§1. Administrative setup and course structure [00:02]
You should have a sheet on Stellar. This will go on to Stellar as the intro. The administrative details are: there are two sign-in sheets going around. Make sure if you want to be in the course you sign one of these two sheets. They're both up here. Anybody in the back not signed in yet? My assistant Jerry Hill is just down the hall in 4-138.
It became an online class a number of years ago, but the last couple of semesters we've required an attendance of six students. To be frank, the students were taking it a little too well — we didn't have anybody to lecture to. If you could just watch it at home. So we decided you're going to have to come to class, because we like questions.
Four days a week we're going to have lectures by one of four people. If you can pick one of those days, you go for six weeks and you finish your lecture requirement. There are two modes of doing lectures. There are some lectures that go for twelve classes, and there are some that are six lectures. Originally we had twelve for everything. I found the students like smaller bites. You have to take thirty-six lectures, because if it's a twelve-unit course and you multiply by three hours a week — which is the official thing at MIT — that's thirty-six lectures. So you've got to take some combination of twelve and six that adds up to 36. Some of these you'll have to take online because you're only going to get 24 lectures live this semester, and the others were done in previous years.
The class schedule says I'll be doing Mondays, and Tuesdays and Fridays will be Steve Lyons. He gets his twelve lectures in because he gets to go twice a week. Wednesday is Donald Baskin — we'll be talking about lightweight automobiles. Thursday is Brian Holman, and we'll be talking about Leonardo da Vinci and mechanics. Dr. Belmar is here, he'll tell you in a little bit. This class kind of blossomed up to more than 40 students, and we used to let you do a paper. The Institute says I have to have something that you're required to do as an individual in order to give you a grade. If it was up to me, you'd just have to come to lecture, but I have to do something. So we used to do presentations and they were great, the students loved them, but I would have to listen to 40 or 50 presentations.
So Brian is going to help me this year and we're going to give you an option. You can either do a paper — which is a 10-page paper — or you can do a 10-minute presentation and you don't have to write anything. The theme is flexibility in the stress-free environment. The administration talks about, we've got too much stress on the students, and what do they do about it? Nothing. So I decided I'm post-tenure — I have tenure and I'm post retirement age, I can do anything I want. And frankly if you check around, I do. That's what I told my department heads. I'm going to do whatever I want, doesn't matter what you want. You can only do that at certain ages.
§2. Science vs. engineering [04:04]
There's another part of this course. This is the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and I chose it as a freshman. I've been at MIT for over 50 years. I chose materials science and engineering at the end of my freshman year because I couldn't decide whether I wanted to be a scientist or an engineer. It was the only department in the whole Institute, and still is, that has both. Maybe biological has both now, but at that time it was the only department that had both science and engineering in the name. So I've come to wonder over the years what the difference is between scientists and engineers.
I started collecting quotes from other people who've tried to describe it. One person was Theodore von Kármán. You ever hear of the Wright brothers? They taught people how to fly. Theodore von Kármán explained why the Wright brothers were correct. He was a fluid mechanician. He started something called the Jet Propulsion Lab that's affiliated with Caltech. He was probably the greatest engineer of the 20th century in the United States. He said: a scientist explains that which exists; an engineer creates that which never was. I always liked that, because if I show it to scientists they think it's a great quote about scientists, and if I show it to engineers they think it's a great quote about engineers. And Joel Moses, who used to be the Provost around here, said the Media Lab creates that which never will be. Because they tell you, oh, we're going to build this computer that'll do bah bah bah, and they never have quite built these things. They always say this is what could be, but they never know how to do it.
I still had some questions about what a scientist or an engineer was. So I taught a 12-unit module in this course a few years ago on science and engineering, and that gave me the time and the discussion with the students to come up with some of my own quotes. I now have a seven-page document which is just quotes on what the difference is between a scientist and an engineer, if you're really interested. One of my favorites is: a scientist seeks to increase human knowledge; an engineer seeks to improve the human condition. Hopefully this is one, and I've tried it out a few times, that both scientists like and engineers like, just like von Kármán's.
I'm going through this because this course is at the far end of the spectrum of science and engineering in the department. This is an engineering course. I used to say what I'm trying to do is teach you how to think like an engineer. Now you may not want that. A lot of jokes are made about engineers — and about scientists. Among most respected professions, what's the number-one most respected profession? Medical doctor. Why? Me. What's number two? A religious minister. What's number three? A scientist. What's number ten? An engineer. So there's a hierarchy of snobbery. The scientists are at the top, they look down on everyone. And the people at the bottom of the scientists' list are actually the medical doctors. They look down on engineers, who are somewhere in between. And engineers look down on medical doctors — that's four guys. The medical doctor is sort of an empiricist. Go home, take two aspirin.
