Slashdot Mirror
Caltech Pranks MIT's Prefrosh Weekend
doughnuthole writes "Caltech students ventured to Massachusetts this past Wednesday to unleash a series of pranks at MIT's prefrosh weekend. They distributed shirts with MIT on the front and '...because not everyone can go to Caltech' on the back. They placed inflatable palm trees in the infamous Tomb of the Unknown Tool and around the great dome and floated Caltech balloons in building seven. A banner transformed Massachusetts Institute of Technology into That Other Institute of Technology. Saturday night a LASER spelling the letters C-A-L-T-E-C-H was directed at the top of the Green building. A full account of the pranks is located at www.caltechvsmit.com."
MIT pranks tend to be so much more artful than the ones listed here. Caltech has yet to transform an MIT building into a cathedral or cause the president's office to disappear entirely.
I'm unimpressed by Caltech if they can't pull pranks that are better than the pranks MIT pulls on itself.
RTFF
No, that would be the DoS attack that was launched before the site was /.ed, in case you were wondering.
I'm posting Anon because I go to Tech.
Caltech alum here (Darb/Ma/84), I'm wondering if the parent is thinking of the Cannon thing (the Fleming Cannon, as I recall, was stolen back and forth with Mudd a few times--maybe as late as the 1970s?)
I'm a nature photographer.
They actually did. For most of Saturday, the site was either incredibly slow or completely unreachable because of a DOS attack from MIT.
Popular perception, perhaps. That's because more people go there, and more people care about USN&WR than care to hear the facts. Just ask an Asian parent.
Search for the THES World Rankings (it's a pdf). Caltech has been the best training ground for young scientists for the past decade. Look at the data for yourself.
They get into better grad schools (again, data available online), have higher starting jobs, work harder, play more sports, enjoy much better weather, have a huge legacy (Feynman, Millikan, Einstein, Hale, Beckman, Richter, and more) and have much more depth in education than anyone out there. They write the important papers, and do the hottest research.
If you want to be a scientist, Caltech is the place to be.
mirror (see the pranks link for images)
For all those interested in more school rivalries and pranks, get a copy of:
If at All Possible, Involve a Cow: The Book of College Pranks
by Neil Steinberg
Very fun reading.
As I understand it, there's a series of one-way rivalries which goes something like so: Harvard targeted by MIT, which is targeted by Caltech, which is targeted by Harvey Mudd. Members of the targeted school are largely oblivious that they're the subject of said rivalry.
Hopefully getting this on the slashdot front page (which is widely read by folks at both Caltech and MIT) might escalate the current prank war. It should be fun to have an active prank trade-off going between both MIT and Caltech. Hopefully people have a lot of frequent flyer miles.
I have no idea how the Caltech students managed to find the free time for this, though. Maybe they're all seniors or something?
I'm just a dropout from the U. of North Dakota, but even I know that Penn is a private school.
US News and World Report. 2005: #1 Berkeley
From 2000, but complete: Berkeley was the number 1 public university and 20th when counting in privates like Harvard and MIT. BTW, those two ranked numbers 2 and 3 behind number 1 California Institute of Technology aka CALTECH!
frosh is the name applied to incoming freshmen before they are formally admitted at the begining of the year by the chancellor of the university.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It was superglued to the "Great Sail"??
Nobody who is anyone has been at MIT in ages. I think the last smarty pants there was Richard Feynman and all he did was help make the nuclear bomb.
Feynman may have done his undergrad at MIT, but he did most of his interesting work at Caltech, including quantum electrodynamics (QED) and Feynman diagrams.
He also taught lock picking courses to undergrads as well as less interesting subjects like physics.
balloons in the dome at night
e r/c.jpgr /a.jpg/ l.jpgt .jpg. jpgj pgp g
palm trees inside "Tomb of the Unkown Tool"
a full shot of someone wearing the shirt
a the only institute of technology retaliation
prank signature on white board
and the spelling of CALTECH:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~gremmer/las
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~gremmer/lase
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~gremmer/laser
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~gremmer/laser/
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~gremmer/laser/e
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~gremmer/laser/c.
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~gremmer/laser/h.j
HD Trailers
Nope.
Prefrosh are prefrosh until the end of rotation, when the cannon fires.
Frosh are frosh until the very same moment the next year, for there shall always be frosh.
It's a complicated set of customs and traditions, but that's how it is.
