CPW 2007

Welcome to CPW 2007!

2007-04-30T15:59:00.000-07:00

Hello, my name is Michael Snively. When I went to MIT's Campus Preview Weekend this year it was my goal to record as much of it as I could, and for a couple of reasons. First off, I wanted to share it with everybody that couldn't make it. Second, I know that I was desperate for MIT information last year when I was applying so this should make some uber obsessed people like me happy! Third, I love blogging, and this was a huge event, so I had to blog it.

I took over 384 pictures and 30 videos of CPW and have posted them all online here.

I recommend not just looking at the pictures, but instead reading this blog and hearing the stories that go with the pictures, it's just so much more interesting that way!

A couple of tips for reading this blog.

1) It's long, so please don't feel pressured to read the whole thing in one sitting!
2) Click any picture to make it bigger. The resolution is much better on the bigger pictures.
3) Watch the videos! Some of them are dumb, some of them are quite cool.
4) Use fast internet!
5) Enjoy!

The Flight Over

2007-04-24T11:24:00.000-07:00

After going to bed at 11:30 pm on Tuesday, it was time to wake up on Wednesday morning at 3:00 am in order to be out the door at 4:00 am and arrive at the airport at 5:00 am. I was a bit groggy but hey, one tends to wake up when one knows they’re in for an airplane flight! We got to the airport, checked our bags, and then headed towards security. The line was huge! We took our place at the end of the line and were promptly handed this:

I thought it was pretty funny actually, I especially liked the line “You have been selected because you are the last person in line.” Being last is usually not a good thing, but now you get “selected” if you’re last. Yes!

Once through security we went straight to our gate, which was less of a gate and more of a door onto the tarmak. We climbed into our little puddle-jumper prop plane and got all buckled in. Guess where my seat was!

Yep, right by the prop. That was cool for about, oh, the first minute. I even broke FAA regulations and had my camera on while it started up so I could record it. Here you go!

This flight was to Seattle, so for those of you who were thinking that I had to sit next to a propeller for the entire trip to Boston, rest assured. It was a 45 minute flight, and we landed in Seattle at about 7:30 am. Seattle’s airport was actually kinda cool. My favorite part, by far, was the whale. Yes, they had a whale, a big stuffed one, outside one of their shops.

Then it was time for the big flight. The 6 hour flight from Seattle to Boston. I planned on getting a bunch of Calculus done, but soon realized that the little tray tables just weren’t big enough, so I had to give up after one assignment. I slept most of the way because if you’ll remember, I was going on 3 and a half hours of sleep. Thus concludes my flight over to Boston!

MIT Wind Ensemble Rehearsal

2007-04-23T11:23:00.000-07:00

After arriving in Boston we had our first experience with “The T”, Boston’s subway system. It really wasn’t that bad! We hopped the silver line from the airport to downtown Boston, and then rode the red line towards our hotel. Well, I say “our hotel”, but I was only going to stay in it for the first night and spend the rest of my nights in a dorm at MIT. The red line didn’t actually connect to the hotel, so we had to cab it the rest of the way. We dumped all of our stuff in the hotel room and hussled out because I had an appointment to meet. I had e-mailed the director of the MIT Wind Ensemble a week or so before and asked if I could sit in on a rehearsal and he said that I could, so we had about 40 minutes to walk to campus from the hotel. As we were walking there we caught our first glimpse of Simmons hall (the dorm I want to stay in), which was very exciting because I’d only ever seen pictures of it before. I was walking, so it’s a little blurry.

We made it to Kresge Auditorium right at 7:30 pm, which is when the rehearsal started. We walked in quietly and sat near the back of the auditorium, but then the director noticed us.

“Is that Michael?” he yelled back.
I stood up “Yes”
“Do you want to sit on stage? Do you have your clarinet?”
“Uh, not with me.”
“Oh I misunderstood what you meant by ‘sitting in’ then. I’m sorry.”
“No, that’s ok, my fault, I’ll just sit back here and listen.”
“Ok, well, I brought some CD’s for you, here they are” he set them on the stage.