§3. Lecture requirements and the "two or three key points" method [08:26]
There are a bunch of modules. You can go to my website — "eager" spelled with an A, you'll get there easier with "on" the end, at MIT.edu, under classes. This list hasn't been updated since 2018. There are more modules than this, but they're all available on YouTube. Dr. Belmar has a bunch of modules; Dr. Romans has a module on non-destructive testing. Steve Lyons doesn't — I stole this from a semester when Steve wasn't teaching.
The requirements are: watch 36 lectures. You get to pick your lectures — that's one of the things the students like about this course, they get to design the course for what they want. It can be very different courses. You need to prepare two or three lines on what the key themes of that lecture were.
This comes from when I was flunking quantum mechanics as an undergraduate. I was a junior. There was no reason I needed to take an introduction to quantum mechanics — it wasn't required for course three. For some reason I decided I needed to learn more quantum mechanics, so I took this course taught by Vera Kistiakowsky. Anybody ever heard of Vera Kistiakowsky? Her father won the Nobel Prize at Harvard in chemistry. She was, I think, the first tenured woman faculty member in physics at MIT, and she was a wonderful teacher. But I didn't understand anything in this course. Everybody else was getting 85 on their homework; I was getting 15. I figured I was going to flunk the course. We had a couple of one-hour quizzes and I squeaked by at the bottom of the scale.
Finally, the night before the three-hour final, I thought, I'm going to flunk the course, I'm just going to take the book off the shelf and figure out what the high points are. I walked in, I did the three-hour final in an hour twenty minutes, walked out, got an A in the course. And all of a sudden the light went off. I said, you mean all this other stuff they teach us is just fluff? You only have to learn the high points. A lecturer in one hour cannot get across more than one or two points, maybe three. They're packing too much in to do three. I used to call it "guess my lecture." They don't give you an outline in the beginning, but if you can outline it at the end, that's what I want — your two or three "this lecture was about."
The interesting thing is that students can be watching the same lecture and what they write down is totally different. You wouldn't believe from those two or three lines that they watched the same lecture. Why? Because you understand based on your prior experience and your interest, and therefore you write down different things. Your takeaways are different. Most lecturers get up and expect you to learn what they know. They're going to hand it down from on high, like God gave the plates to Moses. All you do is memorize it. That's sort of the way they teach. I don't believe in that.
So I just want you to learn to walk out of any lecture — whether it's a class or not, just going anywhere — and say, what's the takeaway? Can I give the elevator talk on what I just spent an hour of my life doing? If you can, that's the thing you're going to actually remember out of that one-hour event in your life. From that point on, first term junior year all the way through the rest of my undergraduate and graduate time, I never took a note in class. Why do it? I would just think. I'd walk out of class, I'd say, what was the key point? And then the night before the quiz I'd go in, I'd see what the high points were, and I could get through.
To me it was a great revelation to train yourself to figure out what the key points are. Steve will tell you, as a lawyer, that you've got to learn to think like that when you're debating with a judge. So that's part of the learning of the course — to write these down. For a whole six-unit module there shouldn't be more than one page. It's really for you to categorize what you think you learned. You can do a 10-page paper or a 10-minute presentation on a topic of your choice. And you're going to have to review three or four other student papers and presentations, so you get feedback from someone other than just the faculty.
I've had some students take this course three times, because they take different modules each time. Is anybody taking it a second time? Third? Oh, you've taken it five times. So two of you have taken it before. There are lots of different things you can take. If you want to be pure structural materials, you can do pure structural materials. If you want more business management things, you can do Simone's lecture, you can do Steve's lecture. Did anybody from Sloan show up? You're the only one? We're about ten pre-registered. Before we go through the requirements, let me give Simone and the others a chance to tell you what they're going to have.
§4. Simone on commercializing pipeline inspection technology [16:20]
[Simone speaking.] The technology, as it is today, is a new federal regulation. We work in a regulated environment. That's a module Professor Eagar talks about. It's a little bit like a narrow space — there are certain rules you have to follow. We test oil and gas transmission pipeline, and the reason it's regulated is there are life-safety issues. There are 300,000 miles of those pipes in just the US for gas and liquid. What our technology allows is — a lot of companies don't have historical records of the quality of the steel, plus the steel is not tested for fracture properties. So we go into excavation sites that they have to do for repairs, and collect information while the pipe is still running, because service interruption is not practical. Generally it does involve turning down facilities that provide the compression or the pumping, and you don't make money if you can't run the pipeline.
