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."
Being that caltech is so much better than MIT you would think that they could find a good spell checker...
Who's Caltech, by the way?
Get your Unix fortune now!
The following email went out on the MIT hacking mailing list:
>Someone apparently released a number of balloons in lobby 7 with
>CalTech written on them. There is also a much larger Mylar Balloon
>with C.I.T. My initial reaction, and the reaction of most people I
>talked to was "C.I.T, what's that?"
>
>Several suggestions were made on what to do about this since if we do
>nothing the balloons will float mockingly over lobby 7 for days:
>
>-Remove the balloons tonight (might be able to get a number of them
>with a needle on a stick from the intersticial space).
>
>-release a second large mylar balloon that says "SUCKS"
>
>-Hack Caltech.
>
>one friend I talked to commented that she was friends with the moles,
>the "legitamate" hackers at CalTech, and they claim to have no
>knowledge of this and are busy with some other project. It would be
>good if we could find out who did this. Could it have been an overzealous prefrosh?
>
>
>As I said my initial reaction was "what is C.I.T? I have drafted an
>article that I hope to send to the Tech Newspaper. Offering an
>alternate explanation.
>Comments, and suggestions are highly encouraged as this is a first draft.
>
>Amilio
>amilio@alum.mit.edu
>
>
>
>>>proposed tech article follows below>>
>
>
>C.I.T Looses BALLoonS
>
>The Center for Incompetent Technologies lost all of their display props
>on the way to the activities midway today. Representatives from the
>research group lost numerous small balloons and a larger one bearing
>the group's acronym while crossing lobby 7, "We thought slip knots
>would hold," said Ben Bitdiddle director of C.I.T.
>
>The Center for Incompetent Technologies is a newly formed nationwide
>research group interested in developing ineffective, arcane, and
>generally useless technologies. "So many companies and institutes are
>focused on doing 'good research' and developing 'useful technologies'"
>said Mr. Bitdiddle accenting his comments with air quotes, "we decided
>there was an untapped niche market for useless technologies." The
>group's motto is taken from an episode of The Simpsons: "Aim so low
>that even if you succeed, no one will care"
>
>The smaller balloons were apparently leftover from numerous C.I.T
>events at Caltech. The balloons were custom printed for the school
>where the group is apparently very popular. Many of the poorly made
>balloons have already popped and are littering the floor of lobby 7.
>"We probably should have had some new customized balloons made, but if
>we wanted to do things well, we wouldn't be CIT."
>
>The lost balloons were originally mistaken for a hack, but
>representatives for the hacking community quickly corrected the error,
>commenting "No, that was just a screw up, hacks are generally more
>interesting and creative," Jack Florey.
>
>>>>>
>
This is news for nerds. If we don't keep up with the MIT / Cal Tech rivalry, who will??
While I tend to understand the enthusiasm that each of these groups of students have towards their alma mater, I have to wonder if the Caltech kids are as smart as they think they are.
I'd much rather stay in warm CA during April than go to MA. Invite the MIT whiz kids down and haze them in the relative comfort of your own hometown. For chrissakes, what fun is it to freeze your ass off over there?
See, the problem with this is, MIT has a reputation (deserved or not) as being better than Caltech. Caltech can do this to MIT, and people go "Hah hah, how clever." But, if MIT were to do this to Caltech, people would say "What stupid arrogant assholes, why don't they stay in Cambridge and stop bragging about their superiority at other schools."
This space intentionally left blank.
This is "Slashdot" news, you know news for nerds.
The topic is MIT and Caltech, not much nerdier than that!
Get your Unix fortune now!
They don't have girls at Caltech. (T-shirt picture.)
In response, MIT slashdotted a server carrying accounts of the pranks.
destroying CalTech's web servers...
Looks like they slashdotted http://caltechvsmit.com
Mmmm.. Donuts
Caltech may have pranked MIT's prefrosh weekend, but MIT got the last laugh by having their puppet doughnuthole submit the story to Slashdot. Caltech is a small (no, tiny) campus, and that one server fire could take the entire place out by morning.
