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One Ring Rules the MIT Dome
Patiwat Panurach writes "The Great Dome of MIT was overtaken on the morning of Monday the 17th by a great golden ring, inscribed in red Elvish with text that translates to: "One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them." The hackers were apparently not completely successful, for neither the Great Dome nor Building 10 managed to vanish into the realm of shadows."
all I did was bite off my ring finger.
It's making hacks.mit.edu server disappear...
--
Victor Danilchenko
However, they were successful in making Building 15 vanish.
sulli
RTFJ.
I could be horribly wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the script on the one ring was written in one of the ancient languages of Mordor, not Elvish.
They're gonna except anything that's slightly related to it for the next 2 days!
I know I would like it if they would except anything else about the movie for the next two days - then I wouldn't have to read even more media coverage about it.
:-)
Hey, good for them. But you'd they'd put a new lock on the roof access door by now...
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
onering-2.large.jpg
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Compared to MIT's history of frankly, wicked cool Hacks (What the students and faculty at the nerdiest of the nerd schools call prectical jokes) this one is pretty lame. Topical, but lame. See the MIT Campus Police Car Hack for one of the better ever performed.
\Drew National Data Director, John Edwards for President
The MBTA (The T) is a subway in Boston, but runs as trolley cars in Cambridge. One night, a swarm of MIT students surrounded a stopped trolley car.
And welded it to the tracks.
y Friends Dad was student there at the time. His report is the only evidence I have that this happened. Any one else know about it?
Open Source Identity Management: FreeIPA.org
Made me crack up.
My Highschool Social Life would have been much more elaborate had more people cared about Lord of the Rings.
The undergraduates used to award a nice-looking trophy with a large aluminum left-handed screw to that professor that best exhibited the kind of callous attitude that makes getting through MIT more difficult than it needs to be.
You know, like scheduling a 4 hour final exam at an inconvenient time, etc; the kinds of things that drove the sale of the IHTFP T-shirts.
There wouldn't be such a list on the web, would there?
"Provided by the management for your protection."
There seems to be an incongruity here. Hacking is usually associated with computers and mechanical things unless it involves fraternity-type pranks executed by MIT engineering students. Someone clarify please.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
What kind of fool risks life and limb to inscribe a high dome in a fictitious language? For crying out loud, haven't these people heard of sex?
There goes my karma, but a man's gotta take a stand!
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
As far as MIT hacks go, I'd rate this a 3 or 4 out of ten. Usually, the pranks exhibit a certain flair of engineering knowhow, not simply a bungh of guys breaking onto the roof of a building a putting up a (pre-made, obviously) banner. I'd have been much more impressed if they'd forged a giant metal ring and somehow hoisted it up onto the dome. It wouldn't even have had to have the circumfrence of the dome's base - just have been large enough to sit on the dome comfortably and require some real genius work to get it up there. I guess we can expect little in the way or creative genius from this year's graduating class...
I wonder if any non-LOTR fans got freaked out over this.
Please see the Jargon File Apendix A which discusses "The meaning of 'Hack'" at http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/The-Meaning -of-Hack.html.
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
For you people at MIT, there is a mural of
Middle Earth on the sixth floor of Building 24
painted by yours truely some time ago.
MIT used to have lots of wall murals, but they
come and go.
The new coffee house one in the Infinite Corridor
is neat.
Judging from most of the women who were at the midnight showing last night, serious injury and even death is definately preferable to sex.
...using V in place of U in English does not make you seem Roman, and neither does it make you seem erudite. A point lost on many neo-classical architects, it would seem.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The hackers were apparently not completely successful, for neither the Great Dome nor Building 10 managed to vanish into the realm of shadows."
Fool! That works only on mortals. Bombadil did not vanish when he put on the ring, and I'm assuming that Sauron didn't either, since he used his powers to take human form, and his power was in the ring.
The real question is, in which category does MIT fall?
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
My fave was a series between my room and the room next door. Just a bunch of small things here and there...nothing major like the MIT stuff
There was the usual buckets of water, soda cans stacked in front of a closed door so opening causes an inrush, placing the beds outside (fully made).
The two funniest were:
Removed the door next door and put up a sign saying "Damn Termites". Friend walked in, tearing down the sign saying "okay...what did you do?"
Made a small hole from our room to theirs, and ran a wire to his speakers, so when he had his girlfriend over later and had nice soft Enya playing, we replaced it with Slayer.
Like I said...nothing major, but fun for us.
Hackers are terrorists now, aren't they? These clever folks from MIT may have just made themselves disappear.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
After seeing a couple of hacks appear here on /. , I am half tempted to start my own chapter of the Hack group here at the University of Wyoming. Although it would just be a flagrant ripoff of MIT, it might give a couple talented engeneering students an excuse to something (instead of getting drunk!).
Would this bea good idea, or just looked down apon?
Would the University (or any school for that matter) be willing to accept the hack team as one of there own?
How do you recruit people to do it?
And most importantly: How would you fund such a project? Those hacks have to cost some money!
