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The World's Largest Scavenger Hunt
illuminatedwax writes "Every spring, University of Chicago students attempt to cast off their bookish tendencies and hold the world's largest scavenger hunt. Now, the event has been filmed by the student film group, Fire Escape, as a documentary, and is being sold on DVD and VHS from Periphrastic Films. The film follows the various teams and their effort to procure the off-the-wall 300+ items. For those who haven't heard of the University of Chicago Scav Hunt, its biggest claim to fame is from the 1999 hunt, when
students built a working breeder reactor. Items during the 2002 Scav Hunt featured in the film include "Passports stamped by all three axes of evil", building "terrorist base camps" on the University quads, and students competing in a game show-style contest, featuring a DDR contest, and trivia like "Digits of Pi" and "Taylor Series." The Scav Hunt lists can be found here, and the 2002 list here."
Wow, something about my school! Nice :)
In case you don't know, Chicago can get a bit depressing in the Winter. The University does a bit to alleviate that, including giving us a day off in the middle of Winter quarter. Well, if Winter is depressing, then Spring is freedom. It gets warm, you take easy classes...it starts to feel like a real college.
Scav Hunt is basically a four-day long party. You stay up late, skip classes, wine and dine the judges, throw a massive party in the middle of the quad, and go on cross-country trips. I think this film is a great treatment of a really unique experience, something you can only really do at University of Chicago.
It's a negligable amount. About $500 for first place, which is at most 1/5th of the teams funds spent on the competition.
I was involved in the making of the Periphrastic film 'The Hunt' as a camera man and assistant. I must say it was the most fun I've had outside competition in the Hunt itself.
-R
Just find a team. There are usually meetings starting in the beginning of May, the locations and times for which are posted, and everyone(including non-students) is welcome. Most teams are associated with a specific dorm, but F.I.S.T.(Federation of Independent ScavHunt Teams) is a successful loose coalition.
Yes, the nuclear breeder reactor was working before the judges made the team disassemble it. It was built on the steps of one of the University's main classroom buildings by the members of 'Matthews House' team in the Spring '99.
The people involved were physics majors, working in jobs with access to nuclear material.
"So, Mike, now that you're at the Tribune have you changed anything?"
"Only my socks."
The year they ran this commercial we put his socks on the list, figuring it was a good gag for one year. Royko, however, was really mean to the first group to ask him for his socks and printed a column berating the Scavenger Hunt and the U of C.
That's all it took. Pretty much until he died, Mike Royko's socks were on the list, guaranteeing he'd be bothered by geeks every year.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
To the best of my recollection, the reactor used fisile material to create radioactive isotopes which could be used for medical purposes. Thus, in a loose sense of the term, it was a breeder reactor.
I was on one of the top teams(Pierce) for my first three years, and a cameraman for the documentary this past year. Scav Hunt is one of the most enjoyable things I've ever had the luck to be part of. Four and a half days of caffeine, power tools, lewd behavior, and insanity.
Examples:
The above-mentioned breeder reactor. A bunch of advanced physics students cobbled, jury-rigged, and "borrowed" the necessary components. It was of the type used to make medical radio-isotopes, and therefore didn't receive full points, but it was real and scary as hell. The builders were known for wanting to build their own high-energy weapons for personal use.
"Fisher-Price Baby's First Flamethrower", a device that had to appeal to children and be operable by a three-year old. I'm quite proud of my work on that. Somewhere, we have the photos of that thing shooting out gouts of flame like a scene from a WW2 movie.
Sharlene, our "Chewing Gum Cannon". A device to launch a kilo of chewed gum. Points for distance and shortest time to launch. We used shells and produced a mortar with a range of 75 yards, easy.
A simulated air strike on Slobodan Milosevic. Involved more fireworks going off at one time than I ever want to see again. I have adrenalin-imprinted memories of running very fast in the opposite direction from the initial blast crater, roman candles scorching the air as they passed my head. The cops showed up and laughed until they had tears streaming down their faces.
If you're ever in Chicago on Mother's Day(the Day of Judgment every year), head down to the University to see what's been built/found/destroyed.
Several universities have uranium used for physics, chemistry, and nuclear engineering purposes. When I went to school, we could obtain samples for use (I majored in Nuclear Engineering). Get weapons grade plutonium was a different matter.
Yes, Moacir is still judging. He is in the film.
-R
Moacir is still a judge. He's a good one, too, so I've never minded.
Damn, I lose coolness points.
Students Build Reactor For Scavenger Hunt
On Campus; It's that season at Chicago, and Ph.D.'s have taken a back seat to a degree of silliness.
By Andrew Bluth
''People think of the University of Chicago and they think the students are weird,'' says Tom Howe, a junior from Atlanta. Having taken off his chicken suit, he is wearing a cardboard crown from a Burger King Kid's Meal. ''We want to show that intellectual doesn't necessarily mean stuffy.''
It is this philosophy -- that Chicago students can have fun if they really put their minds to it -- that gave birth to the University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt, a yearly celebration of looniness at a campus far better known for its Nobel laureates.
Putting aside term papers for a long weekend, hundreds of undergraduates in teams representing dormitories and student organizations range around the campus -- and, this year, the North American continent -- in search of items that will never be found in a course catalogue. The grand prize is $500, but the goal, says Mr. Howe, is loftier: ''to make the participants maximize their intellectual creativity.''
These were among the 339 items on the list for this year's scavenger hunt, released at the stroke of midnight on May 6:
No. 123: A computer suffering a year 2000 problem.
