Visual Effects Stoops to New Low to Visualize Skydiving Cats

I want to thank Yayoi Wakabayashi for pointing out one of the truly, genuinely stupid use of visual effects in recent history: skydiving cats.  Guess what, they didn't actually throw cats out a window, they used the magic of visual effects to execute this abomination.

http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/us/2012/11/16/tsr-moos-skydiving-cats-controversy.cnn#/video/us/2012/11/16/tsr-moos-skydiving-cats-controversy.cnn

With great power comes great responsibility and clearly these people are not up to using visual effects responsibly.

Visualization and Employment in the Defense and Intelligence Field

Just for fun, and because the grass is always greener, I decided to look at the job openings at a major computer technology defense contractor: SAIC. SAIC used to be a small (e.g. maybe 500 people) company in San Diego renowned for treating its people well and doing cool things for three-letter agencies that they could not talk about. I knew that they had grown since then, and I knew that the national security business was experiencing major growth, but I was still surprised.  Amazed actually.

SAIC now has over 40,000 employees, all over the country and the world. They have over 3,500 current job openings, and all of the ones I looked at had been listed in the last 60 days.  So SAIC is gigantic and is growing like mad.  

Job titles on Internet employment lists vary from useful to useless as we all know.  Nevertheless, I am an expert reader of such things and scanned about 1/2 of the jobs open at SAIC, pulling out 1 or 2 a page for further review.   The first thing that pops right out at you and waves their arms around so you can't miss it is that almost all these jobs require a security clearance.  Not merely that you are willing to get a security clearance, no, they require that you have it already, active, in order to apply.  Of the 30 or 40 jobs I happened to pick because they sounded interesting or possibly relevant all but 1 or 2 required an active security clearance.   Since you as an individual can not keep a security clearance active easily, this means that you were either in the military, working for a defense contractor or you were your own defense contractor and needed a security clearance within the last (approximately) two years (it varies, based on the type of security clearance), or it would have lapsed automatically.

But this gets better.  It isn't just any security clearance that you are supposed to have, its a Top Secret / SCI clearance.  Whats funny about that is that Top Secret is a classification, but SCI is not, its something else, an "access ticket" I think.   Just because you have a ticket to one compartment, doesn't mean that you can automatically have a ticket to another, it means you have a need-to-know for that first compartment.  I presume that it is easier to clear someone for a new compartment if they have had a ticket to another one in the past.  I guess.

So of the 30 or 40 jobs I read beyond the job title, all but a few required a clearance of some sort, and most of them TS/SCI.   One of the few that did not require this was, ironically, the one job I found that looked like it might use Visualization as part of its job description.     This is yet more (anecdotal) evidence that graphics and visualization is a poorly regarded niche specialization outside of a few industries.

Wikipedia page on security clearances
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_clearance

Ivan Sutherland, the Screen Transformation and You

[Tom Duff pointed out to me that the MIT TX-2 and the MIT Whirlwind computer were not the same thing.  Whirlwind was used on SAGE (the semi-automatic ground environment), and it was the TX-2 computer that Dr. Sutherland used for Sketchpad.   I had not been aware of how closely the TX-2 resembled or was a model for the original DEC PDP-1.   Thank you Tom!]

Ivan Sutherland has won the Kyoto prize.   

Dr. Sutherland is known for many things, but perhaps the single thing that he did that is used billions of times a second is the method of creating a screen transformation from a 3D object by applying a 4x4 matrix transformation to the 3D coordinates. Most of the time when you are seeing a computer graphics image on a screen you are seeing an application of Ivan's work.  A matrix transformation like this is particularly amenable for implementation in hardware (just about anything can be implemented in hardware, it is true, but this is perhaps the most amenable to hardware implementation of the various algorithms one can use to create a screen transformation in a scalable way).

My favorite thing that he did is a user interface for a CAD design system he did as a graduate student at MIT on a TX-2 computer. The interface is better than 98% of all user interfaces you have the misfortune of using and it was written in machine code on a crazy primitive computer.  A friend at RAND has or had a 16 mm film.  I will try and see if I can not find it on the internet, or get it transferred and uploaded to the internet.  You will be amazed.

A picture of the Whirlwind is kept here because it is so cool looking.

I believe these are Selectron tubes.  A colleague of mine at RAND had one of these or something similar from the Johniac that we had at RAND long before I got there.   Again, this is related to the Whirlwind.

