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MIT 'Hall of Hacks' Gone 50

Posted by timothy from the a-sad-day dept.
WhyCause writes: "The MIT "shrine to clever pranks" has closed it's doors due to space concerns. I thought this development particularly pertinent after the review of "The Hacker Ethic." You can read more about it here." This is a real shame -- it was on my list to visit the next time I traveled to Boston. There are still some great online resources detailing MIT pranks, though, and the exhibits aren't being thrown out, but their future home is uncertain.
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MIT 'Hall of Hacks' Gone More

MIT 'Hall of Hacks' Gone

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  • The good news is, it doesn't sound like the entire MIT Museum is being closed. The hall of hacks was a cool bit of MIT culture, but the *really* excellent stuff at the museum were the kinetic sculptures, and I'd recommend that any slashdotter visit to see them. Things like a wishbone connected to a machine that made the wishbone walk back and forth on a board, a toy chair balanced to tumble around randomly, and several things where oil is making interesting textures on gears & stuff. Perhaps my description doesn't do them justice, but I spent a good couple of hours fascinated by the different things in that section. There was also a large section of holography that was pretty interesting. Hopefully, the article is accurate enough that it's not the whole museum that is closing....
  • It is just some prank that an undergrad pulled.

    At least it would be cool as hell if that were the case.
  • Not necessarily...all the deadbolts in my house, for example, require keys from both the inside and outside. I would guess that's what they're talking about here.

  • Doesn't make sense. The cost per megaby-- oh, real world space.

    Gee, imagine if real world space shrank at the same rate as digital storage. You could have enough farmland in a square centimeter, to feed a whole city the size of a pin head!


    ---
  • MIT regards pranks as part of its mystique, and encourages their publicity for PR reasons.

    And good PR it needs, after the recent cluster of suicides and alcohol-related deaths and near-deaths.
  • I was under the impression that "Real Genius" was set in a euphemism for CalTech (Pacific Tech!?) but was based upon MIT shenannigans.
    Lord knows enough of that stuff went on when I was there. (Working Phone Booth on the Great Dome, anyone?)

  • ... anyone have actual physical space they'd like to donate for these actual physical objects?

    I'll bet they could scrape up space at the "National Liar's Hall of Fame Museum" here in Nebraska. It's located just off the Munchausen Convention Center in downtown Dannebrog. Now that they've just finished moving their wine vineyards underground (to protect them from June blizzards), a significant amount of space has opened up. I'll drop a note to the curator and get back to you guys (though he's awfully busy at the moment, what with the opening of the opera season and all).

  • This appears to be a real-world exhibit at the MIT museum. This isn't something you can just mirror or buy a bigger hard drive for. The director of the museum said that they were _not_ going to just get rid of the stuff, and are looking for somewherwe else to put it.

  • "-1 Offtopic"? What the fuck are you smoking?

    -Legion

  • Well.. White or Black or Red, growing up in America is a different experience from growing up in India or Japan or China. Surely there is a point in the above comment, but not because of more "non-white", but non americans who come from different cultures!

  • As an alumnus of one of the colleges that has a particularly fine reputation for pulling pranks, I can tell you that your problem isn't that you aren't a college student. It's that you apparently didn't learn the first rule of pranks- know your target. The guys from MIT don't avoid arrest because they're college students and people are indulgent. If they targeted a humorless MegaCorp, they'd get in trouble the same as anybody else. If they tried the same stunts at many other colleges they'd probably get expelled. They avoid trouble because their victim views pranks (or at least the kinds of pranks that they like to pull) as funny and, in a sense, and extension of the basic educational mission of the school. That's why some kinds of pranks (those involving engineering feats) are particularly celebrated while others- like random vandalism- are not.

  • Dude, there's a whole book you should buy then, that catalogs excellent 90's hacks. Cathedral in Lobby 7, police car on the dome, a bunch of great stuff happened in the last decade.

    The book is titled "Is This the Way to Baker House?". You can see the description at MIT Press [mit.edu]

  • What was Ford Prefect's theory on why humans are always stating the obvious like "It's a nice day" and "This is it we're going to die" and "This appears to be a real-world exhibit"?

    Something to do with brains turning off I think.

