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MIT 'Hall of Hacks' Gone
WhyCause writes: "The MIT "shrine to clever pranks" has closed it's doors due to space concerns. I thought this development particularly pertinent after the review of "The Hacker Ethic." You can read more about it here." This is a real shame -- it was on my list to visit the next time I traveled to Boston. There are still some great online resources detailing MIT pranks, though, and the exhibits aren't being thrown out, but their future home is uncertain.
The weather-balloon-exploding-from-the-field-covered-i n-"MIT"s during a Harvard/Yale game was a classic. Indeed at the same game the sound system had been rewired (by 3 independant MIT groups) to play MIT material, the MIT marching band succesfully infiltrated the game (for free) and took to the field to spell out MIT, and of course the Harvard placards were re-arranged to spell out "MIT" (much to the confusion of the Yale folks across the stadium.)
That's probably the most spectacular but there have been many, many others since then.
Finally as to your comments about non-white / non-male / non-middle class students being less into hacking: I have no idea where you derive this theory but it seems to have no basis in reality - perhaps it comes out of your own worldview?.
From my acquaintence of the folks who've performed notable hacks at MIT there seems to be no correlation between their racial / gender / economic backgrounds and their desire & ability to pull off a clever hack. Indeed if there's any correlation it seems to be the members of GAMIT (Gays At MIT) who are usually involved somewhere in these activities.
Why are you manually word-wrapping your postings? Is it part of that whole "narrow" thing?
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Actually, Real Genius was not filmed at Caltech, although a large number of other movies have been filmed there. The administration didn't like the way that the Institute was being portrayed and refused to let them film there. They did do a highly accurate copy of a section of one of the Undergraduate residences as a set, though. The details were pretty damn accurate, down to the (sanctioned) graffiti on the walls and the interiors of the closets. IIRC it was a chunk of Dabney Hovse.
Sadly, Interhouse is no more. It was killed off my Frosh year (1990-91) because it simply got out of hand; too many outsiders were coming in and getting violent. A number of the other events portrayed in the movie (Decompression, the Tanning Invitational, etc.) are based on Caltech events, though, and I had Frosh Physics from the professor with his own TV show who was a model for the one in the movie. They even duplicated one famous Caltech hack- stuffing the entry box in an "enter as many times as you wish, printed entries accepted" sweepstakes. The Caltech (Page House, IIRC) students printed up several hundred thousand entries on a line printer and won a substantial share of the prizes including a car.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Already addressed in the Doonsburyesque "Ferd the Nerd" comic strip by Fred Hutchinson that appeared in "The Tech", I believe, in the mid 1970s. As best I can recall:
Student to Asst Dean: "Man, you gotta help me - it's my roomate."
Asst. Dean: "What's the problem?"
Student: "He keeps me up all night."
Asst Dean: "A real tool, eh?" [tool: n., someone who spends all their time studying]
Student: "No. He glows in the dark!"
Asst. Dean: "What?!"
Student: "Yeah man. See, he fell into the reactor while retrieving a wrench and now he's got this pale green glow!"
And hacking was NEVER limited to seniors (limiting hacks to seniors is the tradition at Caltech's "Ditch Day")
In the first phase of my undergraduate career (long story), I was at Purdue, a place famous for engineers and infamous for its mind-numbing, unspeakable conservativism. We didn't get many pranks, but one of the better ones was the time someone erected three outhouses outside of the Math building: one for Men, one for Women, and one for UNIX. Sadly, they were torn down only a bit later. Steve Beering had no sense of humor.
ObJectBridge (GPL'd Java ODMG) needs volunteers.
Finding God in a Dog
>`These kids are splitting atoms and stuff, so a
>lock poses no barrier to them,'' marveled Barber.
A little overdramatic, I think, this sounds kinda like something out of the Matrix, I can see it now in Matrix 4:
MIT Undergrad: "You mean to say that I can dodge padlocks?"
Morpheus: "I mean to say that when time comes, when you have your PhD in nuclear engineering and you want to put a cow on the dome, you won't have to."
- Twid
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
The hacking museum is one of the coolest things about MIT--it gives current and former students a shared culture, and it gives new students something to aspire to. After all, what could be cooler than being imortalized in a museum of cool hacks? (And come on, MIT students: You may claim that you went there for the academics, but we all know that you all secretly want to be the Val Kilmer character from Real Genius.)
I knew of a few cool hacks that happened at my school while I was there, and I'm sure that there were cool hacks in the past, and cool hacks after I left. But these hacks are destined to fade into history until they are forgotten, which is really too bad. I sure hope someone at MIT wises up and does everything possible to keep the museum alive and opened; it would be a shame for them to lose something that makes the school unique and cool.