The 12-hour module at this point is a walk-through of this experience I had starting this company. I'm proud of the sequence: you get six hours first, from two years ago, that was essentially mostly a summary of what was taught to us as entrepreneurs by the National Science Foundation. So it's providing some of what was applicable to our company back then. I supplemented it a year later with three hours more focused on the commercial aspect, and I tied it all in last fall talking about the team.
The National Science Foundation has one of the biggest R&D funding budgets in the US, other than defense. The regulation for the government requires them to spend a certain fraction of their budget in small businesses — it's called Small Business Innovative Research. So the bigger the agency, the more money they have in that bucket. The National Science Foundation really invests in technologies that could be successful commercially. It's an incubator for generating new businesses and growing the economy. They're not as partial to, "I want this small company to help me make the next airplane." They just want those companies to be successful. So they teach us how to identify our market, focus on it, and deliver.
The four key phases: first, discovery of a customer; then you validate it. And you only validate a customer if they've written you a check. It's a very simple, clear criterion. If you don't have a purchase order or a check, you don't really know if they're going to pay for what you're doing. That was something I had to learn the hard way. There's a lot of this entrepreneurial path that you do have to learn the hard way. But at the same time, the more guidance — here we have the Venture Mentoring Service that I'm still a member of. I'm going there this afternoon with my team. We have 16 people now and we're growing probably to 25 before the end of the year because of the new regulation. So we're hiring engineers, technicians, managers. We are focusing now on leveraging our skills. The marketing efforts are super big. A lot of people tell us that we're limited by our internal knowledge — if the customers knew what we know, they would sign up right now. So we essentially have hope in the houses: people traveling to Boston from all over the country to visit with us. That's one of the best marketing, because they're starting to invest. If you're able to do something interesting enough to a customer that they'll co-invest with you — their time or their money — then you know you're on the right path.
So I invite you to follow the 12 hours. I will post on Stellar all the lecture notes — not for you to post up on the website, I try to keep them a little tight. Please send me questions; I still have my email address. There's so many commitments for me right now that I can't do another six hours. I'd love to, but some other time. Any questions for Simone?
§5. Steve Lyons on intellectual property [21:25]
[Tom resumes.] Okay, Steve, do you want to come up? Let me say that the Department of Materials Science just had an off-site last week where they were looking at revising the graduate curriculum. They did a survey of the graduate students, and the graduate students said they need to learn these types of things — how to be a manager and so on — because when they graduate they might have a PhD in materials but they're liable to be thrown in as a manager and they don't have any of those skill sets. So Steve, you want to tell them your background?
[Steve Lyons speaking.] Good morning, everybody. I'm delighted to be here. I always start this lecture off by thanking Professor Eagar for giving me the opportunity to stand up here on my hind legs in front of you wonderful people, and further Tom's approach to education here at MIT. As you can tell just by being here for 20 minutes already, Tom has a practical approach to education. If you want to know the principles behind material science and structural engineering, and you want to know how to be a structural engineer — and there's a difference between those two things — you've come to the right place.
Simone, for instance, is exhibit A — forgive the legal term — but there's a guy who, in my opinion, is going to be a millionaire if he isn't already, in very short order. What he has to tell you about how to turn his knowledge into something that you can market and become successful in, is absolutely invaluable. In the same way, I hope to fill a niche in this course. Tom a long time ago identified a gap in the curriculum at MIT, and that is that we teach you to be the best lecturers, the best scientists, the best researchers, the best writers, the best inventors in the world, and then we send you out there and don't tell you how to protect the results of your genius, and you end up getting taken advantage of. I'm here, hopefully, to fill that gap. It's a practical approach: how to protect what you invent, how to turn what you know into something like what Simone has done, how to make millionaires out of everybody in this classroom based upon what you know.
The first lawyer I ever went to work for, and who eventually fired me, taught me something I never forgot: you don't make any money working for somebody else, you make money working for yourself. And you are the best scientists, the best researchers, the best writers, the best engineers — I'm going to show you how to hold on to what you develop. I get to stand up in front of you twice a week. You can't possibly cover everything we need to know in 12 weeks, but I will give you a working knowledge of not only what you need to know but what you don't know and will be able to find out on your own.