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.
Newsflash: Dorkwads Prank Dickwads in Famous Wad Rivalry!
A bunch of Yalies pulled a similar prank at this year's The Game, but there was no lock-picking or theft involved - just pure social engineering. They reconnoitered the Cantabs' stadium and designed their own card stunt. The day of the game, they dressed up as the "Harvard Pep Squad", and passed out their cards, without, apparently, raising an eyebrow. And not once, not twice, but three times (or more!), they got 1800 Havard students and alums to declare as one: "WE SUCK".
In their own words, or as told by the Yale Daily 'News'.
Say what you want, but pranks and happenings such as these really spice up the students days and I love reading about them. We used to do similar pranks when I was studying, several made it to the news. Our favourites included installing elevator music in the elevators, bashing the Faculty of Engineering Science and Technology students (we were electronics) and their train (they had one train, we had one on tracks that actually works). One night we made two "full size" garden gnomes out of paper mache and placed them on two readily available points. We made the news in several newspapers for that. See the pics here http://www.dagbladet.no/kultur/2004/06/24/401413.h tml?i=1 16 pictures total.
And it looks like that is the film where they got their prank ideas from, the laser lights. Too bad they did not have the frozen ice that turns directly to gas... maybe... or kaboom. I couldn't finish the equations last night so I don't know how volatile it is.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
mirror (see the pranks link for images)
I remember meeting a kid from Cal-Tech, and to this day his impression remains with me. I have never met such a mix of intellect with insanity. He was working for the summer at Northwestern University, and I spent a couple days at his rented house (which a friend of mine from high school was renting with his girlfriend, there were 6 people living in this old house). Anyways, this guy had a pet spider, but not any spider, a black widow. And one night he wanted to cook for all of us. He boiled a big pot of water, Dropped in a head of chopped lettice, and two slices of american cheese. He then served it to us with so much pride. Later that night I broke out a huge jug of Vodka and a half gallon of OJ. We were making screwdrivers that were nearly see-through. After his first glass, he started crying about how he's never been with a woman. By his second glass, he was singing in chineese. He could not finish his third glass, he fell asleep on the floor right there. So the next morning we wake up, and I look in his fishtank, and the black widow is gone. I ask him what happened, and he said he felt bad for it and let it lose the night before. I asked where, and he said "I don't remember, maybe in your room" FUCK! I left that day, and never returned.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
one time, in middle school, some people let some pigs onto the campus. They painted on the pigs "1", "2", and "4". The faculty spent weeks looking for the third one.
http://www.bash.org/?482717
To: All Admissions Staff
From: Director of Admissions
In order to continue fundraising, we have to admit 40% legacies that are shit for brains. They can't read or write, but their fathers have us on an allowance, and we want the money. Plus, without legacies, there would be nobody there to say "You got me again, you silly nerd!". The other 60% will be merit admission, with 30% comming from India. Please be mindful that engish is their second language, and some of them might feel more at home taking baths in the Boston River. The other 30% are American Chinese students. Unlike the other 70%, they know american grammer and spelling.
But feel good, at least we are not Harvard. There legicies are dumber than our legacies.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
This event [Big Screw] is still run; this year's event happened this week.
See here for a slightly outdated list of winners and charities; Chuck Vest (Make a Wish Foundation) won in 2004 and Prof. George Verghese (Doctors Without Borders) won in 2003. The 2005 winner will be announced tomorrow evening, and will be presented with the four foot long, left-handed aluminum wood screw.
Access denied: Not enough clue for requested operation.
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 still think the 1961 Rosebowl prank is one of the very best. But yeah, these latest MIT ones were lame.
Because most slashdotters probably won't actually browse around the site, I think it's important to repeat some of the rules of this prank war. The intent of this is good-natured fun, which seems to be missed by some of the commenters here.
