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Canadians Hang Bug Off Golden Gate
Strider- writes: "Early on the morning of Feb. 5th, a group of Canadian Engineering students from the University of British Columbia accomplished their annual prank: hanging a Volkswagen Beetle off of some structure, usually a bridge. However, to celebrate the 20th aniversary of this annual event, they went for the creme de la crem, la piece de resistance: They
hung the Beetle off of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge."
I thought it would have been common sense to just make sure there was no shipping traffic below the bridge, then cut the cord...
You can't just leave a few hundred pounds of scrap metal in the bottom of the bay! That's one of the purest bodies of water on the planet -- no-one has ever indiscriminately thrown trash in there.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
I'm of two minds deciding wether it would be worthwhile, or even proper, to prosecute the cuprits (if they're ever found).
:)
Sure, its a great 'hack' in the true sense of the word, but can we truely rely on their safety assurance skills? Also, look at the traffic trouble they caused: I wonder how many people missed their flights from SFO because of the trouble.
Personally, I think they should both be congratulated, and be sentenced to community service at the same time
Micrososft responded today by hanging 63,000 bugs off of windows. Bill Gates was heard to say that those Canadians were wimps for only doing one. We will kick their collective ass.
He then proceeded to buy canada, and lay off all the students who had done this.
Wow, close to first post.. Anyhow, having been a victim of the traffic caused by the VW this morning.... I will share...
Anyhow... rumorville says that in the past years, they have managed to get a VW onto the bridge towers back home -- which is more impressive, IMHO, then tossing a car off the bridge. I mean... hanging a VW (chassis only, almost) off the side of the bridge via nylon cable sounds pretty simple... Tie car to bridge, throw car off bridge with multiple people, or off a ramp. Done.
But... getting the car to a higher ground would be far more challenging... I wonder how they managed to get the VW up onto the bridge towers in the past without getting caught...
Despite being inconvenienced, I thought it was pretty amusing. My only gripe was that they chose to do this prank on a bridge with already horrible visibility... Thankfully the VW was 100 feet off the ground, but if it ended up getting hung lower, we'd have ferries crashing into it...
Yawn. :-)
:-) ) is one time a small group of CalTech students hacked a grandstand placard display from a college team back east. Done back in the days before computers were common, the result was that during a game at the Rose Bowl when the team's fans held up the placards, instead of the something of the colors of the home team it really spelled out CALTECH.
The UBC prank seems totally unimaginative compared to some of the hacks pulled off by California Institute of Technology (CalTech) students.
Who could forget when someone hacked the scoreboard at the Rose Bowl so during the Rose Bowl game it showed CalTech winning over MIT? I saw this on live TV some years ago and that was a real classic.
But still, perhaps the most famous hack of all time (IMHO!
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Well, then you gotta worry about the wannabes who will imitate the prank, possibly not listening to the implicit "don't try this at home kids".
Then there's the issue with San Francisco - possibly the VW beetle capitol of the US. No small number of vintage aircooled VW fans were deeply offended today at a destruction of a piece of automotive history. You can take that to the bank.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Seriously, lets declare war on them and force them to feed California all their electricity!
Actually, BC Hydro is already supplying a big chunk of electric power to California. Last week, with over $400M owing, the California utilities announced they would only be paying 15 cents on the dollar. BC might not be sending much more juice south if this situation continues.
Trickster Coyote
Howl at the Moon!
Ideology is for ideots.
I've always thought that a great way to paralyze the US for a day would be to coordinate about two dozen people in major cities across the US to buy $100 junkers, drive them down the freeways during morning rush hour, and park them at strategic locations, pop the hood, toss in a smoke-bomb, and drive off in a freind's car.
The rubberneckers would keep the roads clogged for hours.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Blame Canada
For all the Volkswagon Bugs
they go around hangin' 'round like thugs
Seriously, lets declare war on them and force them to feed California all their electricity!
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It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
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Canadians actually buy into that turbonium stuff...
What? When was the last time MIT students traveled halfway across the hemisphere into a foreign country, risking their academic careers (A jail + court stint can really cut into your class time!) and preformed an [illegal] engineering feat? MIT almost always stays on their home turf, and pulls from a student base signifigantly larger than UBC's. I have undergrad engineering friends here at Lakehead (a northern Ontario U) who know that UBC will be the toast of all the engineering conventions for the rest of the year, and the year's just begun. Nothing like having the canuck's invade your soil to put you in defense mode, eh?
