Northeast US Nerd Tour
2020 February 24
For those of you that don’t know, once again I am traveling. This trip started about 2 weeks ago in Washington DC, then I visited New York for a few days, and now I am in Boston. After this, I will be in Europe for 2 months, and if I get the motivation, I’ll blog about it a bit more.
On this trip, my favorite parts have been going to nerd places and events. And if for some reason you have doubts that I am a nerd, here’s a Google Earth project I just made as a companion piece to this post if you’d like to follow along a bit on a map. Maybe someday I’ll write some code to integrate Google Earth projects into posts a bit better…
The United States Library of Congress
I knew I was going to enjoy the Library of Congress, but I didn’t think it would be the highlight of my experience in Washington DC.
At first when I visited, I just saw the main public places of the LOC, where they have the nice architecture, a recreation of Thomas Jefferson’s reading room, and a window into the main reading room of the building – the one you’ve probably seen in pictures.
I also saw some cool stuff like a map exhibit that included the oldest complete atlas of the world…
…and one of the 80 or so remaining original Gutenberg Bibles.
I posted these things as well as some other pictures to my Instagram story, and headed to the Capitol Building through the connected underground tunnel to do a tour.
That was almost my entire experience in the Library of Congress, but one of my friends from college who had lived in DC for a few years saw my Insta stories and demanded I fill out the LOC’s online form to get a library card. I didn’t know that I could get a card so easily in the first place, and I wouldn’t have thought that it would be processed so quickly, but I filled out the form, returned to the Library of Congress, went through processing, and got a card for the largest library in the world.
At first I just explored the books at random. I stumbled across a Harvard Alumni directory that was printed in the year 2000 and out of curiosity saw that there were a few living in Sioux City at the time, a much larger amount living in Omaha (not that Omaha is such a smarter city, just a larger city), and then found a line for a Mr. B. H. Obama living in Illinois. I’m sure he, along with everyone else who has become president, had probably had that ambition from a relatively young age, but it’s fun to imagine that looking at that entry was looking back in time with this crazy knowledge that this insignificant entry in this huge book would become president within the decade.
Pseudo-deep, pretentious concepts aside, I was walking by some genealogy books which reminded me of a book I had heard about through my dad’s Cloud family genealogical research, but had never been able to find the text for online. So I asked a librarian where to look and she showed me how to do some book queries on their system. I found a book titled William Cloud, Pennsylvania Proprietor 1682 (written sometime in the 1960’s), so I made a request and it was delivered from the underground stacks to the main reading room within the hour. There are aren’t many copies of this book in the world, which is understandable since it’s not a popular book for people who it’s irrelevant to – AKA anyone who’s not a descendant of William Cloud, the Pennsylvania Proprietor (and many people who are descendants would probably not find this book very interesting either).
Since it’s probably a federal crime to steal books from the Library of Congress, I had to leave the book there. There is a book scanning service, but it was my last day in DC when I visited the library, so unfortunately I didn’t have the time to ask about the service and see how much it would cost. Now I have a goal for the next time I’m in the capital.
A Comedy Show about the Iowa Caucus in New York
I met up with some friends from college in New York – Matthew Moo, Matt Turco, and Nicole Vazquez-Chanlatte.
What a beautiful, multi-cultural group of people.
Anyway, we all went to Creighton and 3 of us were in Model UN club, 3 of us studied Business Intelligence & Analytics at least a little bit, 2 of us are now programmers, and the other 2 work in finance / account management (or something) so it’s fair to say that it’s a somewhat nerdy group.
My favorite event in New York was at a place called Caveat. The event, Processing Iowa: a special Political Circus, deconstructed the cluster-whoops that was the 2020 Iowa Democratic Party Caucus.
They had guest speakers from various journals and whatnot, including Gizmodo and Five-Thirty-Eight.
What was nice about it was that it was a genuine comedy show. It wasn’t just lectures about political science, technology, and statistics with a few jokes here and there. The presentations (mostly) had the energy of standup sets. If and when I move to New York, I plan to come here often.
Boston – MIT and Harvard
And that takes us to our final destinations on the Nerd Tour of the Northeast US.
The 2 world-renowned schools are much closer than you might think. I had always heard that they are not technically in Boston, but in Cambridge. To be honest, from an outsider’s point of view, they may as well be in Boston. It’s a 20 minute subway ride from Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood to get to MIT and an additional 10 minutes to get to Harvard.
It was a nice day for being a freezing day in the middle of February in Massachusetts, so I took the scenic route and, along the way, unknowingly found the bridge that’s measured in Smoots, which I vaguely remember reading in some high school science textbook learning about standardized units of measure.
It’s fascinating to walk around these schools, but what surprised me was how similar they felt walking around other US universities I’m more familiar with like Creighton or Iowa State. In between class times, you overhear some conversations about people’s classes, how stressed they are about some test, asking if someone finished that assignment yet, and if they’re going to the thing tomorrow night.
A lot of the buildings at both school have a much older feel, but there were also a surprising amount of more functional looking buildings serving as student centers, cafes, and classroom buildings.
The day I walked to the universities, I needed to get some work done. Luckily, these places are designed for people to be able to sit down at a computer and intensely focus on a project. It was pretty easy for me to blend in at a random MIT work area due to:
- Having a young face for my age, for better or worse.
- My work looking exactly like what everyone else in the room was doing, with programming and whatnot.
- Acting skills? Yeah, why not?
After getting sufficient work done I decided to go to Harvard, partially to be able to say later, “I went to Harvard” and technically be right.
Here are some photos of the nerd meccas.
Great information Spencer, keep posting!!
Happy you are living your dream!
Thanks Diane! I hope you’re doing well back in Omaha. I still have some stuff to give you for the next time I am in town!