Two things I would ask. Tomorrow is the first day of class. If you're going to come to any of my lectures, come tomorrow, because I have a new way of teaching the course. Tomorrow is going to begin with a story. I won't take up the whole hour. The story is going to be about you. It will inform and provide a framework for everything I have to tell you during the term. Not only is it a story about you tomorrow, but it gives you context for everything we're going to learn. As a bonus, I'm going to feed you tomorrow if you show up — there'll be food from Flour Bakery. So you have two reasons to come tomorrow. All you have to do is sit there and listen to a story, and if that's not good enough, there'll be pastries from Flour Bakery. That story will provide a frame of reference for the entire term. Hopefully it's something you will remember and take with you and use throughout the rest of your life. Because the story I'm going to tell you is something that has affected somebody for their entire life. So see you tomorrow, maybe.
[Tom resumes.] Let me give them a hint. That story he's going to tell is actually about a former student in this class. It's a real story; he'll probably disguise it to protect the guilty.
Steve didn't really introduce himself the way I was thinking. Steve Lyons works for a firm in Boston, One International Place, the high-rise, called Kleiman and Lyons. Over the last four or five years he's been teaching in this course, he has presented patent cases before the US Supreme Court on at least two occasions. So he's not really a slouch. He has actually practiced in this field, knows something about it. It's good to have Simone, who's working in the field. Don Baskin, who's not here — Don Baskin worked for 10 or 15 years figuring out how to make lightweight automobiles for Mercedes and Chrysler. It's not just fancy materials, it's not just fancy geometry, it's actually a mixture. He's got a lot of real-life examples from real automotive companies. So it's fairly specialized in automotive. We had a student do the BMW i3 a few years ago in her presentation — a great presentation. When I was talking to Don, he's got the BMW i3 in there. Anybody know what's nice about an i3? It's a $40,000 or $50,000 vehicle made out of graphite fiber. And it's an all-electric vehicle.
§6. Lightweight vehicles, Brian Holman, and the origin of "engineer" [28:42]
Batteries are heavy. I have two all-electric vehicles, the Chevy Bolts, and the battery costs $10,000 to General Motors. It goes in that car and they sell it to me for thirty thousand. What's the number-one cost of an automobile? The health insurance for the workers — that's the biggest single cost. The second is the frame, which would be the graphite fiber, and the third is seats. Brian, do you want to get up and tell us a little bit about yourself and what you're going to do this time? Brian did his doctoral thesis with me a number of years ago on non-destructive testing.
[Brian Holman speaking.] The module I'm going to do this semester — a little background on me. My undergrad was in ceramic and materials at Rutgers. I did my master's and my doctorate with Tom here. The master's thesis was a project for the Navy on using aluminum sandwich panels to reduce topside weight in carrier systems. The doctorate was on non-destructive testing of disks and blades, high-value parts on airplane engines. The module I did last semester is on NDT — techniques for inspecting structural components. The module this semester is going to be based on a trip I did to Rome two years ago, on the mechanics and materials of da Vinci. It takes his inventions as a war engineer from the 1450s to 1500s and talks about them at a very basic scientific level, then tries to tie them into modern-day techniques and where we are now with the materials.
Questions? He said maker of war machines. Does anyone know what the word "engineer" means, where it came from? It comes from the French, and it actually means maker of war machines. The first engineering school in the world was École Polytechnique in France. The first one in the United States — does anyone know? 1797: it's called West Point. And until 1845, the Commandant of West Point had to come from the Army Corps of Engineers. The second engineering school after West Point was Norwich University in Vermont in 1821. But a better-known one is Rensselaer Polytechnic, in 1823, and they started a field called civil engineering in 1823 to distinguish it from military engineering. So now you know where the term civil engineering comes from.
Does anyone know the original name of Harvard's engineering school? They now actually have one, but they didn't have one for years. Actually, the Harvard Business School was built in 1921 to be Harvard's engineering school. I can explain it, believe it or not.
§7. Faculty secrets, structural materials, and "Surviving at MIT" [32:32]
You'll learn a number of things, you probably won't get a lot of equations. Of the modules that I teach, some are on welding, because that's where I got my tenure. In the welding modules, I start out by saying, I'm going to use — I'm going to teach you one differential equation, just to prove I'm an MIT professor.