  • You have an incredibly powerful grasp of the obvious, along with the idiot who moderated you up.

    Neither the slashdot article, nor the article it refers to says anything about it being an online exhibit, but thank you for pointing it out with your bold letters.

    Perhaps you were just stunned by the word door, as in "has closed it's doors". It's the big rectangle with the knob. Try opening it.

    -Tommy
  • (And come on, MIT students: You may claim that you went there for the academics, but we all know that you all secretly want to be the Val Kilmer character from Real Genius.)

    Why would anyone who goes to MIT want to be anything like the characters in Real Genius? That was filmed at Caltech, the other Geek Institute. It is a a very different place (but with a very similar attitude toward cool hacks, and Caltech's may be better... ;-) ). I've heard stories about their Interhouse parties, and the engineering feats to pull some of those off are pretty impressive.
  • I have read a lot about the famous MIT hacks; the fake cop car and the propeller beanie on the great dome, the balloons in the football field, the list goes on. It will be a shame to see this monument to harmless, creative, and truely hilarious hacking close it's doors. These hacks have become a part of MIT culture, I hope not being able to get your hack into the hall of fame so to speak won't be a deterent to future hacks.


    "Everything that can be invented has been invented."

  • Yes, those who have no 'skilz' attend university, where they learn to spell 'skills' correctly.
  • ``These kids are splitting atoms and stuff, so a lock poses no barrier to them,''

    I guess that would explain the reports of glowing undergrads at MIT.

    Hmmmm, if you think about it, that would be the ultimate senior hack.
  • Some other possiblities that we shouldn't neglect:

    (3) Hacks happen and you don't hear about them.
    (4) Hacks happen and you hear about them, but don't consider them clever because they're too similar to historical hacks.
    (5) No toad sexing
    (6) Hacks happen and you hear about them, but don't consider them hacks because they're not similar enough to historical hacks.
    (7) Do not lick
    (8) By gum, the world really has gone downhill since MIT started admitting those round women

  • Morpheus: "... you won't have to."

    'Cause even Morpheus knows that the best way to get past a locked door.. is to find another way in that isn't locked.

  • yeah, I hear what you're saying. I think the myth of these MIT hacks is much greater than the sum of they parts. WHy, the MIT hacks in Real Genius were ten times better than anything actually described in the real MIT hack gallery web page.
  • I've been told by my college counselors that people who go to MIT actually hate it there. They've been known to approach tour groups and tell them not to go to school there.

    Is there any truth in this?

    aciel
    aciel@speakeasy.net
  • I went to MIT for three years. It was okay for the first two, but the third damaged me severely. It's the only school I would ever forbid my kids from going to. One of my coworker's sons was considering going there and I advised very strongly against it. Thankfully, he decided to go to Harvard. I don't know if I had anything to do with that, but if there's one good thing I've done in my life, that might be it.

    My last year there was so terrible I will never be able to erase it from my memory. That's the only year of my life I can say that about. I still suffer from nightmares and flashbacks after almost a decade. I never finished college because the whole educational experience was so polluted. Fortunately, I found a good niche in the real world and I have thrived there.

    I would say that if you're considering going to MIT, or if you know someone who is, advise them to go to Stanford, Harvard, or some small liberal-arts college for undergrad. Save MIT for grad school, and only then if you're sufficiently hardened against the cold, cruel world. The undergrad experience at MIT can be perfectly good (mine was for the first two years) but if you get a bad year it will hit you for a lot longer than that. It can be ruthless for a 19 or 20 year old kid.

    If there's ever anything I take seriously, it's any issue concerning MIT. MIT can be a cruel place and you'd better be ready to deal with it. Personally, I think it embodies evil, but that's IMHO and YMMV. I got dealt a particularly bad hand, from day one, pretty much.

    And by the way... I do have a place in the MIT gallery of hacks (see, not totally off-topic). Shame to see it's going away, but it's not a big surprise. The hack culture has been the target of a systematic elimination by several MIT adminstrations that have not had much appreciation for that culture. Money is what MIT is all about, and though hacks bring money in the long term (due to the legendary atmosphere that culture generates), it's just like politics. It hurts things in the short term. Everything is getting corporatized at the expense of everything else and MIT has been a frontrunner in that game for the last 20-30 years.