The TX-2 console used for early human-computer interface work

The TX-2 at Lincoln Laboratories

Read about the Kyoto prize, the Whirlwind and Ivan below.

The Kyoto Prize

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Prize

The Whirlwind Computer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirlwind_(computer)

Ivan Sutherland

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Sutherland

Tom Duff also sent the following two links.  The first is a collection of information about the TX-2, including Dr. Sutherland;s Sketchpad paper.  The second has information about the Whirlwind computer.

http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/mit/tx-2/

http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/mit/whirlwind/R-series/R-127_Whirlwind_I_Computer_Block_Diagrams_Volume_1_Sep47.pdf

Some Modest Suggestions in Light of the Disney Acquisition of ILM

I have hesitated to comment on the Lucasarts / ILM acquisition and what it may imply for the future of ILM because, oddly, I did not want to annoy people. Besides, how would I know, or what would I know that could possibly contribute? Other than the history of the field, and the history of various studios when it comes to visual effects facilities and how the studios think about such things, that is.

In a future post I will review some of the structural reasons why it is so hard to have a facility like ILM at a studio like Disney, but first, I am going to review some ideas that may be useful. I am pretty sure that my friends at ILM know these already, but there are others who are interested who may not. And it doesn't hurt to discuss these things a little bit, as far as I know.

Suggestion #1. Do not lose money.

Of course it is better to make a lot of money, but if you do not lose money then you are not obviously a perceived drag on the profits of the company. Its more complicated than that, a lot more complicated, but making a dollar is a much better position to be in than losing a dollar. But whatever you do, do not lose a million dollars on some project and expect them to want to pick it up.

Suggestion #2. Be low maintenance.

Manage yourself so well, that keeping you around seems effortless to Disney management. No big horrible scandals, no personnel disputes that become newsworthy, only positive modest press releases that help you get more work but does not interfere with anything that Disney is doing. Fly low, avoid enemy fighters. Avoid controversy.

Suggestion #3. Find a way to deal with Disney producers.

The standard problem in this situation is that a company like Disney Studios which makes movies, will encourage their producers to use an in-house facility, which ILM now is. But the producers are interested in saving money, and will want ILM to give them a deal. This always happens, that is the good side of the situation. The bad side is what happens when people don't love each other anymore, when they do not like the deal, when they do not like being charged for adding a billion shots at the last minute, when they do not like being charged because they went to the lowest bidder they could find then call on ILM to save their stupid ass at the last minute. Then people get unhappy and they take their unhappiness out on ILM.  You see, the producers have access to the top management at Disney and they are not shy about complaining about being charged for the work.

Suggestion #4. Find a way to deal with the fact that you work with the competition.

ILM makes its money by doing excellent visual effects as a work-for-hire production service facility for a fee.  The point is, ILM does work for whatever studio is willing to hire them. But the Walt Disney Company competes with these other studios and they may have a film coming out that competes with a film you worked on for another studio, and the producers and executives at Disney may not like that. I have no idea what you do about this situation, it is not reasonable to expect the producers at Disney to be mature on this topic. I suppose that one thing you can do is to be low profile and not try to get the normal publicity that a successful visual effects film often generates.

I predict that if you are able to do these things, that you will be able to continue the remarkable track record that ILM has generated thus far. There are major institutional reasons why a company like Disney does not normally have a facility like ILM as part of their company and those reasons are all still operative (the subject of a later post). But I am hopeful that you can find a path through this jungle and that the (somewhat obvious) ideas above may be of modest use.

A Very Brief Introduction to Robert Abel & Associates

Tomorrow is the Robert Abel event at the UCLA school of Theatre & Film, which I may or may not be able to attend. I have taken this occassion to write up a very brief introduction to the period that Robert Abel & Associates was a part of. I could write many, many pages about Abel's but I am not going to do that here. Here I am just going to do a page or so of very basic background.

Robert Abel & Associates (Abel's) was a famous visual effects production company mostly in the world of advertising and commercial production, but not entirely. It employed some of the most accomplished people in the field of visual effects and has alumni who are very important in the field as it is today.

I was there only briefly, from 1980 to 1983 or so, working on building what we called the "raster" computer animation system. What we call computer animation today is what we would have called "raster" back then, in contrast to vector animation, and other forms.

It is going to be hard for someone who only knows the field today, or of the last decade, to relate to what Abel's was and what it did. Here is some background to try and make some of it comprehensible.