Well just an idea as I search though the hacks done at MIT. I'll look forward to your replies.
~Brandon
+ 1 ear.
Destruction of public property, impeding the flow of traffic, forgery, and the theft of a rug would not be considered pranks. There is nothing subversive nor ironic about any of those things. It sounds more like high school kids in a hick town behaving as drunks. Realy pranks have a value of humor or irony to them and cause no harm nor damage.
Cave, wreck, and deep diver.
Heh. And I'm not even a conlanger. You ain't seen obsessive.
(Honestly, I don't see how knowing facts about something "historical" or literary can qualify as obsessive. Old facts don't change, so they don't require constant pursuit to keep up one's knowledge. Following things which change, such as technology or fashion, requires a great deal more active engagement -- obsession, as you put it -- than knowing dead facts does.)
For a little bit more "obsessive" information on the Ring inscription and Dr. Tolkien's languages: Tolkien used over a dozen invented languages in his works, of which the most well-developed are the Elvish languages Quenya and Sindarin. Less developed were, for instance, the languages of the Rohirrim, the Adûnaic language of Nûmenor, and the Black Speech of Mordor (the language of the Ring inscription).
The Tengwar, the Elvish script used on the Ring, was Tolkien's attempt at a logical system of writing. The majority of the consonants fall into a simple arrangement which describes the relation of their sounds. For instance, the pairs of sounds ("T", "D"), ("P", "B"), and ("K", "G") all have similar relationships -- in each pair, the latter sound is merely the "voiced" form of the former. So, in the Tengwar, the symbols for these sounds are closely related. A few sounds, such as "L" and the rolled "R" do not fit the system, and have unrelated letterforms.
Historically, very few real-world alphabets have been based on the relationships of sounds. Most "natural" alphabets derive from ancient hieroglyphic or pictographic systems. The Latin letters A, B, C and the Hebrew aleph, beth, gimel both derive from Middle Eastern pictograms meaning "ox", "house", and "camel" -- hence Joyce's "Semper as oxhousehumper." Most "invented" alphabets are derivatives or composites of natural ones. For instance, Cyrillic (created by Sts. Cyril and Methodius and now used to write most of the Slavic languages) is a fusion of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew alphabets. Cherokee is worse. By comparison, Tolkien's alphabets are radically simple.
However, unlike Prof. Zamenhof (the creator of Esperanto), Tolkien did not intend or even imagine that his languages or scripts might be adopted by real-world populations. He invented them as an intellectual or linguistic game, and later as historical and cultural background to his stories. It is in that sense, not in the evangelical Esperantist's sense, that Tolkien fans pursue them.
The first sight of it should strike me with awe. Or if not awe, at the very least I should be somewhat surprised. Momentarily after that, I should ponder "How the heck did they DO that!".
This feat does neither. Its a banner. They wrapped it around a building. I'm sure a lot of work went into its creation, but in the end, I remain unimpressed.
And its not that I'm faulting them for their motives. Its just that they need to reach further. The dome has featured many glorious hacks. They need to strive to top those, not suffice to simply let past events overshadow the present ones.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
However, unlike Prof. Zamenhof (the creator of Esperanto), Tolkien did not intend or even imagine that his languages or scripts might be adopted by real-world populations. He invented them as an intellectual or linguistic game, and later as historical and cultural background to his stories. It is in that sense, not in the evangelical Esperantist's sense, that Tolkien fans pursue them.
/.,) that you're more likely to find someone fluent in klingon and tengwar than esperanto. it's a beautiful language with good ideals behind it, and it's dead easy to learn.
that said, it's a sad comment on society (especially geek society here on
there's even some online courses;
check it out: http://www.esperanto-usa.org/
FreeBSD for the impatient.
Letters chiseled in stone at the top of the pillars:
MASSACHVSETTS INSTITVTE OF TECHNOLOGY ?
Why the V instead of U ?
All your bridges are belong to us!
Karma hell, here I come!
You're using her as bait, Master!
Oh, they've heard of sex all right! The problem is, they seem to be lacking in practical experience!
You're using her as bait, Master!
For those interested in the whole MIT/Caltech hack/prank scene, this is an excerpt of a review I did some years ago of books from The MIT Press, the Caltech Alumni Association and St. Martin's Press.
First up, Legends of Caltech and More Legends of Caltech. These two 80 page volumes chronicle technopranking at Caltech from the 1920s to the late 1980s. Learn about the classic Rose Bowl card section prank that was broadcast live on NBC, See the HOLLYWOOD sign become the CALTECH sign before your very eyes. Vicariously enjoy the revenge of Caltech students upon a greedy police department.
These books MUST be ordered from the Caltech bookstore, as they are privately published by the Caltech Alumni Association. Ordering info is at the bottom of this page.
Ah, but what of MIT? For their history we must turn to a pair of books.
