indefatigablog

My pal Steve turned me on to this essay, written in 1999 by Neil Stephenson.

Highly recommended.

Here’s an excerpt :

If I can risk a broad generalization, most of the people who go to Disney World have zero interest in absorbing new ideas from books. Which sounds snide, but listen: they have no qualms about being presented with ideas in other forms. Disney World is stuffed with environmental messages now, and the guides at Animal Kingdom can talk your ear off about biology.

If you followed those tourists home, you might find art, but it would be the sort of unsigned folk art that’s for sale in Disney World’s African- and Asian-themed stores. In general they only seem comfortable with media that have been ratified by great age, massive popular acceptance, or both.

In this world, artists are like the anonymous, illiterate stone carvers who built the great cathedrals of Europe and then faded away into unmarked graves in the churchyard. The cathedral as a whole is awesome and stirring in spite, and possibly because, of the fact that we have no idea who built it. When we walk through it we are communing not with individual stone carvers but with an entire culture.

Disney World works the same way. If you are an intellectual type, a reader or writer of books, the nicest thing you can say about this is that the execution is superb. But it’s easy to find the whole environment a little creepy, because something is missing: the translation of all its content into clear explicit written words, the attribution of the ideas to specific people. You can’t argue with it. It seems as if a hell of a lot might be being glossed over, as if Disney World might be putting one over on us, and possibly getting away with all kinds of buried assumptions and muddled thinking.

But this is precisely the same as what is lost in the transition from the command-line interface to the GUI.

Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself–and more than just graphical. Let’s call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense.

If you wish, you can download and read his essay in its entirety here.

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MIT Institute Professor Robert Langer has won the Millennium Technology Prize, the world’s largest award for technology innovation.

Langer was chosen “for his inventions and development of innovative biomaterials for controlled drug release and tissue regeneration that have saved and improved the lives of millions of people,” according to Technology Academy Finland, which gives the award every other year.

The award goes to developers of a technology that “significantly improves the quality of human life, today and in the future.” Winners receive 800,000 euros, or about $1.2 million.

Tarja Halonen, president of Finland, handed Langer the prize and the trophy Wednesday afternoon at an award ceremony in Helsinki.

“It’s such a great honor — particularly given the quality of the people who have won it before as well as the quality of the innovations and people considered this year,” Langer told the MIT News Office.

At MIT, Langer runs the largest biomedical engineering lab in the world. He holds more than 550 issued and pending patents and has written some 900 research papers.

“Bob Langer’s pioneering work places him at the very forefront of science, engineering and medical innovation,” said MIT President Susan Hockfield. “In his remarkably collaborative spirit, extraordinary productivity, depth of curiosity and record of fearless innovation, he embodies the core values of MIT. We are extraordinarily proud of his many contributions and the great good that his work has brought to so many people.”

Langer’s achievements have had a profound impact on the field of cancer research. He entered the field with a PhD in chemical engineering when he teamed with cancer researcher Judah Folkman at Children’s Hospital in Boston in 1974. At that time, the scientific community believed that only small molecules could pass through a plastic delivery system in a controlled manner.

In the 1970s, Langer developed polymer materials that allowed the large molecules of a protein to pass through membranes in a controlled manner to inhibit angiogenesis, the process by which tumors recruit blood vessels. Blocking angiogenesis is critical in fighting cancer because the new blood vessels allow tumor cells to escape into the circulation and lodge in other organs.

“Bob has been a pioneer in applying materials science and engineering to drug delivery and tissue engineering,” said Subra Suresh, dean of MIT’s School of Engineering and Ford Professor of Engineering. “I’m delighted to see his seminal contributions recognized through his selection for this most prestigious award.”

Andrew Viterbi ‘56, SM ‘57, founder of Qualcomm, was one of four other finalists for this year’s award. He was picked as a finalist for creating an algorithm that became “the key building element in modern wireless and digital communications systems, touching lives of people everywhere,” according to the Technology Academy Finland.

The other finalists, or laureates, were Alec Jeffreys, who developed DNA fingerprinting techniques, and a trio of scientists who developed an optical amplifier that transformed telecommunications: David Payne, Emmanuel Desurvire and Randy Giles.

“It is sufficient to say that each and every one of today’s laureates has excelled in fulfilling the most important of our requirements: benefit to mankind,” said Stig Gustavson, chairman of Technology Academy Finland.

This year marks the third time the prize has been awarded — and the second time an MIT researcher has won it. Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web and senior research scientist at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, won the honor in 2004.

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