From http://www.caltechvsmit.com/overview.html:
Both Caltech and MIT require that students put in a lot of hard work studying math and science. Because the stress is so intense, we students at Caltech believe that pranks are an important, if not essential, way to relax and have a little fun. We are familiar with MIT's tradition of hacks and hope that we can merge the cultures at the two schools, if only for a short time.
We propose that MIT joins us in a pranking/hacking war. As you may have already noticed, we struck first, so now it is MIT's turn. Obviously the distance between schools poses a great difficulty, but we believe that MIT students will find that this difficulty can be overcome. In fact all of the pranks need not even be on the other school's campus so long as the pranks are made public enough through the media.
The rules of the contest are simple and are essentially the same as Caltech's prank ethics and MIT's hackers' code. Pranks should be reversible. No permanent damage should be done and the pranksters must provide some sort of contact information on a note so they can be contacted if things are damaged. The note need not contain names, but it must be a reliable way to contact the pranksters.
Pranks should be creative and display some form of originality. Novel ideas, particularly novel ideas involving technology, are generally well received, but repeats are strictly discouraged. We suggest that those wanting to participate make themselves very familiar with the history of pranks and hacks at both schools in order to prevent repeating pranks.
Finally, we wish to inform MIT students that Caltech Prefrosh Weekend is next weekend. It may not be possible to organize something so quickly, but we have faith in the ingenuity of MIT students. We hope to see you all in Pasadena soon.
As a side note, denial of service attacks are lame. Anybody can do that. Wouldn't your time be better spent trying to put a '2' on the scoreboard?
Okay, someone is catching on that these are two different words. That's good, but "to loose" is a perfectly cromulent word, with its own meaning. It was properly used here. If you lose something, you no longer know where it is. If you loose something, you unleash it (generally against someone or something).
To use both in a sentence: If you lose your dictionary again, I will loose my wrath upon you!
Or, to use some other tenses: Loosing her exquisite talent on me last night, she made it clear that she had long since lost her virginity.
I'm not going to get into which is a better school, that's rather subjective when you get down to it better how) but they are worse because they pull pranks? HArdly, Caltech is known to be the king of pranks, this pales in comparies to their ultimate, the ultimate prank if you asked me.
The year was 1961, and it was the Rose Bowl, which is held in Pasadena California. Now this is also where Caltech is located. Now Caltech doesn't play in the Rose Bowl ever, they don't play 1A ball for that matter, but some students form there decided to get in anyhow.
That year, the Washington Huskies had an elobrate halftime show planned. It involved not only the band, but a set of cards that the audience would display. The way it worked was audience members sitting in the selected section had a bunch of coloured cards, and a sheet of instructions, telling them which colour to hold up on which cue. The cheerleaders then called cues, and the cards went up to form pictures.
Well a group of Caltech students, later known as the Fiendish Fourteen, decided to alter what happened. They broke in to the room where the instructions sheets were stored, took them, made alterations, made copies, ageded the copies, then replaced them. Nobody noticed that a switch had been made.
On game day the modified sheets were distributed and during halftime the show commenced. Most of the images were left largely unaltered, expect for minor changes, so no one knew what was happening. PRoblems started on the 12th image. It was supposed to be a huskie, but had been altered to look somewhat like a beaver (Caltech's mascot). The 13th image was worse, it was to spell out "HUSKIES" but Caltech reversed it to say "SEIKSUH". Seeing this, and figuring it for a fuckup, the cheerleaders quickly called for the next image, which read "CALTECH" in block letters.
The band stopped playing, the stadium went silent, and the announcers were speechless. It couldn't have been more perfect, as the cameras were focuesd on the crowd at the time (halftime shows were broadcast then) and it went out on national TV. After a few moments silecnt, laguhter broke out. The band left the field, and the final image was never called.
Now that, my friend, is a prank, and it's one of the things Caltech is known for. It's an odd university, with a somewhat different sense of humour, but that certianly doesn't make it bad. That they traveled to MIT to pull a prank is not supprising, like I said, they've done better.
FYI: If this stuff intrests you, read If At All Possible Involve a Cow by Neil Steinberg. It was there that I orignally heard of this great prank.