    - Firedog

  • to see that students today can do interesting and inventive things today but not have to break or damage things to do it...
  • What about the rest of the exibits in the MIT Mueseum? I went there last summer and it was one of the main reasons I'm thinking of applying there to be a super geek. Also in the mueseum were robotic sculptures (think: robotic walking chicken bone,) some of the craziest holograms I've ever seen (think: seeing a hologram of a telescope, and when you look through the eyepiece, there are actual stars, all from a two dimensional hologram,) and michael edgarton's extreme high-speed strobe photography (think: all the super-slo-mo bullet movies/water droplets.) If the entire thing has closed down, it'll be a disappointment to me for years to come!
  • I've actually been there, and although the Hall of Hacks was good, there's also a lot of other extremely cool stuff there - it's worth a visit for any Slashdot reader.
  • It's not ironic if you made this up.

    ---
  • ``These kids are splitting atoms and stuff, so a lock poses no barrier to them,'' But what I really want to know is how those kids got the stuff though the 3 x 3 door. You know? A piano? A plasic cow? Do they build a catapult and launch it to the top? Also how do they do this without people seeing? Do MIT nerds have strange powers that I dont know about? SHOULD I GO TO MIT?! =) I liked the thing about the Smoot That was cool. I have a friend who we could use to measure things out as well!
  • Don't worry, it won't be a deterrent: according to the article, school officials are looking for another site, and they may set it up in the student center. If you know anyone at MIT they'll tell you the school would never be allowed to close it permanently.
  • The undisputed champions of hacks like these are Canadian: the University of British Columbia Engineers.

    While MIT's police car on the dome in 1994 was great, the UBC Engineers do that pretty much every year. Since the seventies, they have placed dozens of their signature red VW Beetles in every imaginable location ranging from bridges and tunnels to stadiums and fountains. Earlier this year you may have heard they hung one from the Golden Gate bridge - deep in enemy territory!! They also gained international notoriety in 1992 when they "acquired" the Rose Bowl trophy from the University of Washington Huskies. Other memorable stunts include blinking the lights on Lions Gate bridge in Morse code and stealing the Speaker's Chair from parliament.

    Unfortunately, not much information is available on-line about them, but some information can be found at http://macboy.dyndns.org/engbook.

    Yes, I'm biased. Yes, I'm a UBC Engineer. Yes, I did the Morse code bridge stunt.

  • Slackers are per definition white - their equivalent exist everywhere. Spend some time "on da block" & you'll meet enough non-white slacker-equivalents.
  • As opposed to a Southern Baptist culture or a Native American culture or Cuban American culture or a first generation Laotian American culture or ...

    Yes, MIT's student body has become more diverse. However I still don't see any divergence from the MIT-population-mean in the folks into pulling hacks. Indeed if one were to follow stereotypes few of the Asains would be involved in hacks, particularly considering the streses placed upon them by their sponsoring nations and the possible consequences of a hack gone wrong. However they seem to hack as enthusiastically as everyone else.

  • Morpheus: "I mean to say that when time comes, when you have your PhD in nuclear engineering and you want to put a cow on the dome, you won't have to."

    Actually the cow on the dome was a University of Virginia prank, pulled off by the current President of NASDAQ back in the late 60's, I believe. It was placed on the roof of the Rotunda, but didn't make it down alive. Unfortunately UVa tends to overlook fraternity-ish pranks, but would most likely crack down severely on MIT-ish pranks. Blah.

  • I haven't heard of many clever ones lately.
    (I am an alumnus from the 1970s.)

    Some possible explanations:
    (1) The student body is much rounded with nearly
    half women, lots of non-white, non-middle class.
    These groups are more into studying and less into
    hacking.
    (2) Shifting attention from the physical to virtual.
    You see more hacks happening on computers rather
    than buildings.

  • This despite three deadbolts on the tiny, 3-by-3 door leading to the roof and four other locked doors prior to reaching the top.

    But, unless you leave someone on the roof permanently, 3 deadbolts aren't going to help much, because they'll be on the inside. :-)

    Gerv
  • Biotech researchers have made mice that glow in the dark, thanks to jellyfish genes and gene-splicing technology. All that one needs to do is make a few of these mice and put them in a cage somewhere.