The Journal of the Institute for Hacks, TomFoolery & Pranks at MIT. Published by the MIT Museum, this is a 158 page book with lots of photos and text concerning the hacks pulled by MIT men and women over the decades. See The Great Breast of Knowledge, The Great Pumpkin, the legendary Smoot Marks on the Harvard Bridge. Read about the chronic humiliation suffered by the inmates at Harvard as MIT has its way with the statue of John Harvard and the Harvard Stadium.
"Is This The Way To Baker House?" - A Compendium of Hacking Lore. 165 pages of legends, essays, photographs and stories of and about hacking at MIT. This book, published in 1996, continues where the Journal leaves off. The MIT Campus Police car on the Great Dome, arguably one the greatest hacks in MIT history, graces the cover and several inside pages. Regrettably, only black and white photographs are used in the body of the book, as there are several hacks, most notably, the Cathedral of Our Lady of The All Night Tool (The "stained glass" panels in Lobby 7) that really should be seen in full color. That minor gripe aside, this is a fine companion volume to The Journal and shares the same binding dimensions as The Journal, making them a handsome pair of books to grace the shelves of any creative malcontent. (The title refers to the canonical reply to an MIT Campus cop when one is discovered in a spectacularly inappropriate location, such as the apex of the Great Dome at 4:00AM.)
Our final book is published by St. Martin's Press and should still be available via any bookstore that will special order books for its customers.
If At All Possible, Involve A Cow - The Book Of College Pranks, is a 240 page history of collegiate pranking in America, beginning with the earliest colleges in America, and even taking note of some hijinx taking place in Canada.
This is an excellent companion volume to the preceeding four books, as it covers collegiate pranking in general, as well as detailing some events that are NOT covered in either the Caltech or MIT books.
If I were sending a son or daughter off to college, I would certainly include all five of these books in their "books to bring to school" box. Start 'em off right!
I have all five books and have enjoyed reading and re-reading them. I trust that these will be inspirational to all who enjoy a good hack and tweaking the nose of Authority, be it the State or the School.
Ordering information
Legends of Caltech is $9.00
More Legends of Caltech is $15.00
The mailing address of the Caltech Bookstore is:
Caltech Bookstore Mail Code 1-51 San Pasqual Street Pasadena CA 91125
The website for the Caltech Bookstore looks like you might be able to order these online.
The toll-free number for the Caltech bookstore is 800/514-2665. For those of you outside the US, their non-free number is 818/395-6161.
In my case, shipping was $6.00. Call to find out what your charges might be or to use a credit card.
(Neither book has an ISBN, so ordering via your local bookstore is not recommended and may very well be nigh-impossible.)
The Journal of The Institute for Hacks, TomFoolery & Pranks at MIT is $20.00 The ISBN is: 0-917027-03-5
"Is This The Way To Baker House?" - A Compendium of Hacking Lore is $20.00. The ISBN is: 0-917027-04-3
The address of the MIT Museum is:
The MIT Museum 265 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge MA 02139
The Museum Shop online ordering is now being handled by Tha Harvard/MIT COOP.
The URL for ordering The Journal of The Institute for Hacks, TomFoolery & Pranks at MIT is here and the URL for "Is This The Way To Baker House?" is here
If At All Possible, Involve A Cow - The Book Of College Pranks
by Neil Steinberg
$9.95 St. Martin's Press ISBN 0-312-07810-2
I'm told by Editor Keith at SMP that as of September 1994, there were about 4000 copies still in the warehouse and SMP will fulfill orders for the book. St. Martin's Press officially urges you to order this book from your local bookstore or Amazon.com.
I've just found out that this book has now made it's way to the remainder tables at some bookstores. If you want a copy, order it NOW from Amazon or inspect those remainder tables very carefully.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
LOTR=Crappiest Xmas Movie Ever?
2 00 11220
A movie review parody contends that LOTR is the crappiest Christmas movie ever. Again, it is a parody. Unbunch panties, please.
Another Short Barefoot Boy Saved by Fabulous Shirt
http://www.ridiculopathy.com/index.php?display=
very few real-world alphabets have been based on the relationships of sounds
The only alphabets I know that don't stop at the phoneme level and reflect phoneme features (as voiced / unvoiced) are, apart from Tolkien ones, Shavian (a proposal bespoken by GB Shaw for a new alphabet for English) and Korean Hangul (its writing can be analysed as syllables, phonemes or phoneme features, neat). Are there another ones?
I read that Tolkien was inspired because of the relationship between B and P and C and G. He started thinkling that adding a mark could tell voiced from unvoiced.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
it's a sad comment on society (especially geek society here on /.,) that you're more likely to find someone fluent in klingon and tengwar than esperanto.
Well, Slashdot types speak English natively or are polyglots so they don't feel the language barrier much.
On the other hand, how many of the Esperanto speakers know at least two languages more? I'd say lots of them.
Anyway, for geeky stuff try ESR's Esperanto mode for tengwar.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
One fairly noticable difference is that most Arabic letter connect to each other, while it seems that Tengwar character do the same.
Solution to blink tags: wrap them in another blink tag, with a javascript delay loop, so they cancel each other out