1. The community of people was small, much smaller than it is today. Maybe a couple of hundred people, although maybe its a few more depending on how you define this community (e.g. visual effects, effects animation, matte painting, rotoscope, camera, etc).

2. The production companies that did exist varied in size from 1 - 80 people, and occasionally would grow larger when they had a project that could support it.

3. The companies were production companies, financed through the personal wealth of the founders, and living on a week to week basis depending on what jobs were in house. If there was no work, everyone would be laid off immediately.

4. There was occasional motion picture work, but not much and not continuously (e.g. motion picture work was nice to have but if you wanted to keep people employed you had to do other things). There was also some television work and intermittent theme park / special venue projects.

5. But at the end of the day, if you wanted to pay the rent, people in visual effects and other related fields often did commercials and such things as "broadcast graphics".

6. The two 800 lb gorilla's in the field of visual effects and graphics oriented advertising was R/Greenberg in NYC and Robert Abel & Associates in Hollywood. If you worked in this field in NYC, then you are likely to have worked at R/Greenberg. And if you had done visual effects in one form or another in Los Angeles, you were likely to have worked at Robert Abel & Associates, even if only briefly.

7. Abel's and R/Greenberg would compete for the big, technical advertising projects. Not the cute projects that had a lot of live action, more like Cliff Robertson AT&T commercials.

8. The advertising business is director driven, and at Abel's, in general, the art director was the director in charge.

9. Generally speaking, the projects themselves were done, e.g. accomplished by the "technical director" who was the filmmaker, if you will, for the project, as directed by the art director.

10. Computers were only a tiny part of the techniques used in visual effects. And perhaps the least important of the techniques.

The good news is that there were some extraordinarily talented people who worked there, and did some of their best work. The bad news was that Abel's, as a culture, encouraged people to work to their detriment and damage their health and in some cases their lives.

I will always be grateful for meeting some of the people I met at Abel's, but I would not want to work under such circumstances, if I could avoid it, again.   It was the Abel experience that first made me realize that the workplace needed to be regulated or in some way moderated to prevent the kinds of abuse I saw there and elsewhere.

What the Bin Laden Family Taught Me About the Nature of Friendship

A few years ago I was discussing with a therapist why I felt so sad and abandoned by my friends. I used as an example a story from a book about the Bin Laden family by Steven Coll.

There are a number of things to learn from this book, which is very entertaining and worth reading (see link below) but perhaps the most compelling thing I learned was something about the true nature of friendship.

As background, before we get to the specific story, here are a few other things to know about the Bin Laden family. First, they are not Saudi Arabians, nor are they related to one of the important families from Saudi Arabia. They are Yemeni immigrants who went to Saudi Arabia and fit the stereotype of the classic Yemeni immigrant in Saudi Arabia: the hard-working, dirt-poor immigrant brothers who through pluck and hard work become millionaires. The next thing to know is that there are hundreds of Bin Ladens, they take many wives, divorce them, but keep them around, and marry new ones and have children by all of them. (1) The next thing to know is that of those hundreds of Bin Ladens, most of them seem to love America and spend a lot of time here. And finally, although the Bin Laden family was and is very wealthy, there was nothing like the wealth that would have permitted a 3rd generation Bin Laden such as Osama, who was not much involved in the family business, to have anything like the $180M in personal wealth that was reported in the American news media (in other words, our press got it wrong, again, not even close to accurate.)

Some of the Bin Laden Family in Europe probably in the 1970s.

Their are many colorful anecdotes, including the one about how after 911, the Bin Ladens chartered a jet and become one of the very few planes allowed to fly, as they picked up their various relatives at various parts of the country and flew them to Europe. Recall that air traffic was prohibited for three days after 911 with only a few exceptions. It seemed safest to the Bin Ladens, our State Department, and the Saudi Arabian government to just get the rest of the Bin Laden's out of the way for a while than to have them scattered all over the country and have to provide security for them (or fail to provide security for them as the case may be).

The specific story which is significant for this post and the cause of so much emotional unhappiness is the story of the time one of the Bin Laden's of the second generation was living in Florida and planning a party in Pakistan. Recall this is before 911, before the war in Afghanistan, and Pakistan was and may still be a favorite vacation place for people from Saudi Arabia, famous for its falcon hunting. Anyway, this Bin Laden was also a fan of ultralight airplanes and planned to charter a jet to fly to Pakistan taking with him many friends and ultralights for the event. Being a colorful and generous man, he also invited along many of his neighbors from Florida including his local ultralight dealer.

