Utter lies about me in TIME Mag.

Steve just alerted me to a post in TIME magazine that includes the most terrifying moment of my life in its “Top Ten Hacks of All Time”.  How on earth did they think this was a “hack”?   Nothing cool or clever happened.  No MIT Deans bailed me out of jail saying “All Tech Men Wear Batteries”.  I was in court for almost a year.  I dropped out of school.  Hack??!

Not only that, but most of what they report is utterly false.  As much as it sickens me to reprint their tripe, here’s the copy so I can break it down line by line [this is such a waste of time, but I feel obliged to respond to this nonsense.  Now that I can talk about it, I can't just let it stand]

“Terrorist or Techie?”

By LAURA FITZPATRICK

 

Mike Adaskaveg / Polaris

In 2007, authorities arrested an MIT student at gunpoint in Boston’s Logan International Airport. Her crime? In truth, it was one for the fashion police: while holding five to six ounces of Play-Doh in her hands, the sophomore, as secretary of the MIT Electrical Research Society, arrived at the airport wearing a black sweatshirt decorated with a battery-powered circuit board that lit up to reveal the phrase “Socket to Me.” To authorities, the contraption looked like a bomb — and the Play-Doh like plastic explosives. The student, who was charged with possessing a hoax device, claimed she had no such thing in mind: she was going to the airport to meet her boyfriend. And as for the outfit, it was career day at MIT, she said, and she just wanted to stand out.

• POINT 1: NO PLAYDOUGH

There was never ever ever any “playdough”.  Who believes this shit?  Someone seriously thinks I was fondling some playdough on the way to the airport???  No, I was in a goddamn hurry to meet my boyfriend and then get home to finish my problem sets.  What’s true is I had a (hard, ceramic!) sculpted flower/fake rose for him.  A flower, for my boyfriend.  Yeah, cute, right?

Additionally, the Boston State Police use playdough in simulations to recognize Semtex (plastic explosives), so it’s really fucking convenient for them to claim this.  Does it worry you that the police at the airport can’t describe the fucking difference between something hard, and “playdough”?  That they would straight-facedly report this to you?  After several hours of consideration?

• POINT 2: PRESIDENT, THANK YOU

I don’t know where this one comes from.   At the time I was not “secretary”, I was president-elect of the MIT Electronic Research Society.

• POINT 3: IT WAS A STAR.

While I’m not entirely sure how the author managed to post a photo of my sweatshirt, and at the same time write that I had some sort of scrolling display that showed actual words, it’s obviously false.  The LEDs were basically a flashlight in the shape of a star.  That’s it.  Do you have a flashlight?  Yeah.  Just like that, only dimmer.

• POINT 4: POLICE KNOW BETTER

The Boston state police bomb squad is good.  They know what electronics are.  They weren’t confused that this might resemble a “bomb” at all.  See Massachusetts’ “wrongful arrest” laws to understand how MA’s police are incentivized to press charges. (Any charges, even made-up charges like “possession of an infernal machine” in my case, or frequently the catch-all “disorderly conduct”)

• POINT 5: A SWEATSHIRT ISN’T APPROPRIATE TO MAKE YOU STAND OUT AT A CAREER FAIR

Yeah, it’s true I once wore this while walking through a career fair, but the idea that I did so because I needed to make myself stand out is ludicrous, and just one more [intentional?] misinterpretation by the police.  I also wore this same sweatshirt every day of that whole preceding week.  I happened to decide to see what was up at a career fair that happened that week, but wasn’t looking for work particularly.  I wanted to see what cool stuff people were working on, and who comes to recruit at MIT.  So, you should faithfully report that I also wore it to dinner, wore it while studying, wore it while biking between Boston and Cambridge, wore it on the subway, wore it in class, wore it in my research group while building other electronic shirts, wore it to the grocery store, and while doing a whole host of other mundane things related to on campus student-life.

There you have it.  If you know how to get in touch with TIME about posting a retraction, please inform me post haste.

Generally speaking — don’t read TIME, don’t believe papers. I had no idea how wildly inaccurate journalism was until I got covered.  I have unbelievable skepticism for the written word, since.  You must always consider the author, the business model, and the motivations of the people involved.

I’m really agitated after writing this, so I hope it’s been worthwhile to write.  Yet I suspect that the wrong information, the lies (white and otherwise) originally spread by the police, and propagated by lazy journalistic behemoths, will never truly go away.  This drives me pretty crazy, especially when I meet people who get that knowing look and say, “I know you..”  I can tell you with certainty what they’re about to say.  How often does that happen?  We’re past the two year anniversary, and sometimes it’s every day — usually at least several times a week.

Finally, here’s some information I dearly wish I’d had in 2007:

Don’t Talk to Police — it cannot help you (advice from a lawyer!)

BUSTED: The Citizen’s Guide to Surviving Police Encounters (long but worthwhile)

Wherein My Dissatisfaction with Wearable Electronics is Clarified

Last Friday I had the great pleasure of meeting the fabulous and amazing Diana Eng of FairytaleFashion, makers of delightful active fashions, like clothes that inflate or light up in nifty ways.

I gave her a tour of the MIT Electronic Research Society, and we quickly started throwing around on ideas for cool wearables we could make.  I described the source of my greatest dissatisfaction with electronics + clothing, which is that the majority of projects only ever get as far as incorporating LEDs.

All they do is light up, I explained.  They almost never do anything more interesting than that.

Diana replied with a logical, Yes — but LEDs are the only electronics that do something you can see.

Suddenly, the fundamental head-to-head between fashion thinking and engineering thinking became clear to me.

