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Star Wars Hack @ MIT
jmtpi writes "Hackers at MIT turned the top of the Great Dome in the center of campus into R2D2 yesterday. See story in Yahoo News. " Anyone have more pics? If so, label accordingly and make a submission - I'll be sure to link them. Update: 05/18 07:06 by J : An article at Wired.Update: 05/18 07:42 by J : Shot 1, Shot 2, and Shot 3. Thanks to Aidan Low. More pics from tcs.
Not only did they vandelize school property, but they could've fallen off of the roof and gotten hurt or killed all for a 'prank'. Idiots.
But this is just pseudo-propaganda that I can appreciate. :)
This is surely true. All good pranks are done by engineers - for of course, ERTW !
Sigh... here we go again. Dudes, all those folks who break the law, script kiddies, prankster, blah, blah *aren't* hackers but crackers.
Hackers are generally good law-abiding citizens such as our very own kernel coders. Let's not help the press in the dilution of the meaning of the term hackers.
Yes, but it wasn't a complete car. Just the shell. It was painted to look like a campus police car and was complete with flashing lights.
I'm glad to see an eyewitness testimonial, because merely snapshots submitted as documentation are suspect due to digital image manipulation.
In one sense we've come full circle to relying on people, rather than on mechanical evidence, to ascertain the "truth" in assertions.
Real nice hack.
MIT hacks never damage property. This one, in particular, was done not by painting the dome, but by covering it with large sheets of what looked like fabric from the bottom (it blew a little in the wind). Really trivial to take down. Pain to put up.
The MIT administration actually mildly approves of hacking (although it's officially illegal, and there are fines for going on roofs, etc.) The PR department has a field day with each one (issuing press releases, etc. about MIT hacking).
In terms of safety, I've never heard of anyone getting hurt while hacking.
That's not a hack. That's just malicous frat boys doing something stupid. Hacking shouldn't do any harm.
I saw it too! There were lots of sparks
flying around! It was soo kewl. You can't see
it in the pictures, but they made the Green Building
look like C3PO too!
MIT's Great Dome was built in 1916 and has been periodically "redecorated" ever since.
It is worth noting that this hack, unlike repainting the building as you mentioned, caused no permanent damage.
I was mildly amazed to not see it there as I've always heard it as being a MIT/Yale thing anyway . . .
The story goes that over a summer a MIT student would go over to Yale's football field on weekends wearing a black and white shirt. He would walk around the field throwing bread crumbs and occassionally blow a whistle. His cover was of course that he was just studying birds and their tolerance for certain noises (the whistle).
At the start of Yale's first football game the official walks to the middle of the field blows his whistle and is immediately swarmed by a flock of pigeons.
May just be a legend.
...reminds me of another legendary stunt. There was a school that had a bell tower, with a _real_ bell, that was still used to ring the hours. One day, the bell rang 13 times at noon and continued to do so for several days. Consternation and speculation ensued. Eventually the campus police caught the student responsible: he had a room with a clear view of the bell, and no classes around noon. Every day, he'd return to his room, aim his .22 rifle out the window at the bell, and time his shot carefully...
Caltech, Hmmmmm, isn't that the school were Harvey Mudd rejects go to?:)
Well at least your Rose Bowl scoreboard hack was pretty decent.
Hehehe. I had a good friend who was a prof at UGA (this after getting his Ph.D. from an Ivy League School). He told me that his student weren't that bright. The phrase that he used was
If this students were any dumber, they would have to water them.
I believe this phrase was also used to describe some pro athlete.
Yale??
;-)
I think you mean that "little red brick
school" further up Mass. Ave and up the
Charles River.... the name escapes me at
the moment. "Have-yard" or something like
that.
[ MIT students have hacked the Harvard/Yale
football game, ( "The Game"), on several
occassions when Harvard has hosted. I can
recall the inflating ballon rising from the
ground at halftime, the hidden missile
banner, and a few other hacks though. ]
> Of course, at Rice they are called "Jacks", ...
The term "Jacks," as I understand, orriginated at MIT.
