of nature!

Making of Metropolis ~ Silent-Era Urban SF Epic!

The Making of Metropolis -- and its painstaking restoration story! Incredible special effects! Changing our futurevision!

Development Ventures ~ Exponential Prosperity!

My MIT colleague Alex (Sandy) Pentland and I are offering our Development Ventures action lab class this Fall 2015 at the Media Lab starting Thursday September 10th from 10a-12noon, with special focus on frugal, DIY, and ultraffordable technologies as well as exponential innovations including mobiles, big data, and analytics. This will be our 15th year!

Every year, we look forward to the latest new venture concepts our students propose -- in domains ranging from Health & Wellness, Energy & Sustainability, Education & Creativity, Commerce & Financial Services, Civic Engagement and beyond -- and we try to help the most motivated teams and promising ideas actually start and thrive! Alumcos since 2001 include FirstMileSolutions/United Villages, blueEnergy, WAY Systems, Dimagi, Howtoons, CellBazaar, Global Cycle Solutions/GCS, Assured Labor/EmpleoListo, ClickDiagnostics/mPower/ClickMedix, Dinube, Sanergy, WoundPump/WiiCare, ESSMART, Wecyclers, Ghonsla, Logistimo, Apportunidades, CrowdSOS/WiseSystems, MoringaConnect, TrueAfrica, MDaaS, MAX, and more. What will blossom this year?

Epic Selfie ~ NASA's Earth & Far Side of Moon!

NASA's EPIC camera on the DSCOVR satellite spots our Earth and the Far Side of the Moon!-)

Man on the Moon ~ Epic NASA Achievement!

CBS shares man's epic moonshot succeeding 46 years ago...

Fairy Lights ~ Plasma Voxels Projection Display!

Check out Fairy Lights, a technique for projecting plasma voxels!

"We present a method of rendering aerial and volumetric graphics using femtosecond lasers. A high-intensity laser excites a physical matter to emit light at an arbitrary 3D position. Popular applications can then be explored especially since plasma induced by a femtosecond laser is safer than that generated by a nanosecond laser. There are two methods of rendering graphics with a femtosecond laser in air: Producing holograms using spatial light modulation technology, and scanning of a laser beam by a galvano mirror. The holograms and workspace of the system proposed here occupy a volume of up to 1 cm^3; however, this size is scalable depending on the optical devices and their setup. [...] Although we focus on laser-induced plasma in air, the discussion presented here is also applicable to other rendering principles such as fluorescence and microbubble in solid/liquid materials."

Morrill Act ~ Catalyzing Land-Grant Universities!

Many thanks to New America Foundation's Ted Widmer, Boston Globe Ideas columnist and BU Presidential assistant, for reminding us all about Justin Morrill, the man behind America’s higher education -- including MIT, UCBerkeley, and a hundred more...

"Morrill is hardly a household name today, but his legacy is immense, felt in every single state. That’s because of a single bill he proposed, the Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862. In the midst of some of the worst fighting of the Civil War, Congress passed a visionary piece of legislation that created more than 100 universities and reshaped the way Americans thought about higher education. [...] The result was nothing less than the creation of a new educational order for the United States. Older institutions did not lose their preeminence, of course. But new kinds of universities came into existence, with a broad reach and a public purpose. Both the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were born of the Morrill Act, a fact of no small relevance to the state’s future economic development. [...] Many of the most eminent African-American colleges, including Hampton and Tuskegee, also owe their origins to Morrill’s bill. Native American schools would also be added. In other ways, the Land-Grant Act became better over time. Many of the land-grant schools were early advocates of co-education and advanced the cause of educating women. Morrill added new legislation to fine-tune the program and secure additional funding. [...] Morrill’s is a legacy that is simply too large to calculate and expands every spring as millions of future Americans [and untold International students too] graduate from public universities."

Wow! Epic and extraordinary.  Truly heroic in the best sense!  Check out Uni map...

MIT $100K 2015 ~ 25 Years of Student Venturing!

Pop by this Wed night 5/13 for MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition LAUNCH Finale! This marks a quarter century of MIT student-led entrepreneurial venturing Tickets are going fast and I expect Kresge to be fully packed, so I highly recommend signing up via the mechanism below! Plus check out the 8 Finalist mini-descriptions. Excellent tag-team keynote w/ Langer & Fuller plus multi-year winner Z Holly as MC! This is going to be great!

Dubai Flo Mo ~ Whitworth's Epic Urban Timewarp!

MIT alum Mills spots Rob Whitworth offers up Dubai Flow Motion...

Live Aid ~ Against All Odds Documentary...

Documenting 1985's Live Aid, which happened Against All Odds...

Five Jetliners ~ Epic Airbus Formation Flying!

Wow, Sploid's Jesus Diaz and Andrew Gorenstein spot an epic Airbus stunt, the formation flying of five new A350-900 XWB passenger jets!

Keating's Story ~ Curiosity Caught the Cancer!

MIT Media Lab colleague Steven Keating shares at a Koch Institute talk how his curiosity caught his cancer -- and now enables him to share unprecedented -- and often hilarious -- insight into how he and team dealt with it... P.S. Check out story at CancerCommons, Super Patient: Steven Keating Fights Brain Cancer with Data!

MegaBots ~ Giant Robot Live Combat Kickin!

Yes! Check out MegaBots! This live-action giant exoskeleton combat arena game is Kickstarting NOW!

"The mad scientists at MegaBots have been zealously working on the prototypes and final design of 15-foot-tall, 15,000-pound, walking humanoid combat robots with giant, modular pneumatic cannons for arms. A driver-and-gunner team pilot each MegaBot in a battle against other MegaBots, vehicles, and a variety of other defenses and obstacles in live-action combat -- the likes of which the world has only dreamed of through video games and movies."

Who Is John Galt? ~ Atlas Shrugged, Part 3!

Atlas Shrugged, Part 3, Who is John Galt? showing now! Trailer... See more videos, etc, in their gallery. It's an epic story -- i.e. productive people finally going on strike, stopping the motor of the world -- but one which infuriates nearly everyone on the spectrum of stupidity, from tax'n'spend left-wingnuts to faith freak right-wingnuts, basically parasites and statists of all stripes. Plus, it's an ambitious project to put to film, even in three parts, especially on a lean budget with the antagonism of Hollywood, DC, and related establishments. So, here's a salute to John Aglialoro and his fellow producers and colleagues who got this trilogy done!

Development Ventures ~ Solving Global Problems

My MIT colleague Alex (Sandy) Pentland and I are again hosting our Development Ventures action lab class this Fall 2014 at the Media Lab starting this Thursday September 4th from 10a-12noon, with special focus on frugal, DIY, and ultraffordable technologies as well as exponential innovations including mobiles, big data, and analytics. As always, we look forward to the latest new venture concepts our students propose -- in domains ranging from Health & Wellness, Energy & Sustainability, Education & Creativity, Commerce & Financial Services, Civic Engagement and beyond -- and we try to help the most motivated teams and promising ideas actually start and thrive!

College Bound ~ Graduates Beating the Odds!

Todd Feathers of the Globe spotlights the very compelling Students who had been written off now heading to college...

"College Bound focuses its attention on those considered unlikely to succeed. They seek out dropouts, gang members, inmates, and others with setbacks in their past and aggressively push them toward college. [...] The paths taken by the students to reach Wednesday’s graduation ceremony are filled with heartbreak and hard choices. [Says rising graduate Sanjoana Fernandes-Centieo] “I am so proud about myself because I struggled so hard,” she said. “It’s not the end, it’s just one step to continue my education."

This is epic and I salute the graduates as well as their supporters!