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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...
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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.
Hey, good for them. But you'd they'd put a new lock on the roof access door by now...
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
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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
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."
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?"
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.
Ah, a wise question. Allow me to enlighten: (from the IFTHP page @ mit):
"The word hack at MIT usually refers to a clever, benign, and 'ethical' prank or practical joke, which is both challenging for the perpetrators and amusing to the MIT community (and sometimes even the rest of the world!)....hardly a term goes by without strange objects appearing in odd places."
In other words, "hacking" in the MIT-sense of it has developed as an internal term that's gotten mixed-in with with mainstream usage. In the same way that traditional hackers tinker with computers and mechanical things, MIT hackers tinker with the campus itself -- they put 'strange objects in odd places'.
Also, look up the phrase: "Institute for Hacks, Tomfoolery, and Pranks." for more info...;)
nlh
Ferrari and other exotic car rentals in New York
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.
Hackers are terrorists now, aren't they? These clever folks from MIT may have just made themselves disappear.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
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.