I'll ask you right now — and some of you have taken this class before, so you already know the answer. Why does a professor spend a whole hour doing a derivation in class? You remember the answer? That's right: they didn't have time to prepare the lecture. I'll tell you how I learned this. In my first year on the faculty, when I came back from a trip and I hadn't prepared the lecture, I looked at the books — oh, there's a derivation, I can fill an hour up with that. Oh, that's why they waste that time.
So we can talk about some of the secrets of the faculty. There is a syllabus on Stellar. It says that Tom Eagar was going to talk about Introduction to Structural Materials, 3.491. Professor Sadoway has been trying to convince the department to revamp the graduate core and have a graduate version of 3.091. I took 3.091 the first year it was ever offered, over 50 years ago as a freshman. I've lectured at it once, and I've TA'd it, so I know what 3.091 is. When Jeff Grossman became Department Head a few weeks ago, I said, I can put together six lectures on structural materials — I can condense everything in structural materials down to six lectures, in a 3.091 version.
I've given you some handouts. One of them is the differences between scientists and engineers — my quotes of what other people say about scientists and engineers. There's Steve Lyons' lecture notes; they're already on Stellar. There's "Surviving at MIT" — something the students really liked, lessons I've learned about how to survive around here. And there's "Leadership, Management and Education at MIT." I wrote that after about 37 years here at MIT, about what makes MIT unique. I would encourage you to read it. I had a couple of faculty say that they were going to start reading the faculty newsletter again after I'd written that, because they thought it was worthwhile.
There are all kinds of things you can start reading, but you're not going to be quizzed on it. One student said in their evaluation that they actually read more when they weren't required, because they read what they wanted to learn. Your presentations and papers are supposed to be your choice. We'd like them to have something to do with the modules — instructional materials — but they're not always there.
§8. Presentation examples and the "stress-free environment" grading [36:32]
One of my favorites was, when we were doing presentations one year, I had two students independently do presentations on pole vault poles, because they were pole vaulters. The interesting thing about a pole vault pole is it's made out of a sheet composite that's rolled up from the corner so that you get more material in the center than you do on the ends — so it's stiffer in the center. Pretty simple, but it teaches you the concepts of stiffness and geometry and material from something simple as designing a pole vault pole.
The presentations are great, because the papers haven't always been so great — it's a pain in the neck to write a paper. We are going to ask you over the next couple of weeks to pick a topic. Tell us what the topic is. I don't want someone to pick a topic that's so general that in 10 pages or 10 minutes you're going to tell me about the energy needs of the automotive industry. That's a little broad; I don't think you'll do it justice. But the student who had worked on the BMW i3 composite, the graphite composite body and what they did to get the cost down, the weight down — that's a great thing. The pole vault poles were perfect in terms of specific, short, with some good punchy technical meat.
Some people have made presentations based on what they're doing for their doctoral thesis. You could do a presentation on shooting little drops at liquids — I don't care. I'm not trying to double or triple your work, I'm trying to reduce your work. So if you've already got it, that's fine. During the summer I teach US Navy officers this course, and a lot of them had to do a presentation before they left their last duty station, when they were working in maintenance or engineering on some ship or shipyard. If it wasn't classified, they can just do that presentation. You can do anything you want, but you will do a better job if it's something you're interested in.
Japanese sword smithing was something people did in the past. A particular technology, like sand casting, we've had students do; investment casting, which is how you make brass rats. Student papers, presentations — any material topic you like, ten pages or ten minutes. Don't be too general, don't be too broad. I'll ask for you to define which topic you're going to pick, and if I think it's too general or too broad we'll help you narrow it down. Don't try to cover too much. How many slides can you have in a PowerPoint for ten minutes? Ten — that's the max, I guarantee you. And we do want you to say something about what your analysis and opinions are. People have done flying buttresses in the cathedrals in Europe.
Now, grading: there are six requirements. No tests, no quizzes, no finals. I said it's flexibility, a stress-free environment. I'll tell you how I decided that tests and quizzes and finals are worthless. First of all, you're MIT students — if you didn't know how to take a test you wouldn't be here.
The story that got me thinking about this was about 25 or 30 years ago. I usually get in early in the morning. This morning I didn't get in until about 6:30, but I used to get in early. I also go home early, about two — I don't like traffic. Most of my life, I have gotten up, gotten dressed, had breakfast and out of the house before anyone else wakes up. One time I was sitting there having a bowl of cereal at the kitchen table, and one of my kids in high school had left their math book on the table, and the newspaper didn't come that day, so I decided I'd flip through their math book. There were two pages on every topic. Two pages on integration, two pages on differentiation, two pages on exponentials, two pages on factorials. I had no idea that mathematics came in two-page lumps. It was quantized — a new theory of quantum.