    If you could add a few other lifeforms, it could be a really interesting display.

    The state-of-the-art may not yet have advanced to the point where this can be done easily outside biotech companies, but it's likely that such a hack can be possible by 2010.

    --
  • Yeah, MIT's hacks sure make our effort of putting a roll of tickertape in an airvent at uni pale in comparison.

    The airvent was a 4 metre tall ground-level duct that was the main outlet to the airconditioning at a uni in Melbourne. A small slot in the side of the concrete pipe permitted the entry of small objects like boxes of confetti, computer cards and rolls of tickertape. These unauthorised wind-tunnel experiments proved to be great fun and fairly harmless.

    --
  • This was definitely an MIT prank. The cow was a life-sized plastic cow from the "Hilltop Steakhouse", a Boston area monument of cheese. The owner of said steakhouse, long rumored to have Mafia connections, was sufficiently amused that he not only declined to press charges but donated the cow to the the Prank Museum.

    Boss of nothin. Big deal.
    Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
  • read the article... it's the physical museum that's closing, not the website, which is still alive and well
  • There are other groups who do/did this. The MIT Hacks though are populer becouse they are ment to show of technical and other skills. Mainly they seem to be pranks. But becouse they are MIT and the scale they get more press then most others.

    I was in a group a while back that did things on this scale or better. None of us hold degrees and when the cops come we are commiting vandalism/terrorism. The only differnece it seems is where you go to school.

    I am by no means putting down these hacks for these pranks are great to read about. Aswell they do involve alot of skill.

    But i would like to say there are many other groups of people that put things out that are bigger and more chalanging then a banner. As of yet my group was disbanded.

    Now pranks are behind me as I am getting older and the law does not enjoy my jokes.

    darklink
    When you look into the abyss the abyss looks back.
  • As AC said above, and speaking as a DC-area resident myself, I'd bet that the Smithsonian would love to get their hands on some of this memorabilia. If the PTB at MIT can't find another home for this material, and soon, then they ought to contact the Smithsonian. Some of those hacks are hilarious, and it's too bad they aren't more widely known - and, it would be a real shame if people never got the chance.
  • The Museum is *not* getting rid of any of the hacks, and has in its collections even more than were ever on display at once. They are remodeling the exhibit space for an exhibition on the longer history of education at MIT: exhibition details are at http://web.mit.edu/museum/exhibitions/in-the-works .html Chocolate Pi
  • it was clearly hax0red.

    -aardvarko
    webmaster at aardvarko dot com
  • I find this quite sad. I associate MIT with a mecca for hackers... and their "pranks" are basically a tribute to the "Hacker Ethic". The hacker museum was actually good for the hacker image. It presented a view of the light heartedness and FUN that the hackers follow; why did you do it? Because it was FUN. Why else? *strange stare*
  • If you haven't noticed many hacks then you haven't been paying attention.

    The weather-balloon-exploding-from-the-field-covered-i n-"MIT"s during a Harvard/Yale game was a classic. Indeed at the same game the sound system had been rewired (by 3 independant MIT groups) to play MIT material, the MIT marching band succesfully infiltrated the game (for free) and took to the field to spell out MIT, and of course the Harvard placards were re-arranged to spell out "MIT" (much to the confusion of the Yale folks across the stadium.)

    That's probably the most spectacular but there have been many, many others since then.

    Finally as to your comments about non-white / non-male / non-middle class students being less into hacking: I have no idea where you derive this theory but it seems to have no basis in reality - perhaps it comes out of your own worldview?.

    From my acquaintence of the folks who've performed notable hacks at MIT there seems to be no correlation between their racial / gender / economic backgrounds and their desire & ability to pull off a clever hack. Indeed if there's any correlation it seems to be the members of GAMIT (Gays At MIT) who are usually involved somewhere in these activities.

    Why are you manually word-wrapping your postings? Is it part of that whole "narrow" thing?

  • Why would anyone who goes to MIT want to be anything like the characters in Real Genius? That was filmed at Caltech, the other Geek Institute. It is a a very different place (but with a very similar attitude toward cool hacks, and Caltech's may be better... ;-) ).

