A love letter to LXM
A real Science House
Context: last night I said farewell to LXM/Light and Matter, a Cambridge group house of the utmost splendor run by my close friends Raffi, Marley, and Aayush. I wrote the note of gratitude below in the hours before the last in our series of biweekly demos.
Dear Raffi, Marley, and Aayush,
Back in March when I arrived back to Cambridge from New Zealand it was cold and I was lonely.
I didn't have a place to live. Aayush, in suggesting I can stay at LXM as long as I wanted, gave me the confidence necessary to arrive here in the first place without a real living plan. Even before I arrived, it felt like LXM had my back.
Returning to Cambridge was weird. Everything looked more or less the same, except everyone I knew was gone, and MIT was closed to me.
LXM became my refuge. The key ingredients:
Green couch + black bean bag: soft surfaces for lying, sleeping, and reading together.
Projector: display demo night projects + showing baby photos of Aayush.
Whiteboards: estimating mechanism of pigeon magnetoception, explaining Maxwell's equations, writing Yeats' poetry.
Spare bunk bed: allowing the itinerant scientist-builder-learner from Kazakhstan, Montreal, or Menlo Park to briefly stay, spreading ideas.
Raffi Hotter: "we're almost there!" energetic driver of doing. physics and building. providing occasional hot chocolate.
Marley Xiong: emotional and aesthetic vibe curation. paying attention to what really matters. "i was in a pit of despair SID soldering, but then I got all of it done in the last hour."
You three made a home for me at a fragile time, and invited me to grow more into who I am by making space for what I wanted to be.
In the LXM of my heart, Raffi is reading a Modern Electrodynamics textbook, Marley and I are improvising on the keyboard as Aayush is using the Proxmark 3 to clone an HID card.
May this LXM live on, wherever you end up.
May we come together and hack again soon.
May I continue to carry LXM with me.
I love you all,
Max
made me wish i visited :)