I wandered up and grabbed the CD’s, one from their Jazz Ensemble and one from their Wind Ensemble. I then just sat and listened to their rehearsal. Here’s a video of them playing:

As you can hear, they play some abstract stuff, nothing I’m used to. They commission songs from up-and-coming composers, meaning they don’t play standards. All of their songs are really dissonant and non-chordal, with very little sense of time. As the rehearsal went on I became less and less enthusiastic about joining them next year, mainly because what I was hearing wasn’t as musical or melodical as I like. Also, after chatting with some members of the band I realized that there was no chair order and that frequently people would be taken out of some songs and featured in others, meaning there was no gaurantee that I’d even get to play all the songs. After the rehearsal I went up and chatted with the director, shook his hand, thanked him for letting me listen, and then left.

Looks like no MIT Wind Ensemble for me.

My mom and I hopped a cab and drove back to the motel. I stashed all the energy drinks I brought in the little fridge. I was mentally and physically prepared to get absolutely no sleep that weekend!

Oh, and the hotel room had a cool lamp.

Then it was off to bed, the last night of sleep I’d get for quite some time. . .

*RIIIIIIIIIIIING*

GAH! Cell Phone! It was 11:30, and I wandered groggily over to my phone. It was my host at MIT calling to confirm that I’d meet him tomorrow. I “Uh-huh”d and “yep”d a lot and then hung up, finally able to go to bed.

Meeting Sara and Registering

2007-04-22T11:22:00.000-07:00

I’ve been chatting with a girl named Sara, who also got into MIT, since December, but had never actually met her. We talked on the phone and arranged to meet Thursday morning for breakfast before going to MIT to get registered. We took the red line to South Station and waited there. Then I get a text:

“meet in the main area in South Station”

Ok, cool, no problem. Too bad I’d never been to South Station and didn’t know where the main area was. My mom and I stood in what we thought was the main area, only to get another text:

“I’m here, where are you?”

Uh-oh. After calling and trying to figure out what was going on, we realized that we were a level below where we needed to be, so we walked upstairs and BOOM, huge open area with banners, stores, restaurants, people, and all sorts of stuff. And, there was Sara! It was really exciting seeing her for the first time, I’m not quite sure how to describe it. It’s really cool getting to know somebody for a really long time and then finally getting to see them in person. We went to a little bagel place for breakfast. Here’s the thing I discovered about ordering food in Boston, it’s really unorganized. You order and then just kind of hang out until food lands on the counter, and then you grab it and hope it’s yours. Turns out the food I ordered isn’t the food I ended up with. Oh well, tasted good anyway!

After breakfast we went back downstairs and hopped the train towards MIT. Sara and my mom seemed to think that sitting was fun, but it’s obviously more fun to try to stand in the subway! Eventually they forced me to sit down, but it was fun while it lasted.

After we popped up at MIT we met Sara’s host and she led us to registration, which hadn’t started yet. She and Sara left us there and went to drop off Sara’s luggage where she was staying. My mom and I went into the student center and sat in some couches waiting for The Coop (the bookstore) to open so we could buy all sorts of MIT goodies. Here was our view from where we were waiting:

Once the doors opened we emersed ourselves in MIT goodies to last a lifetime, but settled on a few necessities. I got a black sweatshirt and baseball hat that you’ll see me wearing in a bunch of my pictures. We bought my dad a coffee cup and a window cling for his car. We also bought a window cling for my stats teacher because she collects them from the colleges her students get accepted to.

Once we were all shopped out it was finally time to go officially register for CPW. We headed upstairs where we caught our first glimpse of Tim the Beaver, MIT’s mascot!

That’s him with his helper, she helps him into elevators and makes sure he doesn’t get hurt.

Registration was in a large room ringed with tables and laptops. Registration was the first real time to meet a bunch of the admissions officers whose blogs I’ve been reading for the last year.