    Actually, Real Genius was not filmed at Caltech, although a large number of other movies have been filmed there. The administration didn't like the way that the Institute was being portrayed and refused to let them film there. They did do a highly accurate copy of a section of one of the Undergraduate residences as a set, though. The details were pretty damn accurate, down to the (sanctioned) graffiti on the walls and the interiors of the closets. IIRC it was a chunk of Dabney Hovse.

    I've heard stories about their Interhouse parties, and the engineering feats to pull some of those off are pretty impressive.

    Sadly, Interhouse is no more. It was killed off my Frosh year (1990-91) because it simply got out of hand; too many outsiders were coming in and getting violent. A number of the other events portrayed in the movie (Decompression, the Tanning Invitational, etc.) are based on Caltech events, though, and I had Frosh Physics from the professor with his own TV show who was a model for the one in the movie. They even duplicated one famous Caltech hack- stuffing the entry box in an "enter as many times as you wish, printed entries accepted" sweepstakes. The Caltech (Page House, IIRC) students printed up several hundred thousand entries on a line printer and won a substantial share of the prizes including a car.

  • Re:As the MIT safety officer stated... (Score:4)

    by brassrat77 ( 9533 ) on Wednesday March 07, 2001 @05:02AM (#379598)
    I guess that would explain the reports of glowing undergrads at MIT.

    Already addressed in the Doonsburyesque "Ferd the Nerd" comic strip by Fred Hutchinson that appeared in "The Tech", I believe, in the mid 1970s. As best I can recall:

    Student to Asst Dean: "Man, you gotta help me - it's my roomate."

    Asst. Dean: "What's the problem?"

    Student: "He keeps me up all night."

    Asst Dean: "A real tool, eh?" [tool: n., someone who spends all their time studying]

    Student: "No. He glows in the dark!"

    Asst. Dean: "What?!"

    Student: "Yeah man. See, he fell into the reactor while retrieving a wrench and now he's got this pale green glow!"

    And hacking was NEVER limited to seniors (limiting hacks to seniors is the tradition at Caltech's "Ditch Day")

  • Purdue Pranks (Score:5)

    by MAXOMENOS ( 9802 ) <mike&mikesmithfororegon,com> on Wednesday March 07, 2001 @12:56AM (#379599) Homepage
    In the first phase of my undergraduate career (long story), I was at Purdue, a place famous for engineers and infamous for its mind-numbing, unspeakable conservativism. We didn't get many pranks, but one of the better ones was the time someone erected three outhouses outside of the Math building: one for Men, one for Women, and one for UNIX. Sadly, they were torn down only a bit later. Steve Beering had no sense of humor.

    ObJectBridge [sourceforge.net] (GPL'd Java ODMG) needs volunteers.

  • "Locks pose no barrier" (Score:5)

    by Twid ( 67847 ) on Tuesday March 06, 2001 @11:56PM (#379600) Homepage
    >`These kids are splitting atoms and stuff, so a
    >lock poses no barrier to them,'' marveled Barber.

    A little overdramatic, I think, this sounds kinda like something out of the Matrix, I can see it now in Matrix 4:

    MIT Undergrad: "You mean to say that I can dodge padlocks?"

    Morpheus: "I mean to say that when time comes, when you have your PhD in nuclear engineering and you want to put a cow on the dome, you won't have to."

    - Twid

  • I think this is one of MIT's keys to a good rep (Score:5)

    by IvyMike ( 178408 ) on Wednesday March 07, 2001 @12:13AM (#379601)

    The hacking museum is one of the coolest things about MIT--it gives current and former students a shared culture, and it gives new students something to aspire to. After all, what could be cooler than being imortalized in a museum of cool hacks? (And come on, MIT students: You may claim that you went there for the academics, but we all know that you all secretly want to be the Val Kilmer character from Real Genius [imdb.com].)

    I knew of a few cool hacks that happened at my school while I was there, and I'm sure that there were cool hacks in the past, and cool hacks after I left. But these hacks are destined to fade into history until they are forgotten, which is really too bad. I sure hope someone at MIT wises up and does everything possible to keep the museum alive and opened; it would be a shame for them to lose something that makes the school unique and cool.

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