Monday we had the grand opening of the basement in Building 5. The basement is where I reside and over the course of the last 9 months there have been some serious renovations across the hall, which luckily have helped improve our side of the hall as well. Thanks to a generous donation from Mr. and Mrs. Pappalardo the labs across the hall will be dedicated to nanotechnology. We will continue to do fluid dynamics on this side of the hall but let me take a second to welcome the really really really ridiculously small people accross the hall. If you don't think that is humorous then this joke will also bore you at the ribbon cutting speach President Susan Hockfield (first woman president of MIT) said "I know you don't like to call this the basement, you prefer to call it the 'ground floor'...pause and laughter... I've been getting a lot of calls from people with offices upstairs that are upset and are requesting offices also on the 'ground floor'." Followed by more laughter. You have to realize that in a place this nerdy, any sort of joke is well rewarded. Anyway, as you may know our lab takes a lot of pictures and such for our experiments and things. Since I had a camera around my neck I was asked by our Department Head Rohan Abeyaratne to take a bunch of pictures of the event, with the stipulation that he would arrange for me to get my picture taken with President Hockfield. So here it is, this picture was taken by Prof. Slocum, and I think it is the best picture of the whole bunch...I am not going to post the other pictures unless I get some requests. Oh, and I got to meet the past president of Northrop Grumman, Joe Gavin. What a great guy, he was hilarious, intriguing, and had some really great stories about MIT and the space industry. He was in charge of the Lunar Lander project! Can you imagine? It was surprisingly fun.
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