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| Michael Hawley is not a man who believes in downtime. The director of special projects at MIT's Media Lab, he has helped develop everything from digital books to digital noses. Many of his leisure hours are spent practicing on his beloved Steinway, which had to be hoisted into his apartment through this window. |
I started playing the piano in kindergarten. I had four lessons—each more miserable than the last. I was playing by ear and by heart, which is the natural way to start and learn. But my teacher, an old English lady, insisted that I look at the music. She used to close the lid right over my fingers.
Finally she said, "Why don't you bring something that you like to play? I'd like your mother to watch." Mom came in the next time, and I played the Marine Corps Hymn—with chords and stuff, which is pretty good for a 4-year-old. The teacher threw up her hands and said, "See, I can't do anything for him. He's playing a completely different key than what's on the page! He's not even reading the music!" She thought I was a hopeless case and advised my parents to save their money.
In an odd way, I was lucky to get pushed away from the piano as a kid, because there's no shortage of roadblocks in science. It's just one big roadblock. Scientists have to keep looking around the corner or figure out how to get through somehow.
There was no one moment when I realized I was going to be a scientist. I'm kind of a perfect mix of my parents. My dad was an electrical engineer at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. We'd go to the supermarket and bump into guys who'd won Nobel Prizes. I started getting summer jobs at Bell Labs in high school.
My mom was into English literature and music. I was really lucky to have the yin and the yang. Science has a heart, but scientists are often a little off the deep end. They're not always great humanitarians.
While I was in high school, I went to hear an amazing guy who played the organ at the Presbyterian church. When you heard music coming from John Quinn's pipe organ, you wanted to jump out of your seat.
Afterward, I asked if he took students and he said, "Sure." That was a really lucky break in my life, and it led to a scholarship at Yale.
The kind of relationship that you have—if you're lucky—with a really good music teacher is very special. I sometimes wish my science education had been blessed to the same degree. At Yale, I don't think I ever had a lesson with my teacher Ward Devenny that was less than three hours long.
What's interesting is the connection you come to feel for other people in the field. It's sort of like six degrees of separation. I could count back through four teachers and know that my teacher's teacher's teacher was Franz Liszt. You realize that you're not that far off from these people. And when you learn about the circumstances of their lives, you start to appreciate the struggles they went through.
In the fall of 1979 I was walking across the Yale campus when I first ran into Bart Giamatti, who was president then. He stopped me, and we had a freshman-to-president conversation. He asked me if I had a girlfriend yet. I said, "Yeah." He said: "That's pretty good. You're not spending too much time in classes, are you?"
I was expecting him to tell me to write neatly in my blue book and to amortize my dad's investment. Instead, he wanted to know how many friends I had. He said the most valuable thing I could do at Yale was to meet as many people as I could, whether they were classmates or teachers or visitors because behind every one of those faces was a different take on a vast world. He thought that understanding that and living that was the best way to be liberally educated. And he was living his advice in talking to me.
That experience taught me not to be shy about asking questions. One of the neat things about successful scientists is that a lot of them still have a childlike quality that allows them to blurt out questions that a lot of people are thinking but would never blurt out, so they would never get the answer.
When we were in college, some friends and I decided to paddle a long river in Quebec, the Mistassini, which means "stone in water." It's a bad news river. A seaplane dropped us in the middle of nowhere. There are no roads. The forests are impenetrable. The only way out is to work your way down the river.
It was raining, and it was 40 degrees. The river was full of these wild rapids, and we kept falling in. After the third day everything we had was soaked, and we were shivering all the time.
Late one day, when we were pitching a tent in the rain, my friend Ed Chaban was chopping a twig off a tree when the knife blade broke, went into his wrist, and cut an artery.
He was ash white. He could have bled to death. It was the first time I really had to do first aid. I remember digging in to get the first aid kit and finding it was basically a bag full of water. The instruction book was one big wad of pulp.
We took turns applying pressure. We froze for two nights in that miserable rainy swamp, each of us taking turns watching Ed and making sure the wound didn't open. We couldn't stitch him up, but by the time we got out of there the skin had started to heal over, and the artery had pulled itself back together.
The experience told me a lot about the value of common sense—which scientists sometimes forget when they get consumed in the details. It's the kind of event that really focuses the mind. You stop thinking about a whole bunch of little distractions and do what needs to be done. That's a large part of what you have to do to make progress in any scientific field.