This is a typical ultralight without either a Bin Laden or a suitcase filled with cash.

Now we get to the signifcant part of this story. This is the part that really made me wonder what kind of friends I had and about the true nature of friendship.

You see, this Bin Laden, being a careful and generous host, also brought along a briefcase stuffed with cash in order to pay for any little extras along the way. Not a lot of money, just about $250K in various denominations, which is enough to buy a Range Rover or two, or hire a band at the last minute, or rent another floor of the hotel, take the gals shopping, whatever. The point is, he so trusted his friend with the ultralight dealership that he was given the briefcase and asked to carry it around.

Obviously, this is an indication that Bin Laden had both trust and confidence in the ultralight dealer. You can't just leave the briefcase with anyone, and you can't just put it in a safe, because you need it around if you need anything. So you appoint someone to keep it with them, someone you like and trust with the money.

 This photograph is for educational purposes only.

This really made me think. Whats the matter with me that I never get invited on the chartered jet to fly ultralights in a foreign country?  Why don't my friends let me carry the briefcase stuffed with cash? Why am I never invited to join the various Academy committees that have my friends and peers as members and who later win important awards because they served on those committees? Whats the matter with me that my friends treat me like shit?

The bottom line is that if they really liked me, they would let me carry the briefcase stuffed with cash from time to time, but they don't.

That's why this story makes me feel very sad and depressed.

_____________________________________________

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century by Steven Coll

http://www.amazon.com/The-Bin-Ladens-Arabian-American/dp/1594201641

1.  There is a restriction in Islam that says you can only have four wives at a time and then only if you can afford them. However, there is no restriction on marrying, then divorcing, and keeping good relations with your ex-wives. In this way, one can with persistance and good financial means, extend the number of wives that you have in some long-term sense of the word indefinitely and the Bin Ladens seem to have in general used this technique.

Voting Irregularities in Virginia and the Byrd Organization

When the Republican putsch put the Bush administration into power in this country in 2000, thus ending democracy and destroying the credibility of the Supreme Court in many people's eyes, there were some of us who were, and are, adamant that the issues of voting procedure had gone on far too long and needed to be dealt with now, completely, fairly across districts, and as comprehensively as possible.

To a Southerner who is tired of being bashed by ignorant Westerners and Northerners for being from a "racist part of the world", this was a particularly low moment.   "Fix the fucking voting machines, ok?" we thought to ourselves. This has been going on long enough.

But there have always been voting irregularities in American politics and some elections are more famous for this than others. Important political dynasties were created out of creative control of voting procedures, one need only think of the Daley machine in Chicago to pick one notable example.  The South had their political machines as well of course, and the one in Virginia from the mid 1920's through most of the 1960's was called the "Byrd Organization" led by former governor and US Senator Harry Byrd. These were Southern Democrats of the old school.

Governor and US Senator Harry F Byrd

So one day, sometime in the 1930's, my dad and his first wife went to vote in Virginia Beach, Virginia where they lived. All polling places have publicaly posted a list of who is registered to vote in that precinct and whether they have voted that day or not. This is all to reduce fraud and to increase confidence that the people who vote are eligible to vote and have only voted once.

The father of my dad's first wife had died many years before. But since he was a good democrat, he not only continued to be registered in his precinct, he had also voted that day, demonstrating excellent party loyalty.

I am sure nothing like that happens today, of course.

The Wikipedia page for the Byrd Organization:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byrd_Organization

Selected Items of Interest from Computer Games of Recent Vintage Part 1

As previously mentioned, I did a survey of PC games a few years ago in order to form a more modern impression of the state of that industry, what games were being made, what I liked about them and what I didn't.   

As you would expect, it was a mixed bag.   But out of the 50 or so games I reviewed, there were about 30 or 40 things that did impress me.  Here is a list, more or less at random, of 10 of those things.

See this post for a discussion of what I was looking for:

http://globalwahrman.blogspot.com/2012/11/some-criteria-for-excellence-in.html

1. An idea so good you wish you had thought of it: Sissy Fight 2000

A turn-based game based on a playground in which young girls compete to become the most popular, or alternatively, do the best job of lowering the self esteem of the other girls by saying nasty things about them.