(technicly Jacks (short for Jack Flory, i think) are tour guides, rather than the "hackers" who do stuff like this. Of course these end up being the same people.)
The story goes that at one time an mit student was playing tricks on someone. The person being picked on shouted "what's your name?" (or words to that effect) the trickster replied not with his own name (duah) but with one of a random person he knew from highschool. This poor kid then went around looking for Jack Flory.
The name stuck...
You forgot the the very first step in evolution
Hacker: someone that makes furniture with an axe.
Just playing devil's advocate.
Long live Pranks, Star Wars, C, and Assembler
The university itself was established approximately 1813 and like most Canadian universities, it is often extremely underrated compared to it's american counterparts. The same thing applies to the University of Waterloo, which I must admit, has an even more prestigious technical program (although not a great prankster history). In fact UofW kicked MIT's arse all over the place in the ACM contest in europe this year. So much for "great hacks".
BTW: The dome in question at the UofT is not the same style as the one at MIT you are talking about. IT has a covering which is painted anyway so the humourous repaintings are usually just left there. It's actually beneficial.
well, this brought a tear to my eye! it is good to see that the fun/phun is still alive.
MoreoftheSame class of '72
PilesHighDeep class of '76
Yes, its true... malicious frat boys are the cause of all the world's. Let's put on some Marilyn Manson and round 'em up!!!
Ever notice how everone on campus screams discrimination about anything anyone says? Except, of course, unless they are talking about whites, males, fraternities, and athletes (especially football players)
Was it ever determined who or how the pumpkin got on top of Cornell's bell tower last halloween?
And yet, it has been done... although due to some bigmouth they got caught off campus...
Engineers rule.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
PS - Disco sucks
Posted by The Mongolian Barbecue:
right on!
-Caltech '01
Posted by mizzer:
:)
I rember my tour guide talking about this when i visted. IIRC he said that the engineering students pride themselves on being better than the pros because of this incident. But i would like to see those giant angular slabs of rock that you can climb on turned to a new angle. That would be impressive
There is a whole page at MIT about their hacks -- hacks.mit.edu. Very nifty. Other "modifications" to the dome have been a police cruiser at the top and the whole thing done up as a jack-o-lantern.
As I understand it, the professionals damaged the statue when they reset it. (From a soon-to-be Rice freshman, so I better know this stuff... :)
I think it's hilarious that you trust the text of an anonymous post more than a JPG. Which one seems easier to falsify to you?
Sure is classy. And shows that the perpretators were responsible enough to care about others' safety when they did it. The Jargon File ( http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/) describes some other similar hacks performed previously by MIT alumni, and show the same characteristic touch as this recent one.
But what I like most is the fact that the police officers were cool enough to leave the decoration 'til Thursday.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
Ha ha. Very funny.
The test of a true troll on a slashdot forum is the "Anonymous Coward" tagline. No one who _actually_ believed something as silly as what you wrote would have hid behind an AC identity.
Please find some other way to amuse yourself.
-Dean
..my favorite is still one that happened at Rice about 10 years ago. Of course, at Rice they are called "Jacks", and aren't as smiled on by the administration.
:) The administration had to hire a construction firm to bring in a crane and set it back. Well, I suppose they could have just asked the kids to do it again, but they didn't want to do that...
At Rice, there is a rather large statue of William March Rice in the middle of the academic quad. Some engineering students were miffed at the administration and wanted to raise a stir, so they decided to remodel the main quad a bit.
They snuck into the quad one night with a pair of large wooden A-frames, and some ropes and pulleys. With some ingenuity, they then managed to lift up the statue, pivot it 180 degress, and then place it back down on its support pins backwards. The story goes that the frames splintered *just* as they lowered it back down, but the statue was unharmed.
The next day, all the kids went out to classes to found their founder backwards.
Man, hacks are cool.
