STATA CENTER CRACKED
It’s MIT’s $280 million ante in support of the idea that the boundaries dividing science into warring tribes are literally antique, and that the mystery of how humans think can be cracked by putting 1,000 hackers and other assorted "intelligence scientists" under one roof (all right, lots of roofs). The Stata Center is the linchpin of a $1.4 billion bet that space and place actually matter in the production of esoteric knowledge. On three is Tim Berners-Lee, who, when most of the world had still not heard of email, sat down and wrote the software for the World Wide Web. On four is Richard Stallman, elder god of free software, who may or may not have another real-world address. Stroll the fifth floor - quietly, please - and you may see Robert Morris, who released the first Internet worm (and is really, really sorry). But inside are the tribal artifacts of intelligence at work: nine floors of networking cable and computers piled in sedimentary layers, couches bowed and stained by napping geeks, hallway whiteboards covered in arcana, and vintage machines chugging away in the homegrown programming favorite Lisp. This place is MIT’s scuzzy port on the postindustrial motherboard of eastern Cambridge. The pretty face of MIT - the iconic dome and quad on the bank of the Charles River, facing Boston - is a 10-minute walk away.
STATA CENTER FULL
It’s a fluorescent-lit playpen stuffed with 600 in-progress or full PhDs and a thousand quirks. Tech Square, formally the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Building NE43, is home to CSAIL, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. Energy-aware lossless data compression? Amorphous and cellular computing? Biomechatronics? If any of that would keep you up until 3:30 in the morning, eyes wired to a monitor while shoveling down yesterday’s cold Chinese food, step right in. A drab concrete office block in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Tech Square has been one of the centers of the computer universe for more than 40 years. Big things, faraway things, crazy or obscure or commercially unpromisingthings that you need a PhD to even think about - that’s what people do at 200 Technology Square.
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