Although the server for Sissyfight 2000 is no longer operational, this high point in western culture will not be quickly forgotten.

www.sissyfight.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sissyfight_2000

2. A great user-interface idea: Grand Theft Auto III

In GTA III, you are given tasks to accomplish for the local criminals. They want you to drive their car somewhere, say to pick up their girlfriend. But the user interface is rigged so that it overreacts making it nearly impossible to actually drive the car without bashing into other cars, or people, or streetlamps. The car is rigged with all sorts of great breakaway parts that get destroyed colorfully. So you pick up the girlfriend, and she pretends not to notice that the hood is bashed in and the door is hanging loosely off its hinges.

3. A great story point / gag: Grand Theft Auto III

You are given an assignment, pick up the boss's girlfriend, there is a map, but the city and the map are perverse. You pull into a parking lot to turn around, in what is probably a stolen car, and discover that the parking lot is actually the lot for the local police station. You try to turn around to get out of there but as with the point above, the car is impossible to drive so you end up playing demolition derby with a bunch of parked police cars. These guys are very funny.

4. Something happens that makes you think that it is actually thinking: SimCity IV

I set up a toll booth to try and collect revenue from an interstate (e.g. only collect money from people passing through, not locals). But I do not realize that I leave a back street open that people could use, if they were clever or persistent enough to find it, to avoid the toll booth.   Trust me, this route was not obvious, it required going around through a bunch of back streets and then back onto the main highway.

So I put in the toll booth and, after a while, a local neighborhood group complains about too much traffic from cars passing through. The game is obviously simulating some of the crazy things people do to save money, in this case, having them drive all over the place to find the cheapest path. It greatly added to the sense that the game was actually paying attention and that there was something actually going on in there.

5. A game that results in learning something about the world: SimCity IV

Maxis says that SimCity is not doing real urban simulation, it is just faking it.  That may be true, but even so, it is an excellent learning tool for people interested in such topics as urban design and management and it is the only such tool that I am aware of that is available to the general public.   

6. A game that is useful in thinking through a strategic issue: Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars

Tiberium Wars is an amusing real-time strategy game, one of the few I enjoy playing.  There is nothing about it that is intended to be realistic nor is that its purpose in any way.

But it has a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) feature and there are several amusing things about it, I noticed.  It is implemented in a way that you always know who did it, you are warned they are going to do it, they can only use it intermittently, and it is very destructive in a limited region but you will probably survive the first blow.

What was interesting was that without thinking about it, I found myself implementing these counter-strategies: (a) distribution of industries in different regions, (b) duplication of key technologies in different regions, (c) attempting surgical strikes to knock out their WMD before they can use it (or use it again), and (d) developing my own WMD in response.   I did not think about it at the time, but in retrospect the strategies that evolved to manage the threat of WMD are some of the same strategies used in the real world to deal with this threat.

7. A game that did a good job of creating a mood or feeling: Bioshock

One of the few games I have found that did a good job at creating some sort of feeling or sense of place, this time of a strange underwater world. The equivalent of a good, bad horror film.

8. A game with a weird funny idea: Portal

Portal is a pretty weird idea, and well implemented. Whether or not it is a good game or not, I could not tell you, its not the sort of game I enjoy. But it is fun to look at, and it is actully somewhat original in concept.

9. A game with some whimsical humor: Command and Conquer Red Alert

Very few games have anything I would see as charming, or whimsical. You may feel differently about it, but that is my impression. But in this version of the C&C franchise, there are some very funny bits. My favorite is the type of Russian soldier, the great Russian bear. The bear can be delivered to a place (a battle, an island, etc) by shooting it out of a cannon. When you do that, it is very cute in how it flies, how it parachutes down, and how it lands. Its really charming in the great wasteland of not-charming of most games.

This bear is fierce looking.  The bear(s) in the game itself are adorable.

Tim Curry as Premier Cherdenko.  He probably got this part because of his role in Hunt for Red October.

10. A game with a great use of some technology: the Total War series

The game separates out the strategy from the battle. During the battle you are given a user interface to attempt to control behaviorally generated troops of soldiers. A Roman Legion for example, made up of the different specialities that existed within the legion. A lot of work has gone into making it possible to give direction to these groups of simulated people as they try to kill each other. And the behavioral is very good and works in real time with dozens of groups interacting with each other and thousands of individual foot soldiers being animated.   A very good job, overall.

