Friday, October 24th, 2014

Time	Event
12:00a	A bumper crop you shouldn’t bump From pies to lattes, this time of year is dominated by pumpkins. But few are as beautiful as the blown-glass pumpkins of all shapes, colors, and sizes that covered Kresge Lawn one recent Saturday. The sea of glittering gourds was no autumnal illusion; in fact, it was MIT’s annual Great Glass Pumpkin Patch. The annual fundraiser sells some 2,000 glass pumpkins at prices from $20 to more than $600, generating funds sufficient to cover the yearly expenses of the MIT Glass Lab, the glassblowing studio in the basement of Building 4. Founded in 1986 by Michael Cima, now the David H. Koch Professor of Engineering in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, the Glass Lab enjoyed a prosperous first decade through a combination of good luck, ambitious students and artists, and generous departmental funding. But by 2000, Cima realized that for the Glass Lab to remain sustainable over the long-term, it would need to raise its own funds. But how? Inspiration came from a Glass Lab alumnus, Mike Binnard ’92, SM ’95. While pursuing a doctorate at Stanford University in the late 1990s, Binnard and some friends at nearby San Jose State University founded the Bay Area Glass Institute (BAGI), a nonprofit community studio that conducted a Great Glass Pumpkin Patch fundraiser of its own. “Mike came by and said, ‘Hey, this is something you can do and raise money for the Lab,’” Cima recalls. “And we just thought it was a fantastic idea.” Gourd deeds In 2001, 14 visiting artists from BAGI instructed Glass Lab students on how to craft the pumpkins, and after several weeks of rapid-fire manufacturing, MIT’s first Great Glass Pumpkin Patch sprang up outside Kresge Auditorium. The Glass Lab has done gourd deeds ever since, hosting volunteer crews on nights and weekends to prepare for each year’s fundraiser. Why pumpkins, though? For one, says Peter Houk, a technical instructor in the Glass Lab, pumpkins “are a neutral shape, and you can kind of go anywhere with it.” Through the years, students and instructors have pushed the form to its limits, making everything from “rotten pumpkins” — flattened ones dotted with simulated mold — to champagne flutes with pumpkins as stems. “I think people enjoy breaking the rules,” says Kaitlyn Becker ’09, a Glass Lab instructor, given that “fantastical decoration is in the spirit of the Patch.” The sheer freedom that the pumpkin’s shape affords also gives students room to improvise, one of the key reasons why Cima founded the Glass Lab nearly 30 years ago. After all, Cima says, “It’s not a straight path to the pumpkin. You can’t script it.” Careful choreography Each pumpkin sold at the Great Glass Pumpkin Patch meanders into being through the hard work of three-person crews that carefully blow, shape, and twist molten glass for hours at a time. It’s an intricate process whose potential dangers demand effective teamwork: At any given time in the Glass Lab during pumpkin session, “There are [two crews] with hot glass at the ends of their pipes walking around,” Becker says. Amazingly, much of the crews’ work happens in silence, says Chris Moore ’90, PhD ’96, a longtime Glass Lab supporter: “There’s relatively little talking because … you kind of know where people are going to move. It’s a ballet that sort of choreographs itself.” It’s a dance that has yielded unimaginably successful results: a financially secure Glass Lab that brings joy to students, instructors, and community members alike. The one question nagging Houk, however, is how pumpkins have stayed so popular for so long: “There’s a little mystery there,” he says. “I have never quite figured out how we can almost sell out 14 years in a row.” But to those in the broader Boston community, like Sudbury, Mass., resident and glass pumpkin collector Rory Richards, there’s little mystery behind the Great Glass Pumpkin Patch’s magic. “It was a perfect, crisp fall morning,” she says of her first visit to the event, in 2003, “and all around you are these amazingly gorgeous, super-fragile glass pumpkins, arrayed on the ground as if you were really walking into a real pumpkin patch.” “There was something almost mystical about the way that it looked,” Richards says. “It was profoundly fun.” (Comment on this)
