| The Good, The Bad and The Ugly |
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| October 2005 | |
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The Good: Dartmouth Offers Students International Exposure On the 26th of September,Dartmouth imported musicians and dancers from four different ethnic minorities of the Yunnan Province of southwest China in a presentation called Yunnan Revealed. Celebrating family, love, war, and survival, the performers played stringed instruments, flutes, and drums. They also performed crafts, including embroidery, instrument-making, and pictography. In keeping with Dartmouth ’s summer camp nature, the Dartmouth students must have particularly enjoyed the crafts. Either way, the coming of Yunnan Revealed was a great success following two full years of effort for Margaret Lawrence, co-producer and curator of the program and director of Dartmouth ’s Hopkins Center for the Arts. Congratulations to Dartmouth for helping preserve the culture of Yunnan Province and to Ms.Lawrence for helping organize an event that will also appear at The Kennedy Center, The Asia Society, the World Music Institute, and The American Museum of National History, among others. The Bad: Dartmouth, Only After Five Full Years Of Effort, Sees First Light With Help Of SALT The rather flamboyantly named Southern African Large Telescope (SALT),after five years of construction, has finally returned its first color images to Dartmouth researchers. This victory for Dartmouth is known as “first light,” and glorious images of light that, with enough trying, can be found in one of the darkest places on earth: the vicinity of Sutherland, South Africa (let it be known that the Yale Free Press, along with Dartmouth, makes this statement purely in the scientific sense).Dartmouth owns an eleven percent share in the telescope, one of the larger shares, which will grant them approximately 30 nights of use each year (the Yale Free Press hopes that Sutherland isn’t prone to fog) Either way, Dartmouth SALT project leaders Robert Fesen (Professor of Physics and Astronomy)and Brian Chamboyer (Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy, also known as sidekick)are ecstatic about the learning opportunities that Dartmouth ’s access to color images will bring to the university ’s student body. The Yale Free Press is also sure that color images will help Dartmouth ’s students learn, as long as purple dinosaurs aren ’t involved. The Ugly: Dartmouth Develops Itty Bitty Spy Robots Ever had lice? But you knew about them, right? You wouldn’t know about the Dartmouth robotics department ’s latest development if it was in your hair: Dartmouth has come up with the world ’s smallest mobile robot. Compared to the size of a human hair multiple times in Dartmouth ’s press releases (it ’s about as wide, but less in length than a period … the written kind),the robot is not only tiny but fully controllable. Says Bruce Donald, research head, “When we say “controllable,” it means it ’s like a car, you can steer it anywhere on a flat surface … it … crawls like a silicon inchworm, making tens of thousands of 10- nanometer steps every second.” Dartmouth claims that the uses of these robots will include rapid recon into hazardous areas and medicine (basically, using the robots as itty bitty cellular manipulators),but the Yale Free Press is convinced that Dartmouth liberals really plan to use the robot to aid in spy operations for the vast left wing conspiracy. I mean, think of what liberals could do with a robot that could go … anywhere … under full control … If one really wants to be paranoid, one might also advise the right wing to consider adding use of tiny robots to behind- closed-doors prohibitions. |
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