i feel like i missed something here.

[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.

Comments

[godream.livejournal.com]

Ah, thanks! I was kinda working off of the back few pages of HowToGAMIT, hacks.mit.edu, and hearsay -- good to know the actual information. :) I keep meaning to check out the Coffeehouse Club -- it sounds really interesting, and I keep hearing it's very cool -- but something always seems to come up. One of these days... :D

Another point of clarification...

[jessiehl.livejournal.com]

For you or any interested parties still reading by this point: :-)

Sometimes people working together on a hack will give their temporary group a name. Interstellar Penguins might be an example of this. So is the Guild of Dislocated Hackers, which hung the giant "paper" airplane in Lobby 7 several years ago, and I believe was actually led by someone from Jack Florey.

With the long-term, established groups, there's no "official" membership. Assuming one defines members as people who are somewhat active hackers, membership is fluid and tends to depend on who is or isn't hosed, or who has or doesn't have early classes, and general morale of the living group during any given term (or month, or week). The exception to this is THA, which has meetings, member ID numbers, and officers. And which you shouldn't talk about without having an idea how the people you're talking to will react, unless you want to take the risk of some excessively paranoid soul's head exploding.