What is Cambridge, MA known for?

Cambridge has been reinventing itself for four hundred years. It's a former farming village that became a major industrial town (New England Glass Co., Carter's Ink Co.) that became a seat of the 80s and 90s computer industry (VisiCalc, Lotus) that became a diverse intellectual and biotechnology capital.

Q: What are the most impactful inventions created in Boston?

I think the telephone is probably the all-time top Boston invention, but also these:

1802 -- Modern navigation -- Bowditch

1886 -- Management consulting -- Little

1901 -- Disposable safety razor -- Gillette et al.

1914 -- "Tech"nicolor -- Founded in Boston by Kalmus et al.

1919 -- Trans-Atlantic aircraft -- Hunsaker et al.

1929- -- Instant photography (Polaroid) -- Land

1931 -- Stroboscopy -- Edgerton, Germeshausen et al.

1937 -- Use of Boolean logic to design "digital" circuits -- Shannon

1940-45 -- Practical radar -- Anglo-American military collaboration at MIT

1944 -- Mark I/II computers and first computer "bug" -- Aiken, Hopper et al.

1945 -- Hypertext -- Vannevar Bush

1951 -- Huffman code

1951 -- Random access memory ("core")-- Project Whirlwind

1953 -- PET scan -- Brownell

1953- -- Doppler radar -- Gordon

1956- -- Chomsky hierarchy

1957- -- Generative grammar -- Chomsky

1957 -- Confocal microscope -- MInsky

1957-61 -- Time-sharing (and some of what we now call virtualization) -- Project MAC

1958 -- LISP -- McCarthy

1961 -- Chaos theory -- Lorenz (and many others)

1961-2 -- Digital videogame (Spacewar!) -- Graetz, Russel, Wiitanen, Kotok 

1963 -- CAD -- Sutherland

1964 -- Minicomputer -- DEC

1964-5 -- Electronic mail -- Van Vleck / Morris on CTSS (also network email, Tomlinson in 1971)

1969 -- Apollo guidance computer that navigated to and landed on moon -- Instrumentation (now Draper) Laboratory

1970-90 -- Object-oriented programming and data hiding -- Liskov (and many others)

1972 -- Packet-switching and ARPANET -- Kahn, BBN, etc.

1973 -- Black-Scholes option pricing model -- Black, Scholes, Merton

1978 -- Practical public-key cryptography (RSA) -- Rivest, Shamir, Adelman

1979 -- Spreadsheet -- Bricklin and Frankston

1981-89 -- Copyleft/sharealike, GNU and free software movement -- Stallman

1995- - E-ink -- Jacobsen et al.

2000 -- Zipcar -- Danielson, Chase

Q: Is the Charles River safe to swim in?

It depends -- on the day, your location in the river basin, and who you are.

The short answer is that if you are young and have a robust immune system, swimming east of the Harvard Bridge, without recent rainfall, you should be fine. I have done it on hot summer days and it was beautiful. The government, which plays these things pretty conservatively, agrees that on most days, the river basin meets the standards for swimmability below the Mass. Ave. bridge.

The longer answer is that the conditions vary depending on where you are in the river and the day. For centuries, the Charles was practically Boston's sewer, not just for human waste but also for all manner of industrial heavy metals.

In 2010, most sites east of Magazine Beach would have been "swimmable" about 75% of the time. See this presentation last October by the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority. (http://www.charlesriverconservan..., slide 14)

Unfortunately, last year we had a problem with "Harmful Algae Blooms," perhaps caused by hot water runoff from power plants. The state posted an algae advisory from July through September. See http://www.charlesriverconservan..., slides 14-16.

During the summer, the Charles River Watershed Association maintains a system of weekly monitoring and flies flags to show whether the water is "safe for boating" at nine places. You can get the data at http://www.crwa.org/water_qualit....

As I understand, the standard for "safe for boating" is less than 630 colony-forming-units of E. coli per 100 mL, plus an acceptable level of blue-green algae. The EPA standard for swimming is tighter, I understand around 225 colony-forming units, plus a limit on Enterococcus.

Q: What are some good day trips around Boston?

Take the ferry or sail to Spectacle Island, visit the museum on the island's history, hike up to the top of the island (the highest point in the harbor), enjoy the view, picnic.