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Desperation is a stinky cologne
Same two guys, standing on a ferry below the golden gate. Camera pans out to show beetle hanging from above:
"Didn't I tell you to let out on the clutch easier?"
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
For all you jingoistic Americans fearing an insult to your national hacking pride, rest assured by visiting At http://hacks.mit.edu/
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the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
In Finland all the technological universities have a long tradition in jäynäs. One of the best jäynäs is the stunt by the divers in Helsinki University of Technology just before the Wasa ship (sunk in the Stockholm harbor in the 17th century) was raised in 1961. In the official list of artifacts found in the ship is a miniature statue of Paavo Nurmi, dated circa 20th century...
A more recent jäynä was in 1993 (or about), again by HUT, where all speed limits in Helsinki were changed overnight from 40km/h to 30km/h. Even the chief of police managed to comment that the change was official and done in the interest of public safety...
A good jäynä does not cause monetary loss nor is it a danger to anyone. It should cause a short inconvinience to the audience followed by a good laugh.
Good to see that UBC has pulled off another one of their STUdeNt projecTs.
Unfortunately, at University of Calgary, where I attend, we never manage to pull this stuff off without getting caught.
UBC started this car-off-a-bridge thing, as the article said, about 20 years ago, with a car under the Lion's Gate bridge in Vancouver, BC, a large suspension bridge as well. Almost the exact same method of deployment -- students experienced in climbing set up all the rigging underneath, then a team arrived, attached to the end of the cable which had been pulled up and temporarily attached to the pedestrian railing, and pushed the car over.
Attaching a beetle with a good wire and then pushing it off the edge of the bridge doesnt seem to be very technical. I would have hoped that they would have done something more creative (what they did, any hick with a truck and an empty beetle shell could have pulled).
Imagine for instance if they suspended the beetle with match sticks (assume they figure out the tensile strenths involved), or more realistically if they used wire made out of spider webs (I think this might just be the right material). I would highly be impressed and it would definetly be worth the trouble of hanging the car there and causing all the traffic mishaps. Maybe the might even win an award?
Trust the source!
Another good HUT prank involved park benches in Helsinki. I don't remember what year this was, but the story goes somewhat like this:
First off, students at HUT (and other Finnish universities) have distinctive coveralls which they (we :) wear when they want to distinguish themselves as students during various student-
oriented occasions. These coveralls have different colors, and Finns are quite used to associating people in colored coveralls with "a bunch of students doing some weird student stuff. This is not something that students wear as everyday wear, mind you, it's reserved for certain occasions.
Anyway, during this caper some students went out and (with great difficulty) purchased a park bench from the city/park authorities. They got a receipt, and then proceeded to carry this park bench across town. It didn't take long for some police to stop them, with the assumption that the guys had stolen the bench. The students showed the police the receipt, and complained that they were getting stopped by the police all the time and could the police do something about it? Finnish police being generally quite helpful, the policemen radioed out a notice that there were a couple of students (in coveralls) carrying a legal bench across town and that they should not be harassed.
Naturally, as soon as this was done a lot of students in identical coveralls proceeded to grab most of the park benches in central Helsinki and carry them to a pre-arranged location. Rumor has it that they managed to stack up hundreds of park benches into an "artistic" formation before anyone else got a clue that something strange was going on :)
One of the major factors of any engineering design is resource management; in these case how to accomplish their goal with as little work as possible.
So what was their goal? To safely hang a VW from a bridge in a manor that would receive media attention. To do this they would have to choose a bridge that was seen by the world. This means they had very little access to the bridge and very little time to accomplish their task. Also they had to design a system that was difficult to undo or the authorities would have quickly pulled the car back up the way it went down.
If any hick could do this why don't you tell us of a system that meets all of these criteria. Remember that how their hang was implemented is still a mystery; even to those who could directly observe the results. If you can't understand the skill that went into successfully pulling off such a caper then you aren't the type of person that engineers are trying to impress.
Try typing in BLAMECANADA when you play the next version of Flight Unlimited, Flight Simulator or Pro Pilot and then fly under the Golden Gate. The developers might pay tribute :)
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
Anyhow... rumorville says that in the past years, they have managed to get a VW onto the bridge towers back home -- which is more impressive, IMHO, then tossing a car off the bridge.
The rumours are true. In our proud 20 years of E-week stunt history, the UBC Engineers have placed beetles in all sorts of places:
Other pranks of note:
Happy E-week everybody! ERTW!