Here’s Nance:

And Matt McGann:

And after somebody saw me taking his picture, they had us stand together and get a picture of both of us:

He seemed excited to see me, and asked how long I'd been at MIT. We chatted for a little bit, but I noticed that he never dropped my name. I never mentioned my name, so I wasn't sure if he recognized me from the MIT blogs or if he was pretending to know me and was hoping I'd say my name. Turns out he knew it was me, because check out what his 9:55 event was in his blog.

I got my folder of papers and discounts, my schedule of parties/events, and my food card and I was set. The food card is basically a debit card for something called TechCash, MIT’s money system. Everybody’s CPW TechCash food card was loaded with, get this, $20.11. How fitting, very creative. Matt McGann’s idea. Here’s my typical convo with people about the amount on the card:

“Yeah, we got $20.11 because we’re the MIT class of 2011.”
“Cool! So that means you get one more cent than last year’s class!”
“Um, actually, they got 30 dollars.”

Yes, it’s true, we got ten dollars less this year, but after MIT realized that last year’s class went the entire CPW without spending any money and then spent all of it on wiffleball bats right before the weekend was over, they decided to cut back. Too bad!

After I was all registered I found Sara again and we took all my stuff over to my dorm to dump it. I met my host, Michael Johnson. He’s the drum major of the MIT marching band, plays clarinet, and is a mechanical engineer. Basically, me in 2 years, perhaps minus the drum major bit. After dumping our stuff he showed us the workshop/lab area for the 2.007 mechanical engineering robot competition. It’s very cool, my kind of place, lots of tools and joysticks and hockey pucks and balls and flashy lights and wood and Michael Snively stuff. We parted ways after that and then Sara and I were on our own. We quickly met up with Sara’s host, who had a class coming up soon, but decided to show us a quick little aspect of MIT that not a lot of people get to see.

We were taken to building 9 and then led through a labyrinth of hallways before reaching our destination. A bit of background: MIT builds new buildings. When they build a new building, they often attach it to an old building via a hallway. Well, such was the case in this particular hallway, except they decided to, um, stop building the hallway halfway through completion. So basically it’s a hallway with a couple of stairs that lead directly into a wall. MIT students thought it was stupid/hilarious, so they decided to take advantage of the situation with a mural.

Yes, that’s the coyote from the roadrunner cartoons, smacking into his ACME tunnel. Poor guy! Here’s a zoomed out view of the entire hallway:

Sara’s host had to dash off to class, so Sara and I were alone, at MIT, in Boston. It was still kinda surreal at that point. We checked the schedule and decided that a tour of the Stata Center was in order.

Meeting the Facebook Group and a Stata tour

2007-04-20T11:20:00.000-07:00

Sara and I got to Stata about a half an hour before the tour started so we took the opportunity to chat and check out the schedules for the rest of the weekend. We did notice, however, two nifty features of the Stata Center. The first was piece of MIT hacking history. There are two huge hacks that MIT is known for, the police car on the dome and the CalTech Cannon. Several years ago MIT students awoke to find a police car sitting on top of the great dome, with lights spinning and a stuffed police man in the front seat. Turns out that MIT kept the police car and now displays it in the Stata Center!

The second nifty feature was a cow. I don’t know why it was there.

It was time for the tour to start, so we jumped into the group and started following along, before I heard someone yell “Snively!” I looked around and saw some random person yelling at me, so Sara and I wandered over. Turns out it was the group of people I’d been talking to for the last 3 months on Facebook! I only managed to get one picture of our meeting, and it’s a little weird, but I’ll try to explain.

The girl on the right is Emma Rosen, the creator of the facebook group. The guy in the blue sweatshirt is Jon Estrada, my future roommate. The girl in green is Sara, checking pictures on her camera, and the person flipping you off is Yuki Yamada. His goal was to try and be in every picture flipping the camera off. That goal kinda fell to the wayside after he realized that I was going to be taking over a gigabyte of pictures. Not in the picture are Daniel Sauza and Hank Robinson, I don’t know where they are. We hung out for the rest of the tour, just kinda chatting in the back and not really listening. What’d we see on the tour?!