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| Michael Hawley is not a man who believes in downtime. The director of special projects at MIT's Media Lab, he has helped develop everything from digital books to digital noses. Many of his leisure hours are spent practicing on his beloved Steinway, which had to be hoisted into his apartment through this window. |
At a mixing console, a couple of guys were working on sound effects for the scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where the guy gets his heart ripped out of his chest. He's screaming his head off as the evildoer sticks his hand in and pulls out the still-beating heart. The problem they were trying to solve was how to create a sound effect for the heart-schlurping noise. They had a big bucket of raw calamari and a plunger. A guy would look at the screen and plunge up and down, trying to make that schlurping. "No, Charlie, didn't quite get it, let's roll it again." After 20 minutes, the stench of the calamari was nauseating. Just then somebody came in and said, "Ready for lunch?"
The point of the story is that until recently making movies was totally labor-intensive. George revolutionized the industry by building an all-digital editing studio. That's what our group set out to do. It's great to get hit over the head with a problem because it really forces you to figure out how to get it out of the way.
We began to build Skywalker Ranch, sort of a California Versailles, but then George and Marsha Lucas got divorced. It was a fifty-fifty split—Marsha took cash, and suddenly the fantastic research building we'd designed wasn't going to happen. George stepped back a bit and made films like Howard the Duck. So I started looking around at graduate schools. I wound up at MIT as a protégé of Marvin Minsky at the Media Lab.
I lived in Marvin's attic for a year. It was wonderful, almost indescribable. Marvin's house was like F.A.O. Schwarz after the bomb went off. There was a trapeze hanging in the living room. You'd open the refrigerator and find seal meat stored on a shelf for the dogs of a visiting Iditarod champion. There actually was a bomb in a corner.
The room I lived in had a bunch of scribbling on the wall. There was a little science fiction story that said "AC" at the bottom. It turned out Arthur C. Clarke had spent some time in Marvin's attic. Every night somebody would come over for dinner—always a bizarre character. Marvin is a great creative soul. He loves to take things apart and put them together. The first night I was there, he had just gotten a new toy, a seltzer-making machine. You put in this tube of compressed carbon dioxide, and it carbonates your water. You could fill up a glass or spray it across the room like one of the Three Stooges. We wondered if you could make seltzer water with helium or something else that would make your voice higher or lower.
One night I got thirsty, went downstairs, opened the fridge, and there was the seltzer. I took a drink, and something felt funny in my throat. I thought, "Hmm, I wonder what's in there?" That was the last thing I took out of Marvin's fridge. Living in his house kept you on your toes.
I started getting phone calls from Steve Jobs in 1987. He was trying to start NeXT to build computers, and my name got kicked around. So I flew out and visited.
I was wearing blue jeans and a white shirt and my New Balance shoes. Steve walked into the room, and he was wearing blue jeans and a white shirt and New Balance shoes. We didn't even have to complete each other's sentences. So I became employee number 16. Technically, I was on leave from MIT, but I started commuting—a week in Palo Alto, a week in Cambridge.
We sort of chalked out the capacity of the machine. It had a huge disk—500 megabytes, if you could believe it! I looked at some numbers and said, "You know, Steve, I think we could put all of Webster's dictionary on this disk, along with quite a bit of other stuff." He said: "Wow, that'd be cool. You could have your own digital library."
I went to Webster, met with the president, and cut a deal. Then I saw a big Oxford edition of Shakespeare in a bookstore window. Looking through it, I noticed a friend of mine had helped with the computer typesetting. I realized there must be a computer tape, which meant we wouldn't have to type it over again. This was before scanners. So I called him up, and he said: "That's a very interesting idea. Speak to the Oxford University Press." They were interested. So I called up Steve and said: "I think we could also stick the complete works of Shakespeare on the machine. It's only six megabytes." Steve said: "That would be awesome. What do they want for it? One thousand?" I said, "Steve, these are the works of Shakespeare!" He said, "Five thousand?" I said: "Steve, we're talking Romeo and Juliet here! He's the greatest writer in the English language." And Steve says, "Yeah, but they didn't write it!"
It wound up that what we were inventing was a respectable way to price a digital book on a computer. We were more than happy to jack up the price of our $3,000 computer by an extra 75 cents for Shakespeare.
Problems have to be solved for a reason. And reasons often have economics behind them. One of the things that experience taught me is that you can figure out how much something costs, whether it's a cost in dollars or a cost in time or a cost in struggle. You've got to factor that into deciding whether you want to try to solve a problem.
I learned something from John Gotti. While he was on the stand, a lawyer asked: "Mr. Gotti, how do you survive? How do you make a living in organized crime?" He said: "It's very difficult. I started my career as a thug. But it's very hard to make a living by thuggery. In order to get anywhere, you've got to have a racket."
Every time I find myself falling into thuggery, I say to myself: Don't take potshots at this. Make a racket out of it.
