Cambridge

Neal Doyle reports somebody in East Cambridge apparently had a spare plasma TV to use as a space saver this morning.

Greg Hum walked across the Longfellow early this afternoon.

First there were signal problems at Harvard. Now, "severe delays in service due to a track problem," specifically, a cracked rail near Central, are creating hordes of refugees. Mamajoan reports from Porter Square:

Commuters exiting Porter like rats from sinking ship. Buses crammed full, driver waving people on without paying.

Amy Lynne Grzybinski adds:

I've been on the train from Porter for 30 minutes and haven't left Kendall yet. HAHAHA

This is the first time a rail has cracked on the Red Line in almost three weeks.

Cambridge Day reports a local psychologist was seeing so much of his business come from Cambridge's tech corner that he decided to set up shop there. Although he already had offices in Harvard and Central squares, "people were kind of stressed out about taking the time off work" to travel the next stop or two on the Red Line.

The Storrow Pool is all fun and games until the top of a bus is peeled back, sending nearly three dozen people to the hospital.

Is there any way to prevent this in the future? Clearly, the signs aren't working. Bring back the cowbells the old MDC used to attach to poles across onramps? Station troopers at every entrance? Suggestions?

Here are some thoughts from Twitter last night as the events unfolded:

City councilors from both cities are planning a joint hearing, with the World Class Cities Partnership (yes, that's a thing), to talk about ways of encouraging our smart people to stay here.

Councilors Tito Jackson (Roxbury) and Leland Cheung (Cambridge) are spearheading the effort. In 2010, Cheung and Boston City Councilor Mike Ross organized a similar session (held at the Museum of Science, which straddles the border), but then relations chilled, in part because of that whole Vertex thing. Also, some Cambridge councilors fretted Tom Menino would steal their secrets.

In a statement, Jackson says it's time to put such pettiness in the past:

The T today turned on new digital ad screens at Harvard, in a move that could mean "millions of dollars of new advertising revenue for the MBTA in the coming years," the state Department of Transportation says.

Park Street Station, North Station and South Station will also get some of the large-screen TVs to beam ads and service info at the faces of commuters.

Harvard Station is equipped with three 70" Tri-Faced screens in a kiosk in the main atrium and five 55" Landscape Screens; one double-sided on the inbound platform and three single-sided across the track on the inbound platform.

Wicked Local Cambridge reports that every week for the past six months or so, a naked guy had driven up to a drive-thru on Concord Avenue and placed an order. The report does not specify the name of the establishment; the street has both a Dunkin' Donuts and a Burger King.

Meanwhile, up in Burlington, police responded to the Burlington Mall today on a report a man was selling drugs - out of a Dumpster near Nordstrom. Alert Burlington reports police didn't appear to find any evidence of drug dealing, but they sent Oscar on his way.

Lorem Ipsum seeks your help.

Earlier:
Seems to be the thing to do for Cambridge businesses.

The Harvard Square institution has turned to Kickstarter to try to raise the $140,000 it says it needs to install digital projectors and fix a creaky heating and air-conditioning system.

We will still show 35mm as much as possible, but as much as we like showing this format, many of the new films and restorations of classic films are only being provided in digital format now. So DCP is a necessary addition. But it'll cost us $90k to do it right.

H/t Pip.

The Crimson reports on the impending name change for the soon-to-re-open Upper Crust there as the Just Crust, to reflect its new status as being owned by employees.

The latest on Aisling McCarthy Brady.

Der Spiegel interviews a Harvard professor who thinks we're nearing the point where we could implant Neanderthal DNA in a human egg. Of course, that would take a woman willing to carry a Neanderthal to term. Actually, several women, because what's the point of growing just one?

No, you would certainly have to create a cohort, so they would have some sense of identity. They could maybe even create a new neo-Neanderthal culture and become a political force.

Via Boston Business Journal.

WBUR posts a statement by US Attorney Carmen Ortiz.

Meanwhile, a California congresswoman is proposing changes to the law used to go after Swartz to try to keep anybody else from going through what he did.

Photographynatalia photographed Park and Tremont streets this morning. Melissa Gibson watched an Orange Line train pull into Sullivan Square:

Obscure MIT Web page about its cogeneration plant was replaced with Anonymous message.

UPDATE, Monday: MIT confirms it was a distributed denial-of-service attack, rather than a network misconfiguration:

On Sunday 1/13/2013 from approximately 7:00pm to 10:30pm MIT experienced a denial of service (DoS) attack. During this period external network connectivity to and from MIT was down for the large majority of the Internet. IS&T staff responded and service was restored by 10:30pm.

UPDATE, 11:20 p.m.: mit.edu is back up, although the co-gen page still shows the Anonymous message.

Revenge for Aaron Swartz's death? TechCrunch reports MIT's Web site is down, although some testing here (ping and traceroute) suggests the entire mit.edu domain is no longer listed in DNS.

The Tech tweets:

The folks at Railroad.net report the Grand Junction Bridge, under the BU Bridge, re-opened to train traffic on Friday.

The bridge, the only connection between railroad tracks north and south of Boston within 128, was was shut by inspectors in November. This forced Amtrak, MBCR and CSX to re-route freight trains and trains carrying cars needing repairs on a 108-mile journey through Worcester County.

Needs 25,000 signatories to get a government response.

Statement by his family:

Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community's most cherished principles.

Aaron Swartz, 26, who co-founded Reddit and who allegedly broke into an MIT wiring closet to download large numbers of academic articles from a non-profit database, committed suicide, the Tech reports.

Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig expresses his outrage at the Department of Justice's prosecution of the case even as the database's owner declined to press charges:

From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The "property" Aaron had "stolen," we were told, was worth "millions of dollars" - with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.

A roving UHub photographer captured the scene this morning at the Great Dome, where Pacman hopes to gobble up the energy pills while avoiding Blinky.

MBTA Transit Police report officers on patrol at the Central Square Red Line stop yesterday morning spotted a couple making their way onto the platform without paying. Police report this was the third time the male half, Christopher Reed, 26, of Cambridge, has been caught fare evading. He did, however, get a free ride - in the back of a cruiser to T police headquarters - because, police say, he was also wanted on a Cambridge drug charge. The woman? With no outstanding criminal charges, she was captured and released.

Innocent, etc.

Cambridge Day reports on a hearing today at which two city councilors called for limits on the sizes of sugary drinks at restaurants - and at which a Harvard nutrition professor called for limits of 7 ounces, or less than half the size of the limit now enforced in New York. Only the city health department could enact soda limits.

Riders on the 5:40 train to Fitchburg tweeted their train came to a sudden stop in Cambridge after hitting a car at a crossing there. AsianKerr reported the conductor came on the PA not long after:

Sorry folks, we have struck a vehicle.

After getting the remains of the car out of the way and after the train engineer was interviewed by police, the train started back up around 6:24 p.m.

In a lawsuit filed yesterday, MIT and Children's Hospital charge Shire Regenerative Medicine's product aimed at people with diabetic foot ulcers violates patents they hold for building skin grafts on a polyester matrix.

The two local institutions say Shire's Dermagraft, in which cells from newborn foreskins are laid on a thin membrane to grow a layer of skin that are then applied atop the ulcers that some diabetic patients develop on their feet.

They're seeking tons of money for the injuries the alleged patent infrigement has done them.

One of the patents.

Cambridge's Culture, which bills itself as "the word on cheese," is seeking an editor. Think you're gouda 'nough? At least five years' print experience required.