The WSJ has a piece telling how MIT has an Age Lab and that they incapacitate a student to feel my age. They note;
It took two people to make me feel like I was a woman in my 80s. At the MIT AgeLab, which works on finding ways to improve life for the elderly, a pair of researchers helped me put on their age-simulation suit. They started with a 15-pound weighted vest, tightening the straps around my body. They added more weights around my ankles and wrists, to replicate the sensation of the loss of muscle mass that accompanies aging. They pulled a blue jumpsuit up over the weights, helping me lift each leg and step into the suit without falling. They added a harness around my waist, and a bungee cord system that attached to different body parts including the back of the ankles and my wrists. The cords reduced my ability to reach up and shortened my stride. The get-up made it even more difficult to stand without a slouch. They put a padded neck collar on to limit my rotation and goggles to distort my vision. Foam-padded Crocs on my feet challenged my balance. The MIT designers call the outfit the “Age Gain Now Empathy System,” or Agnes for short.
Now back in the 60s some clueless student like this would have most likely been a product of BU before Silber, but not MIT. This shows haw MIT has deteriorated not me. Now my wife is a few years older than I but she spent the day hedge clipping and root pulling. I did some chain sawing and leaf collecting.
Yes we both have had cataract replacement, but my wife resulting from her life as a chemist and mine from, get it, ageing. Yes my knee is shot, but more from damage as a result of travel accidents and less just age.
I still write more than any graduate student at MIT and my wife reads more than any Harvard undergrad. She spends the week bagging the plants at season's end to be collected so the garden is ready for Spring. We are headed for our home in New Hampshire to do the same there on the side on Mount Tecumseh.
So yes, I hate many of the new packaging schemes but my wife has shown be how to bang open the pickles.
Would it not have been better to collect a group of 80+ MIT grads like us and see what we have done. Instead money and time was wasted on what simpletons thought we should look like. This is just another sign of deterioration, not of 80+s but of what MIT allows to be foisted upon us as academic excellence.
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