No doctors for me!

Why? Because a hack a day keeps the doctors away, and today there were hacks everywhere! No need for mysterious text messages today, I found these ones by myself! Most of the pictures were taken by Eric Schmiedl but I promise that I actually saw these hacks, Eric just takes much better pictures than I do. Click each picture to see the full sized version.

While wandering to the Media Lab for my UROP I walked by the Green Building and noticed something surprising in the middle of the grassy area adjacent to it.



There was a giant game of Settlers of Catan set up. . . but something was strange about it. Is that, could it be, is that a campus police officer instead of a robber?





Seeing this put me in a fairly good mood, I love hacks. I kept on toward the Media Lab when I noticed a large group of people outside it looking up. Wha- could it be another hack? Honestly, normally if there's a hack there's just one thing. If this was another one then there could be countless more and then I'd have to actually go look for them.

I got to the Media Lab and looked up. OMG, it was amazing! What was it? A HUGE SCRABBLE BOARD! Not only was it a huge Scrabble board but it was full of MIT slang and vocabulary.





Here's a list of the words appearing:

ANNAS
ATHENA
BRASSRAT
CRUFT
DOME
EAST
ENGINEER
ESP
HACKER
HOSED
IHTFP
INFINITE
INSTITVTE
MIT
NERD
PUNT
SMOOT
STATA
THECOOP
TIM
TOOL
UROP
WEST

A couple of people gawking asked me to take their picture in front of it and I gladly obliged, who wouldn't want a picture in front of that?!

I quickly noticed another group of people in another area, all examining something. ANOTHER HACK?! WHAT'S GOING ON?! I head on over to find a large game of chess set up.



Upon closer examination I noticed that it was administration versus student living groups:













After taking the Jack Florey piece and pitting it against Susan Hockfield (MIT's President) I took care of my business in the Media Lab and then took off to find more hacks laying around. Unfortunately my search led to no new hacks. When I got back home and checked online to see what had happened I was surprised by pictures of some hacks that had been taken down before I'd seen them. They were:

Cranium in the Brain and Cog building



Mouse Trap in Stata



Risk on the Campus Maps


As of 11:30PM tonight Settlers, Scrabble, and Chess were still in place, which is strange for any hack. Especially for Scrabble, the only one on a building, to last for more than a day is spectacular. I'll keep checking on the three to see how they're doing over the next couple of days, but to the hackers I'd like to extend a "job well done" for bringing the fun and exciting spirit of board games to MIT in a grandiose fashion. Kudos!

Photos copyrighted by and courtesy of Eric Schmiedl, eric [at] ericschmiedl [dot] com