--Lenny
The construction firm botched the job and bent a support pin when trying to place the statue back. Fixing *that* cost a fair amount. One of the coolest parts of the jack was that the students, working in secret with nothing but some wood and ropes, got it right whereas the guys with the crane messed it up. I believe that sufficient funds were generated from T-shirt sales commemorating the event to pay for the clean-up, which is cool.
This year was the 10th anniversary of the prank and, at homecoming, the ever-wacky Rice band (the MOB) did a half-time show about the event. They made a mock-up of the statue with one of the original pranksters posing as William Rice, and turned him.
When you get to Rice, check out the MOB -- they are a witty bunch.
--Lenny
This happened at Lancaster Uni in the UK when my friend was there: a group of engineers took a mini apart, took all the bits up in the lift to the top of an accomodation block, and rebuilt it up there - including the engine. A complete drivable car on top of a (something like) 12 story block.
It stayed there for a couple of years until the university rented a crane to get it down (ignoring the more fun option of a brick on the accellerator and a clear area below).
Did something change?
Cause thats the same link as in the story.
This Signature does Not Exist !! FNORD
... is that the official MIT web page has a link to this on their front page. I don't know about other schools, but Duke has a pole shoved so far up it's a** that if we pulled anything like that, not only would we be arrested, the school would do everything in their power to suppress the news. No way it would stay up for a day- much less make it to the school's front page. Argh... if only I could tolerate cold :)
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
Kudos to the "Rebel Scum", and may they succeed in their deperate struggle for freedom from the "Imperial Drones". :)
All my co-workers are looking at me funny. I guess I shouldn't laugh out loud like that while I'm supposed to be working. I really should go back to slaving away now...
_The Journal of the Institute for Hacks Tomfoolery & Pranks at MIT_, Brian M. Leibowitz, 1990, published by the MIT Museum, ISBN 0-917027-03-5
_"Is This the Way to Baker House?"_, edited by Ira Haverson and Tiffany Fulton-Pearson, 1996, published by the MIT Museum, ISBN 0-917027-04-3
Both are B&W illustrated, the first is a history and the second is a collection of essays.
They aren't availible from amazon.com or bn.com, but the MIT Museum shop online has them for $20.95 each here. Ordering Instructions are here.
Is bill as big a fan ?
They always do that. That's the point of a good hack. Although, I think the donuts may have been intended as kidding, rather than a treat.
It wasn't a whole car, it was the "shell" of one. Also, it was the R2D2 dome.
some of my favorite hacks of the Great Dome are the telephone booth and the greeting for commencement speaker Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
They might not have left donuts for the PhysPlant worker who had to take down the phone booth, but at least they had the courtesy to call him on the phone when he got to the top of the dome.
Commencement is held in the Great Court just below all those flat roofs and the Great Dome, so the security for a former Head of State was pretty insane. I read about that just as Kohl got up to speak, a radio-controlled banner unfurled from the Dome welcoming Kohl and reminding him that at MIT nothing is impossible.
- just another follower of Jack Florey.
You whipper-snippers wouldn't remember when same dome was turned into an enormous breast, nor when a 'phone booth was discovered atop it - and found to be entirely functional, light and all, when the maintenance people got up there to remove it.
And then there were the sporting events...
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I moved to the Boston area about two years ago. One day a coworker and I headed over to the MIT area for lunch. He pointed out a tall building on the campus with a dome on top (not the R2-D2 dome) and told me that one day, students managed to put a car up there, they did it piece-by-piece.
Is this true?
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
I commute past there and saw the article. The dome was cleared off by the 5pm commute last night even through the article claimed they'd leave it up until thursday
Sigh...tear in eye...reminds me of the hack - dare I call it that in light of such a grand effort? perhaps minihack, or microhack - me and a friend did at university in Bangor, North Wales, when we decorated the Main Lecture Theatre with a printout from banner "Didn't we have a luverly time the day we went to Bangor". It just fit as well, to within an inch or so, and stayed up a lot longer than we'd expected; it survived past the end of the academic year but had gone by the start of the next. I suspect it came down shortly after someone (not us) lp'd banner "bang her" and stuck it on top of "Bangor" ;-)
Did anyone else out there in slashdotland go to Bangor between 1986 and 1989?
