Star Wars Takes Over Harvard Commencement

An anonymous reader writes "Harvard University celebrated its 356th Commencement on Thursday. It is tradition at Harvard is to have an undergraduate deliver a Latin Salutatory address. This year's speaker, Charles Joseph McNamara, delivered an address all about Star Wars in Latin! TheForce.net has a write-up of the event, and the speaker was really hilarious. He apparently doesn't like Star Wars that much, but it's still awesome. The video is available online, and you too can see him do a Yoda voice and make light-saber motions ... in front of over 30,000 people. The speech is under "Morning Exercises" on the Harvard site. The Latin Oration begins at about 1:09:30."

rewriting of history

[nanosquid]

With a foresighted vision of the immense future potential of desktop computing, Gates left Harvard during his junior year to devote himself to building Microsoft, the company he and Allen founded in 1975.

Another example of how a lot of wealth can get you a lot of rewriting of history.

Re:rewriting of history

[Torodung]

Seems 100% accurate to me, just a little short on the details and context. Plenty of folks know some juicy tales of paper tape and Aiken labs.

But what can you do? He was dead on right about the future of the home computer, and he made that future, or broke it, depending on who you ask. He is a brilliant businessman.

--
Toro

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

[qbwiz]

Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.

Re:Whatus the Fuckus

[ArsonSmith]

Because it happened and someone reported it. That's how news works.

yawn

[djupedal]

And here I am, thinking I was missing something by not attending Harvard...

C3PO anyone

[2ainman]

Anybody else reminded of C3PO's narration of the characters' story thus far to the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi? It was probably his intention to mimic C3PO. This made me smile :)

Re:rewriting of history

[harmlessdrudge]

Biographies of Gates, including critical ones, all make it pretty clear that he dropped out of Harvard precisely because of his vision of the future of computing -- in the form of the Altair -- having arrived and of there being no time to lose.

If you have a different version of history why not share it?

Re:"stuff that matters"???

[thesandtiger]

I'll go ahead and non-anonymously disagree and see what it does to my karma, too :)

This is at least as interesting to me, a nerd, as, say, yet another article about Final Fantasy n+1 being maybe exclusive maybe not exclusive maybe coming out this year maybe not coming out this year. Or another article in which someone who was very influential at one point in time but is now completely irrelevant babbles about how they think Apple/Unix/Windows/Whatever is alive/dead/goingup/goingdown/slamdancing. Or another askslashdot in which someone comes up with a completely fabricated question about "which distro of Linux should I run on my new fridge." Or dupe of a dupe. Or... well, you get the point.

It appeals to me because, like many nerds out there, I've been shut down when discussing something I found neat because non-nerds don't seem to enjoy conversations that involve thinking too hard. But this guy - he said fuck it, and basically co-opted the Harvard Commencement just to do it. Rock on, Harvard nerd, rock on.

From a different angle, has this story making the front page in any way taken anything away from more "deserving" stories? Anything that's really super-duper relevant is gonna hit the front page eventually, even if there are fluff pieces like this one up there.

So I guess I just don't see that it would even be worth posting a comment asking why it was put up in the first place - on several levels it has at least as much, if not more, merit than much of the other content on /.