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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.
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.
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?
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!
>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.