First they were using a promo video that was at least 10-15 years old, that contained more than a few inuendos about parties and drinking that seemed a little bit out of place since it was a few years after Scott Kreuger's death. Also they were bragging about how the president of Bose Stereo taught a class there every year while the speaker system buzzed the entire hour and a half the presentation lasted. The school might have a ton of resources available but I would rather be at a school where professors actually cared about their students.
looking back, I definitely made the right choice. I'm confident that got more out of my education here at Notre Dame than I would have at MIT and had a lot more fun doing it too.
I never said I was smart, I just said I was smarter than you
First, I don't think we see MIT as a rival in a "we win you lose" sort of way. But let's assume that we do in a "we want the best frosh we can get and a lot of people are considering both schools" sort of way.
A typical Caltech freshman class has about 215 students. MIT's have on the order of 1,000. This means that the schools admit around 500 and 2500 students, respectively. MIT, then, has at LEAST 2000 students in it's prefrosh pool that don't even have Caltech as an option (in a given year), so that even if Caltech took all of the students that are chosing between Caltech and MIT (I don't know the number, but probably more than half of total Caltech admits applied and were admitted to MIT), MIT would have at LEAST about 4/5 of its prefrosh pool in tact. If, on the other hand, Caltech lost all of the students deciding between the two, it's pool of prefrosh would decrease by 1/2.
Such a "rivalry," then, is understandably more important to Caltech than MIT, due to Caltech's small size (which, by the way contributes to lots of its awesomeness).
Regarding a pranking rivalry, I don't think one has really existed in the past at either school. But wouldn't it be cool if there was one? Lots of cool stuff might happen. That was kind of the point of Caltech's work this weekend. We're suggesting a pranking rivalry, in good spirit. Looking at the response, it looks like MIT might agree, but let's keep it in good spirit. Pranking/hacking should be fun for the pranker and the prankee. If you give a good joke, you should be able to take a good joke.
Prankers/Hackers at Caltech and MIT have a lot in common, and should have more interaction. Anyone up for an ice cream social? I'll provide music and a laser light show (much better than the one that was projected on to the green building... there will be more preparation).
There legicies are dumber than our legacies.
Ahem. "Their legacies". I take it you're not part of the American Chinese 30%.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
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!
from: http://people.bu.edu/fmri/somers/cannon.html
I think the first cannon attempt goes back to '74 or even '72. They once got it on a pickup truck only to break the axle. Another time the fire hose was turned on them. By the mid 80's there was still a buzz about the cannon, but no serious efforts had been made for awhile. Mark Moeglein and I made a trial run as a frosh, with a pick up truck and a pair of bolt cutters, but all we did was cut the lock -- I don't know how we would have gotten it on the truck.
In '86 I was ASHMC president and had a bit of a prank reputation. ( I was nearly expelled for moving the stakes of New II/ 7th/ Case Dorm early in construction ). Jeff Hong and Steve Olson revived the idea of stealing the cannon and had made a few observational runs. They knew it was a big job and that it would take some money (hopefully ASHMC's) so they brought me in. I got some covert help from the administration -- the phone number of an alum, Bob DePietro, who had a construction engineering company -- and a promise to post bail if we got busted.
The DePietro connection was critical. We used his name to rent a flat bed truck and a fork lift in Pasadena. I don't think they would have given it to a 21 year college student with a visa card. There were so many logistics. We had to find 2 people with class 2 drivers licences to drive the truck and the fork lift off site -- Greg Felton and Tom Jed.
We also had the problem of where to park the fork lift. We planned an early Saturday morning raid. But had to pick up the forklift by 5 on Friday. The forklift was huge and clearly could make a trip on the 210 between Claremont and Pasadena. So I scouted around and found some road construction where they left the equipment over night. We picked the fork lift right at 5 and fortunately the work crew quit a little early. Tom Jed just drove it in behind the Pasadena equipment, parked it and took the key. Well, actually it wasn't that simple. Tom ran into a BMW on the way! As we would later discover, the hydrolic steering on the forklift was defective.
