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U. Chicago's Epic Scavenger Hunt Is Back For 2012 56

gotfork writes "The world's largest scavenger hunt, covered in previous years on Slashdot, is now taking place at the University of Chicago. The competition is fierce: in 1999 one team build a working breeder reactor in the quad, but only won second place. Items on this year's list include your appendix in a jar (210), a disappearing spoon made of metal (105), a chromatic typewriter (216), a xyloexplosive (33) and a weaponized Xerox machine (83). Check out the full list here (PDF). Not bad for the school where 'where fun comes to die.'" Does your school have any equivalent annual hijinks?
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U. Chicago's Epic Scavenger Hunt Is Back For 2012

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    See Mystery Hunt, the Bad Ideas Competition, anything that happens in the East Campus courtyard during rush.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10, 2012 @02:32PM (#39958439)

    Maybe they could add that to the list?

  • by Tastecicles ( 1153671 ) on Thursday May 10, 2012 @02:38PM (#39958509)

    ...for toner.

    Anthrax?

    • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

      How weaponized are they talking about? There are lots of highly toxic substances that exist in a powder or crystalline form and would kill you if you breathed in enough of them. Or, for that matter, simply removing the air filter from a laser printer could potentially put enough toner into the air to pose a fire risk in a small enough enclosed space....

    • it shoots out infinite copies of Barbra Streisand's face.
  • Naked Mile (Score:4, Interesting)

    by strength_of_10_men ( 967050 ) on Thursday May 10, 2012 @02:42PM (#39958539)

    The U of Michigan used to have a "naked mile" at the end of each school year. I seem to recall it was mostly the Crew team that started it but everyone was welcome to join in on the run. It was fun to watch and used to have a huge crowd turnout, but the school and city shut it down for some reason - liability? exploitation? I dunno, this sounds a lot more fun than a scavenger hunt.

    But being that the school year ends at the end of April and Michigan's been known to have April snow showers, sometimes the turnout is on the smaller side. [youtube.com] [mostly SFW]

  • by Anonymous Coward

    If the students can find the Second Amendment hidden somewhere in the city.

  • Rule number 7 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ultraexactzz ( 546422 ) on Thursday May 10, 2012 @03:17PM (#39958907) Journal
    From the rules: "7. A Good Time. For a good time call (202) 762-1401." ...Did we just Slashdot the Navy?
    • You know you're a geek when you get the joke immediately because you recognize the number.

      For a couple of days after we change the clocks in the spring and fall, the usual minute-long recorded message at the USNO Master Clock is shortened to thirty seconds, presumably because they are essentially getting slashdotted at those times.

  • There is no spoon (Score:3, Informative)

    by midgetpoker ( 1148901 ) on Thursday May 10, 2012 @05:15PM (#39960083)
    The disappearing spoon should be easy, there's a classic prank of making a teaspoon out of gallium (or a gallium-tin or gallium-indium-tin alloy) where if you put the offered spoon (which is solid at room temperature) into your tea, it melts.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    347. A sonnet composed in C that, when compiled and run, prints a haiku to the standard output. Just as no great poet would ever write an unnecessary word, every variable and expression in your code must be essential to the program’s proper functioning. [10 points

  • And people said I was crazy for holding on to an old AOL disk. If someone needs it for the hunt, I will provide it ... for a nominal fee, of course.
  • No one's going to get that one, my appendix is still in my thorax, I'm going into hiding, and I'm armed.

  • Both the Scavenger Hunt and Kuviasungnerk, the "awesome" winter festival, are constructs, complete fictions created by the University of Chicago marketing droids so they have something to put in prospectuses for applying students. During all my time there, six years for undergrad and master's, I neither knew nor heard of (remember, it's a small school with very few degrees of separation) even 1 human who participated in the Scavenger Hunt and only 1 human who did Kuviasungnerk. (Kuviasungnerk, btw, is whe

    • Yes, I know, the saying that U of C is "Where the squirrels are more aggressive (and better looking) than the women!" and all of the other T-Shirts, but I've not been to a more fun campus since.

      Where else can you walk out across the quads at 4:00 a.m. on a major university campus after a night of hard research work and stumble into the middle of a medieval melee with swords and armor being carried out in a language that you don't understand, complete with torches? (Old English? High German? Didn't know, did

  • as a graduate student at U of C. It was madness. We hit 10+ states in a borrowed truck. There were drunkenness, nudity, minor violations of the law, vandalism to competing ivy-league campuses, elaborate ruses to move large crowds, a statue of elvis, and and any number of other things involved over (IIRC) just the course of a wild, no-sleep-possible weekend, and all in pursuit of items on the list (i.e. it wasn't just random debauchery, though the nature of the list started to make it feel that way).

    It was o

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