2:00p	Can the U.S. and Russia make more progress on nuclear security? Political tensions between the U.S. and Russia have increased in the last year, raising concerns about how effectively the two states will be able to pursue nuclear arms-reduction goals. Striking a note of cautious optimism in an MIT talk yesterday, Rose Gottenmoeller, U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control, praised Russia’s “businesslike” enforcement of the U.S.-Russia New START Treaty, but cited a need for continued progress in other areas of nuclear security. “The United States and Russia are continuing to implement the treaty in a businesslike manner, despite all the tensions,” Gottenmoeller said, referring to the military conflict in the Ukraine. The U.S. accuses Russia of occupying Ukrainian territory in Crimea; Russia claims the area is historically its own. The U.S. and Russia inspect each other’s facilities 18 times a year as part of the New START Treaty, which was signed in 2010, went into effect in 2011, and calls for a reduction to 1,550 nuclear warheads deployed on certain delivery systems by the year 2018. Gottenmoeller said that “the Russians have been good partners” on issues such as removing chemical weapons from Syria, and reiterated American willingness to reduce nuclear arsenals by a further one-third, an offer President Barack Obama made publicly at a speech in Berlin in 2013. “The greatest prize at the current time is if we can get the Russians to [pursue] the Berlin” proposal, Gottenmoeller said. Still, as Gottenmoeller made clear in her remarks, areas of arms-control friction remain between the two states right now. She noted a central one early in her talk: The U.S. contends that Russia has been in violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), a 1987 U.S.-Soviet Union pact that bans ground-launched nuclear and conventional weapons with a range of up to 5,500 kilometers. “We have been attempting to press this very serious matter with the Russian Federation,” Gottenmoeller said, emphasizing that the U.S. is “fully committed to the continued viability of the INF treaty, and we are in full compliance with it.” The road ahead Gottenmoeller’s public talk — “Future Prospects for U.S.-Russia Arms Control” — was delivered Thursday afternoon in MIT’s Building 54, in front of an audience that included students, faculty, diplomats, and peace activists.  She emphasized that public awareness of both the ongoing threat posed by nuclear weapons and of recent progress in arms control needs to be enhanced. “At the end of the Cold War, the looming threat of nuclear war seemed to drift away,” Gottenmoeller said. Public support for nuclear security has a practical dimension to it, since the U.S. Senate must ratify arms treaties — and public opinion has the ability to sway senators. The U.S. has also significantly reduced a stockpile of what was once 31,000 nuclear weapons, Gottenmoeller noted; in another area of progress, the U.S. and Russia have collaborated on a program that has repurposed Russian nuclear materials — the equivalent of thousands of bombs — into nuclear-energy fuel in the U.S. As for the next steps for nuclear security, Gottenmoeller suggested that further bilateral arms reductions between the U.S. and Russia should take precedence over multilateral arms-reduction talks among several of the world’s nuclear powers, including Britain, France, and China. “To my mind, this [multilateral approach] doesn’t make sense, because the U.S. and Russia control 90 percent of nuclear weapons,” Gottenmoeller said. The U.S. and Russia will also need to work together next spring to perform the mandated five-year review of 1970’s Treaty of the Non-Proliferation of Weapons (NPT), the world’s largest and longest-lasting global nuclear-weapons agreement. Gottenmoeller said it could be “a difficult review conference” for multiple reasons, including U.S. concerns over the spread of nuclear materials in the Middle East. However, she stated, “I want the NPT regime to be increasingly and constantly strengthened.” Moreover, Gottenmoeller emphasized, “It is in the U.S. interest, and in the interest of countries around the world, that the 70-year history of nonuse of nuclear weapons be continued.” She concluded her talk by quoting former U.S. President Calvin Coolidge, in what could be a mantra for arms negotiators: “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.” (Comment on this)

<< Previous Day

2014/10/24 [Calendar]

Next Day >>