About Angles
Remembering Umaer Basha
Editors’ Note
Personal Essays
“Forty three… no….” I did the math again on my fingers. “Forty five!” Yes, two plates of daal, six naans and a cucumber for salad would cost forty-five rupees. Five rupees to squander!
“I’ll have five sixty-fourths, please.” Opa cut into the apple, first in half, then sliced that half to make a quarter, then an eighth, and finally a sixteenth that he handed to me.
Memories from the Future by Kapaya Katongo
This boy: hands in his front pockets, chest fully upright, head slightly tilted. He is barely seven years old. He is wearing partially faded, blue jean shorts loosely held to his waist by a brown belt.
From the Great Dome by Eric Manzi
Hacking, the students’ epic pass-time, has long been a tradition of MIT. I think I like it; sitting here, I can see the Charles River glistening with the reflected lights from the Boston skyline.
Ma’s Sauce Day by Clarissa Towle
Saturday was Sauce Day Ever since my father was a child, Saturday had been Sauce Day. And Sauce Day would be a tradition at his parents’ house for the next forty years, until they passed away in 2001.
Food for the Soul by Lena Yang
My very first memory of China is of pollution. I was five years old and it was my first time there.
Profiles:
A Quantum World of Possibility by Carl Lian
On a whiteboard in a spacious sixth-floor office in MIT’s Stata Center, there isn’t a morsel of free space. To an outsider, it is filled with nonsense….
Scientific Base Plus Educational Fire Yields Pattie Christie by Margaret Okobi
When we run, our feet smack against the ground, audibly expressing the force of impact on our bodies. The heel hits the ground first, triggering an impulse up the entire length of the leg. Over time, this impact causes problems like shin splints.
Dr. Vincent Cheung has spent countless hours in the laboratory working with frogs, making jumps, leaps and hops in understanding the human brain.
Investigative Essays and Review Articles:
Lithium-Air Battery: A Review by Trond Andersen
Pollution from personal motor vehicles accounts for about 10% of the total CO2 emissions from fossil fuels in the world (EDF 2006), despite the efficiency advances that have been made in internal combustion engines in recent decades.
Playing to His Potential by Dirk Beck
In 2006, the Seattle Mariners boasted two of the best young players in the game: Jose Lopez and Yuniesky Betancourt. Each was practically dripping with talent.
Manmade Disaster, Natural Response by Cheng Dai
On April 20, 2010, 21 years after the horrific Exxon Valdez oil spill, one of the most feared environmental disasters struck again. The oil drilling rig Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank, resulting in the world’s largest marine oil spill in history.
Many of my movies have strong female leads – brave, self-sufficient girls that don’t think twice about fighting for what they believe in with all their heart.
The Fovnder by Andrew Hochstadt
The day begins at MIT, as students, professors, and TA’s shuffle groggily through the doors of the Infinite Corridor. Our minds occupied with derivatives and electron transport chains, we pass underneath giant columns, supporting embossed concrete which reads:
MASSACHVSETTS INSTITVTE OF TECHNOLOGY
WILLIAM BARTON ROGERS FOVNDER
Modular Self-Configurable Robots by Vincent Kee
Imagine if you had a “bucket of stuff” that could do all your most tedious household chores for you. Washing the dishes. Vacuuming the floor. Cleaning the rain gutters.
The School Up the River and That Other Institute of Technology by Timothy Curtis Shoyer Jr
“To Hahvaad, m’ lads.”
A mixture of Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) brothers and freshmen board Segways and zip down Massachusetts Avenue. I’ve been a freshman for less than a week and I must look like a deer in the headlights during rush week, but even I jump at the opportunity to heckle some Harvard students.
Reviews—Books and Art
Moral Behavior in “Simon Lee, The Old Huntsman” by Elizabeth Berg
Like many other ballads, “Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman” by William Wordsworth is a rhyming lyrical poem that tells a specific person’s story. However, while the characters in many traditional ballads are either vibrant action heroes or romantic protagonists…the speaker chooses to describe Simon Lee when he is old and decrepit (4).
Paradigm Shift by Elizabeth Zhang
I approach the checkout of LaVerde’s uneasily, trying to restrict my field of view and exit the convenience store without incident. Nevertheless, the Goetze’s Caramel Chews placed in the bin next to the cashier pierce my flimsy mental blinders.
The Abstract Art of Physics by Beth Cholst
A black canvas. Twenty-six white images of spheres. What is this?
Twenty-First Century Wordsworth by Andrew Feldman
Imagine: You are a quiet, introspective man named Bob, and you have just arrived at a party. You knock on Bill Wordsworth’s front door and do your best to cordially thank him for inviting you before you pass through the entry into the fray.
Seeing is Not Always Believing by Kapaya Katongo
If you happened to time-travel back to the year 1955 and told Marilyn Monroe that in her future she would resemble Albert Einstein, she probably would have passed out.
With an attention span seemingly inversely proportional to my age, I can hardly bear to walk through a museum. Stopping at an exhibit: forget it.