No. 262: Five Mensa membership cards.
No. 167: A 15-foot-tall monument to Grimace, the McDonald's Happy Meal character.
No. 40: A tenured professor willing to recite profane lyrics from a gangsta rap song.
Each team works from an identical list; items are assigned points, based on difficulty, and the team with the most points by Sunday afternoon is the winner. The wording of certain clues often suggests a trip to a far-flung destination -- having a team member photographed with an Ontario police officer, for instance.
Teams are often elaborately organized, with ''page masters'' assigned to each page of the list and at least one person operating a computer long after midnight in search of Web sites that will lead the team to cubic zirconia (20 points) or Chicago Bulls season tickets (15 points) or an autographed photograph of the Food Network star Jacqui Malouf (30 points).
''One of the items on the list was the 'street value of Mount Everest,' '' said Sam Hunt, a freshman competing for his dorm, Shoreland Hall. ''So we posted it on Ebay, and made it look pretty, with a nice picture of the mountain and everything. The bidding got up to $180 before we got kicked off the site.''
The Shoreland team is run out of sixth-floor dormitory room of its captain, Ryan Miller. By the end of the weekend, Thai food containers litter the floor and at least three trash cans are overflowing with empty soda cans. The members have slept little if at all, and the room is a nest of cables that wire no fewer than six personal computers.
When the phone rings, it is answered with a curt ''Command central'' and calls are kept short so that the line can be free for a check-in from the road-trip group, probably somewhere in Canada.
''From what we can gather, the road-trip team is doing really well,'' Mr. Miller says. ''Except last time they checked in, they sounded drunk.''
Other items on this year's list included building a nuclear reactor from scratch (one team was actually successful -- this is the University of Chicago, after all), an edible iMac computer and a ticket to a local theater for a certain movie opening May 19. (To these students, the date needs no further explanation.)
No one is really sure how or when the scavenger hunt began, but they do know it is a welcome break from economics exams and Shakespeare papers -- a way to demonstrate, in Mr. Howe's words, that ''we actually can have fun on this campus.''
And how do you say fun on a college campus better than a keg toss? As part of the Scavolympics, a string of a dozen events before the final judging that teams compete for points in, all 13 teams came together to recreate a battle of the Civil War, to demonstrate a fight between Aunt Jemima and Mrs. Butterworth, and, yes, to toss a keg.
Competing for his dorm, Hitchcock-Snell, 23-year-old Niyi Omojola, after minutes earlier winning the competition that called for contestants to eat an entire bottle of squeeze cheese, won the keg toss. While others had grabbed the kegs with two hands, taken a few steps and heaved, he held it with one hand, arm extended, and spun around like a discus thrower, propelling the keg beyond the other teams' markers.
''I was trying to get some torque,'' said Mr. Omojola, a junior. ''If you can direct that torque in a straight line, you can throw it pretty far. People were trying to muscle it, and that's not going to work.''
And if you can't say fun at the U. of C., with a little torque and a keg toss, certainly you can with a nuclear reactor.
Two physics majors, Justin Kasper and Fred Niell, gathered up some spare junk from their physics labs and dorm rooms and built a plutonium-producing reactor.
''It's kind of scary how easy it was to do,'' said Mr. Niell, assuring onlookers that there was only a trace of plutonium -- nothing harmful. ''It only took us about a day to build it. We've been thinking about it for a few days and we gathered the parts, and last night we assembled it. In Justin's room -- he lost the coin toss.''
The Scavenger Hunt is open to anyone who wants to play. That means people from other schools, people who aren't in school, people from Mars, we don't care. Any help is welcome, and especially so if help can bring his or her own tools.
In case anyone wants more info about that reactor everyone's talking about, Slashdot actually covered it back in '99. Here's the link: http://slashdot.org/articles/99/05/20/1320256.shtm l
This story comes up every so often, and is met with the same incredulity. I was there, on the team that built the reactor, so take it from me when I say that we did it. (Well, not so much we, as Fred and Justin did it with their mighty ninja atomic physicist powers; I was a first-year at the time, so my major contribution there was listening to them explain the scheme at breakfast.)
The fact is, a breeder reactor is just anything that is making plutonium, at least as far as the judges were concerned. So they made plutonium, by irradiating thorium from lantern mantles with a source they "borrowed" from the student labs. The tricky part was convincing the physics department to lend them a $20K proportional counter so they could detect the relaxation photons and thus prove plutonium production. After 36 hours of running they had a few hundred events that we figured corresponded to a total yield of 100K atoms or so.
Yes, purification would have been harder. No, we're not actually sure what eventually happened to the reactor.
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
Here is the excerpt from the Congressional Record:
Ms. SANCHEZ. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Chairman, just for the gentlewoman's sake, the individual who would get the abortion done would have to pay for the abortion herself. This is not a public expense.
Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Kirk), my colleague on the committee.
Mr. KIRK. Mr. Chairman, I take a point of personal privilege first to wish the best of luck to Hoover House at the University of Chicago in their ancient and honorable scavenger hunt.
I rise in support of the Sanchez amendment because it guarantees American women in uniform that they can use their own funds for all legal options in their health care. As a Naval officer I served at Incirlik Air Base in Adana, Turkey. I know of the outstanding clinics available on base and also of the poor conditions available at the Adana Turkish City Hospital. I believe that U.S. service men and women should be treated on base by American doctors and that our women in uniform should not be forced into some clinic where English is not spoken.
I commend the gentlewoman, and this amendment should be adopted.