A view from the Rome: Total War series.

Friends, Romans, Countrymen !

I will probably post another list of equal length sometime soon of other things I thought were well done.

Then I will tell you what I really think about the games I reviewed.

Some Criteria for Excellence in Computer-Based Entertainment

Several years ago I did a survey of certain genres of computer game to better understand where they had come since my involvement in that industry, before it was an industry, years ago. I was looking for notable examples of the following sorts of things:

1. The illusion of intelligence

Either the game itself had some function or response that made one think that it was actually paying attention to what was going on, or the computer generated entities within the game, either opponents or allies, exhibited behavior that seemed to indicate that they were aware and responding rationally to the events.

2. A strong subjective impression of a different world or period

A good book or film will often take us to another world, real or fictional, and make us feel a part of it to some degree. So I was looking for that same sort of feeling or impression from a game.

3. Something is learned from the experience

By playing the game in a certain scenario, something is learned that is applicable to real life or to understanding a historical situation. Historically, the armed services of a nation will run "war games" or simulations because they can be so useful in learning about the sorts of things that are hard to imagine in advance. Although the popular press and imagination makes fun of these "games", thinking them frivolous, experience has shown they can be very valuable tools for planning and training.

4. Something surprising (and interesting) happens

Events and policies often have "unexpected consequences". A classic example is the question / issue of whether a minimum wage increases unemployment for certain kinds of workers. If it does, that would be an unexpected consequence. Suprising, interesting and plausible in retrospect.

5. An excellent use of an advanced technology

A game that uses a technology in an unexpected or particularly skilled manner.

6. A particularly humorous or ironic situation is created

The game has some situation or appropriate use of technology that is particular funny, or ironic, or sarcastic and indicates that someone actually thought about the game, its characters and its situations.

7. An excellent user interface.

A user interface which is beyond what you normally find, or which demonstrates some creative or appealing approach to the problem of what we see of the game and how we interact with it.

8. A fabulous concept.

A game with an idea that is so great you wish you had thought of it yourself.

9. A strong personal vision.

A game that in some way demonstrates the values or ideas of an individual or group of people who are collaborating, in a way that indicates some style or aesthetic that is clearly their own.   A writer such as Hemingway or Faulkner falls into this category and people can have a lot of fun trying to recreate or satirize their world view.  

A game that has even one of the above to some degree is an exceptional game.

In a future post, I will go over some examples I found of these (most of these) in recent games.

The Story of Columbia University's Second Campus

So I am going to tell you a New York real estate story, the story of Columbia University's second campus. Their current location is their third campus.

Columbia University has been around since 1754, in other words, before the American Revolution. It is a recent college by the standards of a Virginian or a European, but it is still venerable.

It was originally located down by Wall Street, the street named for the wall they built to keep the Native Americans out. That's right they built a wall, and south of that wall was "civilization". How ironic given the pestilent sore of moral depravity that Wall Street represents to the world today! Back then, there was a lot of open country, a lot of farms, and no skyscrapers. But it started getting crowded, people were building the area up, so they decided to move out of there and bought a second campus somewhere around what we call today midtown, and sold their first campus.

After a while, they realized that they had made a mistake. They should have kept their first campus as a long term real estate investment and merely leased it out to others as Wall Street real estate was proving to be a good investment. So, when, years later, midtown was also getting crowded and they started looking for a new campus, they remembered this lesson. This time they leased their old campus and moved to their new location, the location they have now, in Morningside Heights.

So the question you are supposed to be asking yourself, is where in midtown the second Columbia campus was located and what is it called today.

The second campus was Rockefeller Center.

When I heard this, I realized that I had been told this long ago, but had not understood what I had been told. I remember reading that when the Japanese bought Rockefeller Center that what they had actually bought was the buildings not the land. The buildings themselves had been built on land owned by the Columbia trust on a 99 year lease said the article in the NY Times.

Now Columbia is one of those old American names filled with Symbolism and doesn't necessarily refer to Columbia University.  We used to call everything Columbia. The Statue of Liberty is called Columbia. So I thought nothing of it, and just assumed it was the name of an old financial institution or something like that. But no, when they said Columbia Trust, what they meant was the Trust for Columbia University.

The moral of the story is that educational institutions are well positioned to benefit from long term real estate investments in the cities where they reside. For two other examples, check out the history of the real estate investments of Harvard and Stanford.

Wikipedia page for Columbia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_University