All this time I’ve been considering making electronic clothing that feels good to *me*, or that does something *for me*.  Fashion, is fundamentally about making something that has an effect on *others*.  No wonder all the LEDs!  No wonder the electronics have rarely impressed me.  I’m asking “where are the conductive antennas and fabric radios?  When can I do a live broadcast by talking to my shoulder because I’m a walking radio station?”  But that’s not fashion thinking.  Fashion thinking is about appearance. If you want to make a dress with a thunderstorm-print-fabric where the lightning lights up, that is pretty boring if you’re an electrical engineer, but that is amazing from a fashion standpoint.

This may sound pretty straightforward, but I’ve really never thought about my clothes this way, and I regard the entire conversation as a revelation.  Everything about fashion and wearables make much more sense now.

Photo: Life is Glorious at MIT

This is a photo I took of one of my favorite moments in recent memory, this term at MIT:

It’s 3 or 4 in the morning.  My pockets are stuffed with relays for switching 120V which I expect to promptly use to further electrify my room.  My head is full of ideas for nifty gadgets to build, and I’m riding my incredible pink chopper (smallbike), the USS Sakura “cult of girl” Hime around, with freshly installed front basket.

In the basket are two excellent books — ARRL’s UHF/Microwave experimenter’s manual, Forrest Mim’s Getting Started With Electronics, and in the black case, a state of the art a vacuum tube tester (classic dial reads “Good” “Dubious” and “Bad”).  In my left hand is a classic “200 in One Electronics Projects Lab” kit.  All of these delightful gifts via the outstanding Scott Morrison.

Shout out to the Woman Geek Knowledge Cloud

Hey!  I’m pretty excited to write that my blog has been added to FOSS/Hacker Women’s blog aggregator!

I really like how this works — a whole lot of people are out there writing really cool things, but it’s not generally possible to access what a community is buzzing about, without finding, becoming aware of, and participating in or understanding the community dynamics, yourself.

Until now!  Thanks to high-level information manipulation, you can get a good sense of what FOSS/Hacker women are all writing about, just by reading the posts/feed at http://planeteria.org/wfs/.  Nifty!

Helping out Humanity

I’m currently working on an MIT IDEAS^[1] competition team, working to solve some women’s health issues in the developing world — namely, to help with community education and surgeon training involved with repairing birth complication-related fistula — and I realize that one of the biggest differences between the general populace in developed nations vs. the developing world, is equal access to information.

This particular problem (obstetric fistula) typically occurs when a girl or woman experiences birth complications from an underdeveloped pelvis — generally by being either too young, or malnourished.  Poor access to healthcare usually results in the stillbirth of her baby and a host of health problems for her, including unwanted connections between previously separate compartments of the abdominal cavity — the vagina and the intestines, or bladder, for example, resulting usually not only in incontinence but in ostracism as well.

Fortunately, fistula can generally be repaired with a moderately non-invasive surgery, if only there were more doctors available who could perform the operations — the West no longer trains our own doctors to operate on fistula, as it’s no longer a problem in the developed world.  And that’s why we’re working to solve surgeon training.

However, I’ve been reading a number of articles and interviews on the subject, and I’m realizing, that one of the original sources of the problem is this problem with fistula is that there are still women who don’t realize the connection between sex and pregnancy. That’s infuriating!  How can this equal distribution of information be approached and solved? [2]

[1]http://web.mit.edu/ideas/www/index.htm
[2]http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/140349.php – the fistula reference that sparked this blog post

Cuttlefish are Just Amazing

So, I’ve been checking out cuttlefish to find out what exactly is up with their ability to mimic any environment, by producing any set of colors imaginable on their skin with reasonable accuracy.  Being able to generate active camouflage like that would be pretty incredible, right?

I learned that not only are cuttlefish really completely amazing in this regard (see wikipedia and read about chromatophores), but that cuttlefish-language is color-pattern based!  AWESOME.

Additionally, cuttlefish have a W-shaped pupil — yes, a W-shaped pupil — that’s sensitive to light polarization!  Try to imagine the world as you see it, plus the ability to see — and speak — polarization.

There’s no end to how cool and amazing this universe is!

Incredibly Delightful Short Film: “Validation”

I can’t stop smiling.  I just watched this incredibly delightful 16min short film, “Validation”.  Watch the first 2 minutes if you don’t have time for the whole thing:

New Toy: Chumby!! (open source hardware!)

I get to play with a Chumby!  Chumby is an open source hardware “Window to the Internet”, or ambient information display, meaning it scrolls through a variety of information sources and presents the data for you to check out at a glance.  It does wi-fi, audio, photos, and videos, and has a touchscreen and an accelerometer.  I met Open Source Hardware superstars Bunnie Huang and Steve Tomlin at Foo Camp, and am getting to try one out via them.   Yesterday, it arrived in the mail, and I’m psyched make stuff on it!

 

Electronics Update: My New Workbench

I’ve finally arrived in Cambridge: I built myself a work bench to do electronics on. That means I’ve finally arrived here!

I think it’s pretty sweet. Here are Star’s essentials:

Stuff on the desk: my awesome weller soldering iron (I missed you while I was gone!), the world’s smallest/cutest single channel scope, AVR programmer, board etching stuff & copper clad FR4, toaster oven, The Art of Electronics, a couple of projects I’m working on: an OLPC that I need to make boot, a Meggy Jr to play with & program, some experiments with DIY plastic forming, and some various stuff on breadboards!

I’m looking for new Weller tips if anyone has any == I have an EC1002.  Also, feel free to come over and play!

Blog Statistics are Beautiful

I can hardly describe how warm it makes me feel inside that the number one search term that leads to my blog is “interesting questions to ask” which resulted in 45 clicks to boranj.wordpress.com in the last 30 days.

Also I wanna shout-out to all the folks who were looking for “Star Simpson wikipedia”. Awesome. Feel free to shoot me an email if you want to look anything up — stars at@ mit dot. edu