For a long time Olin has used the word “interdisciplinary” to describe our curriculum, but I think it’s time to stop. Being interdisciplinary was new and exciting for schools 20 years ago, but now it is routine. Olin should be one step ahead while everyone else is catching up – we should be working on the next thing. And the next thing is “postdisciplinary.”

To explain what that means, I’ll use the analogy of racial integration. In an integrated society, people from different racial groups live together peacefully. In a postracial society, the fact that different types of people live together doesn’t even have a name; that is just how it is, and how it always should have been.

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Green Space is for anyone who wants to contribute to or learn about green initiatives at Olin and the world. Want to submit an article about green initiatives? Please do! Want to learn how you can make a difference in your own life or at Olin? Easy! Want to learn about cool things people are doing at Olin (and elsewhere) to reduce our impact on the environment and improve sustainable technologies?

Dude, we got you covered. So please, read on and listen well, because, you know, this is your world too.

A better place
As a “Little Known Fact” from the last Frankly Speaking pointed out, it is very easy to get caught up in the Olin bubble in an alarming way. There is so much going on here at Olin that one can forget to pay attention to anything else, from current events to struggling with what we want to work for.

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Last month’s cover article claimed that Frankly Speaking was founded three years ago. It actually existed at the start of Olin, but died and was restarted three years ago.

In the election article, Hillary Clinton’s name was misspelled.

In the short survey I sent out a few days ago for IPD, I asked students to guess how many gallons a typical 10 minute shower uses.

Corey Cavicchi, Olin’s Associate Plant Manager, has informed me that Olin shower heads have a 2.5 gallon per minute flow (the maximum federal regulatory standard since 1994), but that facilities is “planning to install 1.5 GPM shower heads over Thanksgiving break.”

Based on this information, an average 10-minute shower uses 25 gallons of water now, but will use only 15 gallons of water after the anticipated change.

Back in March when Amos and I applied to the MassChallenge accelerator program, we had a cool idea, some initial feedback from potential customers, and a POE-level prototype showing that we could really build a usable bathroom scale for people in wheelchairs. However, when we were accepted into the program and started talking to people, it turned out that there was a lot more to learn about “the business side of things” than we thought. It’s not as simple as just building a product and selling it in an online store, and crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter are not as effective unless you’re selling to engineers (like Technical Machine) or the general population (like 3Doodler). Here are some of the major things we have internalized in the past four months of running a business:

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You are the one who moves
Who can’t sit still
There are too many tools to grab
Too many races to run
Too many sources of brilliance in this world
And you want to know them all
You want to feel the burn of your soul as it struggles to find new meaning
Its sinews stretching
Skin sweating
It will ache tomorrow
But grow back stronger

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