>one friend I talked to commented that she was friends with the moles,
:-p
>the "legitamate" hackers at CalTech, and they claim to have no
>knowledge of this and are busy with some other project
Moles are nothing like the "Jacks" you have at MIT. Unlike whatever exclusive (and respectable, I'm sure) club there is for Pranksters at MIT, "Moles" means they live in Blacker Hovse. Blacker is a house, your equivalent of a dorm or a college. Granted they like building things, but trust me. The other thing they were working on that is referred to is their yearly get-drunk-and-get-laid-party, which was modeled after Escher paintings. Pretty cool, but pretty occupying. Pranksters at Caltech can be pretty much anyone; we do not need to be in a club to create things like this.
Just trying to clear it up
Also, the general sentiment at Tech is that MIT is full of douchebags until they do something cool in return, rather than say how our pranks are not real hacks. I'm looking forward to see what happens.
- Some Tech undergrad
PS The REAL Tech.
US News and World Report. 2005: #1 Berkeley
Huh? According to the actual U.S. News & World Report rankings, Berkeley was 21 overall for undergrad for National Universities. It was, however, #1 for public institutions. A more relevant ranking here would probably be undergraduate engineering. That list has MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley, in that order.
To be honest, in my experience, undergraduate engineering education at big research universities doesn't necessarily produce good practicing engineers.
Things to do today: See list of things to do yesterday
hate responding to what looks like a troll, but presentation of a school to prospective students is very important. all you get when you look online is that they are #1 of lots of lists, not that they provide a good undergraduate education. my girlfriend transferred from notre dame to an ivy league, thinking it would be better, so she *can* tell, and she always says that notre dame was a much better undergraduate experience, where, as grandparent said, they care a lot about students.
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
As for the ACM World Finals, I think this year Caltech tied with MIT. Neither did particularly well. In previous years, sometimes Caltech beat MIT, and sometimes MIT beat Caltech. I don't recall the details.
JPL, the guys who do lot of the satellite missions(voyager, galileo, etc) is staffed by both caltech employees and regular government employees.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
To the person who said that the cards weren't readable: some pictures at the prank website. Definitely legible.
Is it still arrogant if it's true?
FYI, there are actually a lot of other countries out there as good or better than MIT or Caltech. Of course, they're found in obscure, little-known countries like India, China, Britain, and Canada, but they're out there.
Names? As for England, Cambridge and Oxford are very good, both in the top 10 in a lot of fields. But Britain goes down fast after that. China's rising but not there yet, same for India. Canada doesn't have that many good schools, none of their best would top our top 20. That includes, for example, UToronto. You failed to mention Germany and Japan which would likely provide the best competition to the US, actually, after Britain.
Here's a list of the top schools compiled by a Chinese university: ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2004/top500(1-100).pdf. I deliberately chose a non-American source to prevent any "bias.". Of the top 25, 18 are American. That's not the only authority, of course, but I'd love to see any measure in which well over half the world's top universities weren't in the US.
Perhaps if your "super-elite, best-in-the-world" US colleges focused a little more on their geography classes instead of their patriotism classes, you'd know that.
I'm familiar with many institutions across the world (and quite good at geography). And I've never seen one that profs in the sciences would routinely choose a job at as opposed to any of the top 5 US schools (say MIT, Harvard, Caltech, Berkeley, Stanford). The only ones that would offer competition would be Oxford and Cambridge. And I'm quite familiar with this situation. Probably different in liberal arts, but not science.
You may not like it - but it IS true.
The pranks were not as bad as they seem to have been reported. The balloons did go up under the dome, but very few people noticed them. The palm tree also went up on the dome, but it was not up there for more than a few minutes before it was retrieved and spray-painted white to appear covered in snow. The t-shirts were handed out at the Academic Fair which a fair number of prefrosh didn't even go to, and the laser on the side of the Green Building...well, let's just say I witnessed a few people departing to make that guy's life miserable. The banner reading "That Other [Institute of Technology]" was also rapidly counter-hacked to read "The Only [Institute of Technology]".
It took a while for people to realize that Caltech students really had taken the time to fly out here and bother us (the smart money was originally on Caltech alumni at the grad school). MIT may have a rivalry with Caltech, but it's quite far away and not supported by any sort of sports team encounters. Caltech may have only MIT to focus on, but MIT spends a lot of its energy harassing Harvard, which has the advantages of being easily mocked and just down the road. Caltech has had some great hacks in the past - the Rose Bowl prank, the Hollywood sign - but MIT has a greater culture of regular hacking that involves much of the community. Thus, it's a little surprising that Caltech would throw down the gauntlet like this...and the invitation to prank their prefrosh weekend can mean only trouble.
But it would probably be trouble for Caltech. They seem to have invested a lot of pride in this, but most of the prefrosh at least didn't even know it was happening. If MIT heads to Caltech and gets humiliated, Caltech might be cheering but the rest of MIT might not even know about it. I hope they know what they're getting in to.