All they're doing is training them to take the SATs. That's all they're doing. Did the students actually learn the math and what to do with a factorial? No. It's sort of like doing the derivation on the board.
§9. Submission schedule, evaluations, and the TQM module [43:45]
Brian is the TA, so he's the one who's going to know about these things. He's going to send you the emails on Stellar saying if you don't do this you're going to be docked a letter grade — that's what he likes. 3.371 it all gets lumped into one Stellar — Jerry usually takes care of that. She set up the Stellar site. If you have a problem getting on — there are always a few students who do, for whatever reason — she's the one to talk to about getting on Stellar. We've had students cross-register from Harvard and so on.
Number one is either a paper or a presentation. We need to know by the 20th or 21st — just a few weeks away — what your topic is going to be. I need to know this time, since I've given you the choice, whether you're going to do a paper or a presentation. I'm hoping some of you will do papers so I don't have to listen to 30 presentations, but Brian's going to help. I do like to listen to the presentations, and sometimes I watch them on video.
Your papers are going to be due — if you do a paper — at the end of March. You attend presentations of three or four others and you write some critique of their presentation or paper. If you're doing a paper, the final paper is due on May 10th. Presentations will be scheduled in April; reviews will be in April. Completion of the one-page outlines of modules watched is not due until the end of the term, because you'll be watching modules the whole term.
I'm trying to front-load this course. There is a class every day. If you keep up with this course before your other courses have gotten crazy, you'll be done with this course. You can be done in early April. That really, for those of you who are undergraduates and taking a full course load — and even if you're graduate students, if some of you're studying for the exam or whatever — it's nice to be done.
I've got student evaluations from the past. Some students thought this was a very good course; these are the best ones. The latitude meant that they actually worked harder than if they hadn't. Here's the worst — over the last four years, this was the only bad evaluation. The guy hated me. Well, I didn't like him either, even though I don't know who you are.
There's one from a Navy officer who graduated in 2004. He sent me an email last September, which is actually what spurred me to put this together. "I learned more and was entertained more in your class than all my other grad classes combined." I've had people tell me it was the best class they took, but I never heard it was better than your entire MIT education. "Your practical knowledge is what we all took away." I actually called him up on the phone. I said, did you really mean that, or was that just hyperbole? He says, maybe a little hyperbole, but dude, you've educated the next generation of ship designers in the US Navy, and they like it. There's also one from a guy who's a welding engineer who teaches courses in Wisconsin. I put all my courses on YouTube, and I've had about 40,000 hits on my welding metallurgy course. 40,000 people even know what welding metallurgy is.
For business-type things, there is one module on TQM. When I was department head I was talking to a bunch of undergraduates — I had actually taken TQM when I was a student at the Sloan School. I took the senior executives program at Sloan School in 1988, and I was head of what they called Leaders for Manufacturing, which is joint with Sloan, and they were big on Total Quality Management. I said to the students, anybody know what TQM is? And one student in the back says, "It's BS." I said, well, you may be right, but why did the CEOs of some of the largest corporations in the country give the University Challenge to six of the top universities? I think Stanford and MIT, and I don't remember the others.
We had the opportunity to go to IBM at their executive training facility on the Hudson for a week. 75 MIT faculty drove out there, and we stayed there for a week — beautiful facility, wonderful food. IBM taught us what they called customer-driven quality, voice of the customer — all these quality management things. I said, why would these CEOs think that TQM is so wonderful if it's all BS? So that's what that module is. Is it BS or is it real? The answer is, it's actually both. It depends on what parts of it you want to get into.
It's time, I've got to let you go. Next Monday is a holiday, so I won't be lecturing. And I'm not going to lecture — I'm going to try to answer whatever questions you want. I've been here for over 50 years. If you want to talk about Epstein, I'll tell you what I know about Epstein. You may not be happy. If you want to know about the tenure process at MIT, I will tell you the truth, because they can't touch me. So you ask me whatever you want, and I'll tell you. That's been one of the students' interests. So that's what I'm going to do rather than lecturing on 3.491. I'm going to come in — I've got stories. Some of the postdocs looked at my last four years of lectures, and they counted 551 stories that I told.