HA! That’s a safe place to work!

That little black robot is autonomous and is part of the DARPA project. Those little glowing lights are infrared that the robot uses for navigation and are not visible to humans, but apparently they are visible to digital cameras. Here’s a video of the little robot, named “Little Dog”, wandering around, and notice that you can’t see the infrared lights.

Now, notice that the enclosure the robot is in was surrounded by red lights.

I leaned over to Jon and asked “Why are there red lights everywhere?” to which Jon replies “They’re obviously for dramatic effect!”

Yeah, right. So I asked the lady in charge why there were red lights.

“I’m not really sure,” she said, “I think they’re there just to look cool.”

I groaned and Jon laughed. He was right! They were for dramatic effect! This just goes to show that some of the most technologically advanced stuff isn’t as intimidating as it may seem at first, sometimes it just looks cool!

They use two computers for controlling Little Dog, one running Windows and the other running Linux.

I suppose that one works and one doesn’t. I’ll let you guess which is which.

Next on the tour was the area where they test Mars Rovers.

Here’s Mars!

In the background you can see the red Mars Rovers that they test. People asked a couple of questions that were, granted, interesting, but not what I wanted to know. They asked about environment, types of rovers, and all that stuff, but I raised my hand and asked the most important question of all.

“Do you guys make your own rocks?”
“Yes”
“Cool”

I ask the questions that matter!

On our way out we caught one last glimpse of Stata coolness:

A poster of the Vertruvian Man, version 2.0

Now it was on to our next CPW adventure: Exploring Simmons Hall!

Simmons Hall

2007-04-19T12:52:00.000-07:00

After our tour the next logical stop was Simmons Hall, because it’s the most famous dorm at MIT and none of us had seen it up close. Simmons has a very unique outer appearance, often being described as a space sponge. It has hundreds of little windows all over the building, giving the appearance of being over a twenty foot building, but in actuality each floor is three windows high. This means that each dorm room has 9 windows, 3x3. The architecture is really weird/cool, with curveey walls and spiral staircases, modular chairs, and lit benches. Here’s a wall that we found in the lobby area:

Also, it has some PRETTY CRAZY WALLS!!! As you walk along you notice that the walls are wooden, but then if you lean against them they move! THE WALLS ARE ON HINGES! Check out this chunk of wall that when opened reveals an office:

I made a video of us opening another much bigger wall. We were VERY excited, it was amazing.

Simmons had, what I like to call, a “chill center” in their lobby as well. A chill center is essentially an area with chairs, tv’s, and and stuff that helps you relax. The lobby chill center had

A flatscreen tv

a skeeball machine

a ping-pong table (Yuki not included)

and a kitchen

One of the windows, we noticed, had a flare for video games, sporting its best rendition of Space Invaders.

I’ve left the best part of the lobby chill center for last. As we walked down the hall we saw a room called the “Meditation Room.” Wondering what a Meditation Room was, we opened the door to check inside. IT WAS A BALL PIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

OMG! We were even more excited about this than the moving walls! We all went in and started jumping around, throwing balls, juggling, climbing walls, and taking pictures. Here are some of those pics:

Then everybody discovered a new game, called “Let’s bury Snively with balls!”

Oh, and did I mention that the windows in the ball pit were blue?

Overall, the ball pit is a huge incentive to live in Simmons.

Thus concludes our initial impressions of Simmons before our next adventure. I give it two giant thumbs up!

The Z-Center

2007-04-18T13:01:00.000-07:00

Next stop on the facebook group tour de MIT was the Z-Center, MIT’s brand new fitness center.

The first thing we saw was the huge, olympic size swimming pool.

It was very cool, kinda intimidating, but one of the Z-Center’s better known features.