OK, so we had the hardware, but how we're we going to pull it off. We picked an early Saturday morning when most of Fleming House was off on a dorm ski trip. But still we needed cover. We decided to go in daylight and pose as a construction crew. Joe, after a stint in the army, was a bald 27 year-old Mudder. He was made foreman and H&M construction was born. Phony work orders were made and blue workshirts, overalls, and workmen flannels were aqcuired.
We could not think of one story that would fool everyone, so we came up with two stories. We told campus security that we had be contracted to take the barrel for polishing. There was no way would that the students have bought that lame story. So we told them we're just moving it to get access to a broken water main that was below. Still a little fishy, so we added some decoys. Tom, Steve, and Eric went in 15 minutes before to pose as Caltech students. Two playing catch and one reading. I think this was critical. Each time someone would come along, they would be suspicious. But then they looked around and saw other "techies" who seemed to think all was right so they moved along. And to add insult to injury, Byrne Sanford hid inside the dorm and shot 8 rolls of photos of the whole event.
Of course it wasn't all so smooth. Campus security was called almost immediately upon our arrival. I thought we were busted. But Joe our foreman played his role beautifully and made our story hold up. Once campus security was pacified, we knew we were going to make it. Also there was a Fleming house frosh who was up early and chatting with us. He gave us a bit of a scare, but by the end he was telling us stories of how people had tried to steal the cannon in the past. Poor frosh.
Unfortunately, the steering on the forklift was no good and we had to do it by hand -- two of us on each wheel, back and forth trying to back into a corner so we could lift the cannon. The wheels were so rotte
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.
Even though I'm an alum (you guess from where), the following are un-biased examples of inscription hacks.
(1) recent hack by the west coast school
(2) a classic inscription hack
It's clear which of the two is more thoughtful, creative, and true to the spirit of hacking.
Why does the person wearing the T-shirt in that photo has 2 lumps on his chest?
That would be a rare example of what is known as a FE-Male. Fulminate of Estrogen infused male. Handle with caution as they can be extremely volatile, but with proper care can be quite nice to have around.
Dude, if you have to ask why a prank between Caltech and MIT is being covered on Slashdot, why are you here?
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
An inspiring story from the pages of the Yale Daily News:
The "Harvard Pep Squad" ran up and down the aisles of Harvard Stadium at The Game [between the Harvard and Yale football teams] Nov. 20. They had megaphones in hand and their faces were painted as they encouraged the crowd to hold up the 1,800 red and white pieces of construction paper they had handed out. It would read "Go Harvard," they said.
But the 20 "Pep Squad" members were actually Yale students. And when the Harvard students, faculty and alumni held up their pieces of paper--over and over again--they spelled out "We Suck" in giant block letters the whole stadium could read.
Yalies Michael Kai and David Aulicino, both of whom are to graduate next year, had to overcome great adversity to realize their dream. They originally planned to do this a year ago, and rather than handing the pages out, they taped them to the seats. "The prank derailed when security guards, trying to clear the stadium out during a pre-game bomb scare, asked Kai, Aulicino and their cohorts to leave."
In the year since, they rethought their plan:
They created a system to have the Harvard crowd pass out the 1,800 cards themselves. The "Harvard Pep Squad" went to each row and handed out a pre-ordered stack of the red and white papers. In five minutes, Kai and Aulicino said, all the papers were passed out.
It took a great deal of planning, however, including a road trip to Boston. Kai and Aulicino attended the Oct. 9 Harvard-Cornell football game in Cambridge, simply to scout out the stadium and count the number of rows.
They also created "Harvard Pep Squad" T-shirts and even fake Harvard IDs. "It was almost sad," says Dylan Davey, another Yalie who joined in the gag. "There were all these grandfather and grandmother types--and they all had big smiles, saying, 'Oh you're so cute, I'm so glad you're doing this.' I felt bad for about two minutes. Then I got over it."