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."

Comments

Scav Hunt!!

[jonny-mt]

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.

Re:Scav Hunt!!

[djmitche]

Scavhunt has also included successful procurement of such fantastic items as a fully-suited hazmat team, live elephants, weapons-grade uranium (before The War On Terror(tm) started; IIRC it was made from the insides of flourescent light bulbs), and such trivialities as goldfish consumed alive, survivor islands on the quads, etc.

For a campus that prides itself of being bookish, and where Kant and Freud are a discussion topic at every party, scavhunt is a chance to get out in the bitter cold of Chicago and be, well, flamboyantly bookish :-)

Re:What do you win?

[Remik]

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

Re:Scary

[Remik]

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.

Royko's Socks

[nightsweat]

For years and years, we put columnist Mike Royko's socks on the list. He had moved from the Sun-Times to the Tribune and done a commercial that ran something like -

"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.

I'm a veteran

[Chuckaluphagus]

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.

Re:I'm a veteran

[bobol6]

The above-mentioned breeder reactor. A bunch of advanced physics students cobbled, jury-rigged, and "borrowed" the necessary components.

This article brings back such lovely memories... I lived in Mathews House when Fred & Justin built their reactor. I've got a photo somewhere of the two of them, standing in front of the shed which housed the reactor, dressed in yellow radiation suits, drinking cheap champagne & Baily's, smoking cigarettes, and grinning like maniacs.

The builders were known for wanting to build their own high-energy weapons for personal use.

wanting to build? Fred & Justin had a lab on the 3rd floor of Kirsten; they used to spend nights in there drinking, smoking cigarettes, and building low-budget lasers, plasma cannons, and other implements of destruction. It's amazing what you can do with a 20,000 Volt power supply, a centiFarad capacitor, and your own custom pulse-forming network.

Re:I'm a veteran

[Captn Pepe]

wanting to build? Fred & Justin had a lab on the 3rd floor of Kirsten; they used to spend nights in there drinking, smoking cigarettes, and building low-budget lasers, plasma cannons, and other implements of destruction.

And oddly enough, the physics dept. basically sealed off the 3rd floor "student lab" after they left. By the time I managed to get back in there, it had been stripped bare and was going to be used for teaching space. Of course, one of them apparently left bits of their stuff as "presents" hidden around the Research Institute. Took me two years, but I eventually found the guts of the pulse forming network (I think) stashed in the sub-basement of the Accelerator building next to some discarded-crated-and-encased-in-fiberglass NASA hardware.

Never did find much of great use, though. On the other hand, claiming to have some leftover Fred TechTM on hand is still a good way to scare a few points out of the judges. A schematic for the plasma cannon was all it took to get partial credit for the "Deface the surface of the moon" item a couple of years ago.

Re:Reactor

[Captn Pepe]

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.