Another well-known aspect of the Z-Center is the Rockwell Cage, which is basically 2 gyms surrounded by a cage so that you don’t get hit by random flying objects. We had a problem getting into the Rockwell Cage, however, because there was a turnstile leading into it that required an MIT student ID card. Not to fear though, Yuki’s host had given Yuki his card, so we were clear! Swipe, first person enters. Swipe, second person enters. Swipe, third person enters, until 6 of us had gotten in. We laughed about the conversation Yuki’s host was eventually going to have with some administrator:

“Now, Curtis, according to our log, you entered the Rockwell Cage a total of 6 times in a 10 second window. Would you like to explain this?”
a) “Well, I have obsessive compulsive disorder. I need to swipe my card 6 times everytime I go to the gym.”
b) “I got excited! I just had to swipe it one more time!”
c) “Somebody bet me I couldn’t swipe it 6 times in ten seconds.”
d) “Sorry.”

Cage:

Gym (with chairs for the evening’s greeting session):

We decided to go upstairs and explore all the secret hallways and back rooms of the Z-Center next, and found the squash courts.

We decided that a squash court would be a great location for a horror movie, because it’s essentially a pit with no doors. Well, there’s one door, but it’s about 3 feet high and only big enough for a very large snake to get inside to eat you. That, and there’s a balcony (which is where I took the picture from) for the evil murder to watch you die.

Next we saw the ice arena (currently concrete, you’ll find out why soon)

and then the indoor track, where two things of significance occurred.

1) There was a long jump, meaning there was a sand box. We discovered that if you framed the picture just right, it would look like you were stranded on a desert island. Jon volunteered.

2) There was a climbing rope that Yuki decided to climb. This is when we discovered that Yuki was a ninja.

As we left the Z-Center we noticed two doors with four windows. Photo Opp! Here’s the 4 guys of the group in our respective windows:

We went back to Simmons after the gym because they promised to have Dunkaroos and Fruit-by-the-Foot (which they didn’t), so we killed some time in the chill center. Yuki and Jon played ping-pong and Sara and I sat on the couch and watched.

Jon had perfect form

Sara

We noticed something else cool about Simmons. It had a lego Spongebob on the main counter.

Z-Center and Simmons, two very cool places to explore and hang out. We want Dunkaroos!

Burton Conner Ice Cream and Tour

2007-04-17T13:08:00.000-07:00

Next up was an ice cream feed at Burton Conner (another of MIT’s dorms).

Look at all the happy ice cream eaters! In addition to ice cream there was also Guitar Hero and a pool table. Everybody was just kind of standing around chatting, getting to know each other, but my main focus was on the ice cream.

Here’s what I was there for:

Of course, there were no spoons, so we had to use forks, which somebody conviniently decided to thrust into one of my pictures.

This is the girl in charge yelling at us and telling us to go on a tour. I don’t think she understood why I was taking her picture. More about this yelling girl later, we meet again.

We went on the tour, and I saw three things of particular interest. The first was written on a whiteboard at the top of a staircase.

“Course 69: Oral Communication”

We lol'd.

The next was a Family Guy mural warning us not to loiter, which was ironic because the tour stopped there and we had to stand there for quite some time.

and the third was their huge open area thing. I’m not sure what it was, but apparently they use it for gatherings, dances, parties, and anything else that needs a big open space.

My initial impression of Burton Conner was a good one, except that the bottom level outside from where we were eating ice cream smelled like dorm. It wasn’t exactly a pleasant smell, and we made sure to complain a sufficient amount. Everything else seemed fine though.

Random Hall and Fraternity Food

2007-04-16T14:50:00.000-07:00

One of the things we were looking forward to the most on the schedule was “3D Twister” because we had absolutely no idea what to expect. We were imagining a giant cube or something, but had to know. It was at a dorm called Random Hall, so we headed there next. We went up to the 3D Twister game, but it was kurazy crowded, hot, and the line was way too long, so we had to ditch it. What was it like? Well, imagine 3 twister mats and a corner. One mat was on the ground, the other two were on the walls. Overall, not that exciting, too bad.

I took the time to explore and I found the bathroom with the Foo Display in it!

What’s the Food Display? There’s a website where you can type a message and select a music note. When you hit enter it sends the message to this little box in the bathroom so that the person in the bathroom can read it. It also beeps the note you picked. I find this fascinating, I’m not sure why.

