Oliver Yeh is the kind of guy who cooks up ideas so kooky, so out-of-this-world, that even his fellow MIT students tend to roll their eyes when they hear them.Scientists, geeks, nerds, techies and gearheads salute you, Ollie. Best use of $148 I can think of in a long, long time.But that never stops him.
His latest concept -- to launch a camera into near-space using a weather balloon, a cell phone, hand warmers and a drink cooler -- fell flat when he sent out an e-mail message to dozens of his classmates, asking for help.
Unfazed, Yeh managed to find one friend willing to chip in. And on September 2, the go-it-alone pair floated a balloon-camera high enough into the atmosphere to photograph the curvature of the Earth and the deep black of space, all on a lunch-money budget of $148.
"For me, it was just about not being afraid to do what I love to do," said Yeh, a 20-year-old MIT senior studying computer science and electrical engineering. "Before, people were just kind of like, 'That's a crazy idea; there he goes all over again.' (Yeh once convinced a friend to float the Charles River with him on a raft made of plastic bottles.)
"I didn't have a lot of people who wanted to do it with me, so I'm really glad I stuck it out and succeeded in what I wanted to do."
When the zombie apocalypse comes, I've found my engineer. Hey NASA guys: take notes.
EPIC WIN.
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2 comments:
Just a note from an MIT dropout from long ago: photo #6 at the CNN page
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/09/21/space.camera.icarus.ireport/index.html#cnnSTCPhoto
is bogus -- it's somebody's file shot of the MIT campus as seen from the far west end, not "The contraption lifts above the town of Sturbridge, Massachusetts." (The white thing in the middle of the photo is an air-pressure inflated tennis bubble.)
Hah, nice.
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