Bike the Minuteman Trail from Alewife to Bedford, continue to Concord center, enjoy the old New England town, eat lunch and go antiquing/bookshopping, continue to Walden Pond, walk around, see Thoreau's house, swim in the pond.

Drive out to Sterling and navigate the Davis Mega Maze. Stop on the way back to go apple-picking and drink fresh cider.

Walk the Freedom Trail and stop in at some of the historical sights. Walk Newbury Street and all the touristy shops.

Rent a kayak in the Broad Canal (in Cambridge) and go up and down the Charles River. (http://www.paddleboston.com/kend...) Dock it at the kayak dock at the North Point Park, one of the area's most manicured and beautiful parks (built at a cost of tens of millions as part of the Big Dig to mollify environmentalists) that's also usually deserted and one of the most difficult to get to (both of the bridges originally planned to access the park were cut from the Big Dig after it ran over budget; one is now under construction again with federal stimulus money). Explore the park, kayak around the artificial islands, and try your luck at the incredibly dangerous but fun adult "goth" playground that tries to kill you and the spinny things on the intermediate playground. (http://www.yelp.com/biz/north-po...) Kayak back.

Q: What advice would you give a college freshman in the Boston area to make life easy, fun, and successful?

Get out and enjoy all that Boston has to offer! Spend the summers here -- Boston is beautiful in the summer. Get a guidebook and peruse it. Read the Phoenix/Weekly Dig/Improper Bostonian to know what's going on. Go picnic on the Boston Harbor Islands (there are fast ferries to Spectacle and Georges), get a bicycle and take it everywhere (Boston is a bike-friendly town despite its reputation for crazy drivers, mostly because everything is so close together), learn to sail on the Charles River, ride the Minuteman trail, do the corn maze in the fall at Davis Mega Maze, go skinny-dipping (or normal-dipping) in Walden Pond, walk the Freedom Trail and Newbury Street, volunteer at a high school, relax at Tosci's, go to weird plays (at Mary O'Malley park in Chelsea there are free plays in the summer, plus Back Bay and in the theater district), join ubernerd clubs like the Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston, acquire the local passion for the Red Sox, attend the film festivals and movies at the Somerville theater or the Brattle or Coolidge Corner or the Landmark or Harvard or MIT, go camp out at 9 a.m. on July 4th for a spot on the Esplanade to picnic and watch the Boston Pops concert and fireworks over the river with 500,000 other people.

To be honest, most of the cool stuff I love about Boston I didn't discover until I had been here for like five years and started venturing more off the campus.

Q: Did MIT's decline (outside of biology and life sciences) begin shortly before WW2?

The democratization of electronics -- made possible by transistors and integrated circuits, among other things -- surely contributed to a decrease in relative prominence for MIT, but the institution and people in close orbit had many groundbreaking accomplishments in electrical engineering and computer science since World War II.

Looking at EECS only, consider MIT's dominant postwar role in:

• Magnetic core memory
• Navigating to land on the moon (http://www.technologyreview.com/...)
• Chaos theory and the "butterfly effect" (which earned Edward Lorenz the Kyoto Prize in 1991)
• Time-sharing and operating systems (Corbato won the Turing Award in 1990)
• Artificial intelligence and neural networks (e.g., Minsky's groundbreaking work)
• Object-oriented programming, information hiding and abstraction (considering, e.g., Liskov's 2008 Turing award and 2004 von Neumann medal)
• RSA
• GNU
• X
• The packet-switched Internet (consider, e.g., Bob Kahn's Turing award in 2004)
• LOGO
• E-Ink
• The spreadsheet (Bricklin and Frankston's VisiCalc)
• High-definition digital television (including the work of Lim and Schreiber, and MIT's role as one of four voting seats on the Grand Alliance)
• Languages and automata (e.g., Chomsky's work)
• Information theory and coding, including Shannon's revolutionary master's thesis in the 30s and his work as an MIT professor from the 50s on
• The rise of "hacker culture" (see Steven Levy's "Hackers") and the digital video game ("Spacewar!", much later "Rock Band" and "Guitar Hero")

• Programming languages, including McCarthy's LISP (still used more than 50 years later)