I met up with the group again upstairs, where they had found Michelle, the girl from my school that also got into MIT. She joined the group for the rest of CPW. They were all sitting around on the ground trying to do logic/math puzzles. They were devilishly hard, we didn’t even know what most were asking.

All of a sudden a ghostbuster ran by!

We left the crowded dorm to get some fresh air, and saw that there was food at a fraternity across the river. We hopped onto a SafeRide shuttle that MIT provides and drove over. I took the shuttle ride over as an opportunity to actually get a picture of me and Sara together. People at my school seem to think that Sara is a guy from Texas because I’d never met her. This was proof against.

Also, in the shuttle, somebody mentioned my last name, and then I heard a "Wait! Which one of you is Snively?" I raised my hand. Turns out there was an MIT blogger on the shuttle, Bryan Owens. We chatted for a bit about blogging, but soon we were at our stop, so we had to go.

We got to the fraternity and started eating, there were burgers and hot dogs. Look at how happy!

As we ate we played a game. The rules? Spin a coin and then stop it with your finger on its edge. Filmed!

Dumb game, but we enjoyed it. We had to leave soon, there was a formal meeting for all of the pre-frosh in the Rockwell Cage that we had to get to, so we hopped the shuttle and left. It was a very nice dinner!

Pre-Frosh Meeting and Party

2007-04-15T14:58:00.001-07:00

The meeting in the Rockwell Cage was really fun! Remember all those empty chairs from earlier? Well, look at them now.

It was packed! Soon enough, Marilee Jones, the dean of Admissions, came on stage and welcomed all of us. She then introduced some of the admissions bloggers, who are basically celebrities. The guys in our group decided to chant for Ben Jones, so when she introduced him we all jumped up and started screaming/chanting “BEN BEN BEN BEN BEN!” We got looks, but it was fun. Next up after Marilee was a Stomp group, very cool, and then a small choir enemble called the Logarhythms. They were also very good, lots of cheering. That was the jist of the meeting, just saying hi and showing us some cool music groups. We broke into groups by row and went into the other gym to sit in circles and play “meet other people” games. Turns out that there was another guy from Oregon in mine and Michelle’s circle, what are the odds?! After our meeting games we were shuttled to the ice arena that I talked about earlier, the one that was all concrete. There was an activities fair going on there, it was intense!

The first thing that happened was the MIT marching band coming in.

Now here’s something really interesting about the marching band. As small as they may be, they sound like an ensemble! They sound very very good! I’ll be in the band next year, any reservations I had are gone.

The next thing I saw was 2x4 Jenga, which I did really well at actually. I didn’t cause the collapse in the picture.

Then there was giant twister

Now, as fun as giant twister is, it’s much more fun when a giant green ball appears and you can throw it at people.

I’m not sure where it came from, but I loved that big green ball. I was an assassin! Plus, it worked great as a signal flare. We lost Yuki to some other part of the arena, so in order to find him we called him and told him to look for the giant green ball. Then we threw it really high into the air. Boom, instant signal flare.

There were other activities, but we decided to leave, none were as interesting as Twister or Jenga.

BUT WAIT! Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream!

I never actually ate any, believe it or not, but it was very cool and everybody else seemed to enjoy it a lot. I mostly just liked the fog that was everywhere.

Ok, now we left, after seeing the ice cream. It’s late by this point, about 10:40 pm, and there’s something called a “Firehose Class” starting at 11:00. We decided to check it out.

