godream

So Sadoway's 3.091 got hacked this morning. -- Uh, translation from MIT-speak: there was a practical joke played in the large (400ish students, I think) chemistry lecture class this morning, taught by one of the most famous/infamous lecturers for freshmen. Someone rigged the sliding blackboards to go up and down, rather than being under the control of the professor. I'm not sure if they had a remote to control it or if it was just sliding every once in a while at random. And, well... people didn't laugh, probably because Sadoway was obviously more than a little annoyed, and he's also the professor who, when a cell phone rings, won't resume class till the perpetrator leaves. He seems to have a sense of humor about other things, just not about running his class.

And hacking is a huge part of the MIT culture, right, and it's really one of the things I was looking forwards to about going here, and I'm not sure why I didn't think the 3.091 hack was funny. Maybe it's because it's been done before -- I've heard the stories of how someone first did it, and that seemed clever and funny, and when you do it again then it just isn't. The creativity's gone; you're just imitating someone else's joke and it's stale now, it isn't new and it isn't funny. I'm not sure how it impacts the effect that they chose to pull it on Sadoway -- in theory it seems like it'd be more amusing; in practice, watching him get frustrated, I didn't even want to laugh. Maybe it's this, or maybe I just don't have the right sense of humor. Or maybe it's one of those stories that's only funny if you *weren't* there, the opposite of most anecdotes... which makes me wonder if the original were that way as well.