See this little gadget? It's a weather probe we developed here at the Media Lab so we could put it on Mount Everest. It sends data via satellite so you can get a yearlong record of the climate. In 1998 we went to the top of Everest, a year after the book Into Thin Air. Well, I didn't go to the top. I stopped just below 20,000 feet. I may be dumb, but I'm not crazy.
We had a very powerful team making that climb: the 1998 American Expedition, plus the Boston Museum of Science, members of the Explorers Club, MIT, Yale, NASA, and we looked at geology, climatology, physiology, telemedicine. We put monitors on climbers to study how the body changes as it moves from sea level to the summit.
In 1953, when Sir Edmund Hillary reached the top of Everest, it took four days for the news to get to Queen Elizabeth. When we were there, we were creating a live classroom with video links to Yale Medical School.
Let me show you some of the things my students have done.
Counter Intelligence was a research program in which we looked at the kitchen. This countertop had sensors. It could see ingredients as you put them on the counter and talk you through a recipe. I love the idea of picking up a tomato and hearing it say: "Slice me here. See the green pepper for the next step."
Here's a digital nose—first of its kind. The prototype was built by Cyrano Sciences in California. It will sniff wine and try to identify it. It's a hard problem, and it hasn't been cracked by a long shot. Human beings have written language for about 4,000 years. For about 80 we've been able to transmit language electronically. For about 50 years we've been able to do it digitally and electronically. After language, we got electronic pictures, movies, and sound. Yet there isn't a byte or a pixel or a sound sample for taste or smell. But there will be. At some point that channel is going to open up in your computer, and that will turn it into a much more sensual machine.
Here's a bathroom scale that measures your weight over time. You step on it, and it shows you your weight over the last year, graphed like the Dow Jones. I look at that and think, What if someone did that for your heart? Heart attacks are 150 billion bucks out of the $1.4 trillion annual medical bill. Eight out of 10 people who have heart attacks don't get treatment in time. Zero percent have seen a little in-your-face message that says: "You're in the risk zone. You should really lay off the steak today." There's plenty of technology around to provide that message. It just hasn't been focused yet.
See this little jewel? One of my students built it with Harry Winston, the jeweler in New York. It's 56 perfect diamonds and six rubies in a gold and platinum setting—a one-of-a-kind piece for just the right girl. The rubies glow with every heartbeat. A sensor picks up the heartbeat and transmits it to the brooch. A transponder built into a glasses case carried in a purse can send the wearer's heartbeat to the Internet so she can broadcast it to a worldwide theater.
When your job is to invent new possibilities for computers, this is what you get to do. I thought that when I became a professor, I'd be wiping chalk off my coat. More often I'm turning to a student and saying: "Next Wednesday, Zurich. We're going to meet the president of Swatch and learn how they make those wristwatches." Each session is like a mini graduate education rolled into an intense day or two. It's join the Media Lab and see the world.
There's the professional Van Cliburn competition. And there's an amateur one, for people over 35. It's very different from the parade of guys in tuxedos who graduated from the conservatory. Each time another person sits down, you hear a different version of something beautiful created by a different personality—a brain surgeon, a croupier from Las Vegas, the Brazilian ambassador, a mad scientist from MIT playing West Side Story.
A friend wrote me after I won the competition last year, "This is better than tenure." I said, "Well, I don't have tenure, but I think you're right because there's something about music that is apart from the things we do day to day." News at that time seemed to be full of nothing but badness—bad CEOs doing bad things to their companies, bad priests, terrorist attacks, horrors in Afghanistan. So taking time out of your life to make something beautiful to share with people simply because it's beautiful makes the Van Cliburn so good by contrast, an absolute treasure.
You know, it would be interesting to see the expression on my first piano teacher's face if she ever found out that I won the Van Cliburn.
When I think of the best times at MIT, they always involve students doing something wonderful. People become professors for all kinds of reasons. There's ego. It's a fun job, a secure job. You can be on the cutting edge. But at the end of the day, the only real reason to do it is because you care about students and you care about learning.
Very late in his career, Leonard Bernstein had a press conference—he was seventysomething—to announce that he would be stepping down as director of the Vienna Philharmonic. He said, "After a lot of reflection, I've chosen to spend my last few years teaching because it's the thing I like best."
There's a neat photograph of Bernstein kissing his cuff links. They were a gift from Serge Koussevitzky, his mentor. He kissed them before every concert.
Read about Hawley's nonprofit work in Cambodia: www.media.mit.edu/~mike/tr/010101. People worldwide are funding construction of computer-equipped village schools: www.cambodiaschools.com.