I am quite aware of MIT's hacking tradition, and the use of the term hacker over that long history.
I am referring to the debate between crackers and hackers, and how hackers want the word to ONLY mean implementing a cool hack on a COMPUTER.
I am calling for the word hacker to be large enough to encompass the ingenious hacks, such as the R2D2 dome, that are not necessarily implemented in binary digits.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
The meaning of hacker has become diluted in recent times, but we must all remember and pay homage to those folks who may or may not program computers, but still implement the most ingenious hacks.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
For those too lazy to cut and paste, here you go.
--jon. Postel is dead. May we all mourn his, and our, loss.
MIT issued an official press release praising the hack. You can read it here.
Does anyone else find it strange that Wired News felt the need to explain to its readers exactly what R2-D2 is?
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
There is an excellent book on college pranks by Neil Steinberg, entitled If At All Possible, Involve a Cow. A few pages are dedicated to the various decorations which have graced this dome at MIT over the years; my personal favorite is the phone booth which began ringing when campus security approached. The book has a whole chapter dedicated to MIT/Caltech type "Tech Pranks," and another covering Caltech's Ditch Day. Good reading.
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
MIT was the first place at which the term "hacking" was used to describe computer tinkering. By then, it had already been long used to describe elaborate, carefully-engineered pranking. If someone from MIT calls it a hack, it's a hack.
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
I like the fact that they left behind donuts and removal instructions. The kids had some class, didn't do any damage, didn't want damage to be done during the cleanup, and left a little treat for the ones who would have to do the cleanup. That's Class.
hehe.. I like practical jokes that require thought
It's just Crap.
I saw it from inside the Prudential, and it was a nice view. It's been awhile since any really visible hacks have been brought to us Bostonians from our friends across the river.
I guess all the old hacks have just built up a tolerance. I think it's the ongoing tradition of (mostly) good taste in these matters displayed by the hack-ers.
Yeah, but at least the male:female ratio is approximately .5 here.
Picture at
5 17/us/star_wars_mit_2j8.html
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/p/ap/19990
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
Chatting with some of my friends there led me to believe something big was planned for today.
Now I know.
I expected something about SW, but not that
Another Hack in the great tradition.
RB
All schools have their little longstanding traditions. MIT has one of something called "Hacks". They are practical jokes that:
A. Are in good taste.
B. Non Destructive.
This is merely an example of one. This is a tradition. And a fun one at that.
RB
Seeing the hack on the MIT hack website when their new president was sworn in (he had just come over from the University of Michigan) reminded me of a hack done here at the College of Engineering. The College is on a campus that is seperate from the rest of the University and has had a lot of renovations and new buildings in the last four years. One of these was a belltower that many students believed would mimic the clocktower that is located on the main campus and is an icon of the university. Many were dismayed though when they heard it was only going to play bells and no plans for a clock were ever made. Although many planned various cranks (placing small led watches all over the tower, etc.) one art student beat us all. One night he sat in the parking lot adjacent the tower and was able to project the image of a large VCR type digital clock on the side of it, flashing 12:00. People walking by at first didnt take notice, but busloads of students heading to the main campus did. No other hacks have been preformed on the tower, most probably because the first one was pretty hard to top or because they play stairway to heaven which isnt that bad at all.
I blog, they blog, do you
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/1999/r2d2.html
We at Caltech can certainly appreciate a good hack, even from our rival university.
Interesting enough, coincidentally (?), Ditch Day here at Caltech was yesterday as well. While there were many interesting things found all over campus (and plenty of students dressed up like Jedis), nothing compared to this nice hack at MIT.
Best,
Joe Kiniry (Caltech PhD CS '99)
Joseph R. Kiniry
http://kind.ucd.ie/~kiniry/
Lecturer
UCD School of Computer Science and Informatics
Pretty cool, although I wonder where they find the time, having to deal with the workload at America's 2nd best technical school... :)
foley
Caltech '96
This is the kind of thing that makes me dream of going to mit.