Firehose Class: 4 Color Theorem

2007-04-14T15:05:00.000-07:00

This was probably the first part of CPW that I didn’t really enjoy, but was bearable because I was at it with Michelle and Sara. It was in some obscure part of MIT, in some little room at the top of a building. When we first walked in we saw, believe it or not, Ben Jones (an admissions blogger, the guy we were chanting at earlier)! We went up and said hi, he looked at us and said hi, and then we introduced ourselves. He looked at Sara and said “I recognize you, but I can’t remember your name.” Sara told him her name. He smiled and said nice to meet you. Then he looked at Michelle and said “again, I recognize you but I’m not getting a name.” Michelle told him and he smiled and said nice to meet you. Then he looks at me. I think I should take this opportunity to share a bit of the history of me and the MIT blogs. I love them. I read them all and comment all the time, so much so that the bloggers have started to mention me. I’ve e-mailed a bunch of them and am friends with them on facebook. Ben Jones absolutely knows who I am on the internet. He looks at me and says “And I don’t even recognize you, I don’t think we’ve ever met.” Sara laughs, Michelle snickers. I say “I’m Snively.” Ben’s mouth drops and his eyes got wide and he was like “SNIVELY! Nice to meet you! Finally!” lol, obviously people on the internet don’t look the same in person? Ben had to leave, but the class hadn’t started yet, so Sara played some piano for us, it was very good.

Anyway, back to the four color theorem class. Firehose classes are basically just really hard math at odd hours of the night. You don’t take notes or anything, you just listen. The four color theorem states that if you have a map of some type with bordering regions, that you need a maximum of 4 colors to color the regions so that no two regions of the same color touch. Simple concept. The lady that taught the proof was just really irritating though, I couldn’t stand her! Her voice, I don’t know, there was just something about it. Sara and I joked back and forth the whole time, and even managed to get a good nerdy Chuck Norris joke out of it.

Chuck Norris can make a utility graph planar.

At midnight we left, we just couldn’t take another 15 minutes of it.

We left and went outside, where we called the rest of our group and met up with them in Killian Court. Thus begins the midnight meanderings of the “Fab Five”.

Midnight Meanderings of the “Fab Five”

2007-04-13T17:31:00.000-07:00

At this point there are 9 people in our group:

1) Me
2) Michelle
3) Sara
4) Jon
5) Yuki
6) Alie
7) Dan
8) Harrison
9) Hank

I haven’t introduced Alie or Harrison yet because I kind of forgot when we met them, but irregardless, they were in the group now. So why did we name our group the Fab Five? My fault, I guess. Earlier, at the Frat BBQ somebody asked me what time it was and I said that it was five till. Somebody else looked at their watch and said “Actually, it’s 8 till.” I argued that it was the same thing, but they disagreed.

“Look, 8 rounds down to five, it’s not complicated. It’s Snively math.”

It kind of became a joke at that point that 8 always rounded down to five and that I sucked at math. The thought behind the Fab Five is that 9 rounds to 8 and eight obviously rounds down to five, so there are five of us.

As I said, we met in Killian Court and decided to wander around for a while since there was nothing scheduled to do. Sara was tired and wanted to go back to her room, and she was staying across the river, so we all walked her home. On the way, Yuki demonstrated his ninja prowesses again.

We took a quick tour of Fenway House, where Sara was staying, and of particular note was the tile in the basement that looked like PacMan.

We checked the schedule and saw that a frat party was happening near by, so we decided to go check it out. Ha, that turned out to be an interesting experience.

We found the frat and could hear the music from outside and see lights flashing on the second floor. We walked in and there was nobody at the door greeting, so we just wandered upstairs. About half way up the stairs we were overcome with the smell of liquor. CPW is supposed to be completely dry, absolutely no alcohol at all, anywhere, on pain of death/suspension. We got to the top of the stairs and realized a couple of things. The first was that we were the only prefrosh in the frat, the rest were upperclassmen. The second is that there was liquor EVERYWHERE, bottles sitting around, and glasses sitting around. The third was the topless girl dancing across the room. The fourth thing we noticed was that we were stuck to the floor. The floor was so sticky from spilled drinks that our feet were literally stuck to the floor. We all stood there for a bit, feeling very awkward, and looking around. After about 20 seconds we came to a concensus: abandon frat! We all peeled our feet up off the floor, taking some of the flooring with us, and went back downstairs and outside. Our first frat party, lovely.

On the walk back to Cambridge two events of note happened.

1) We saw a bike that got completely pwnd. It was locked up, but everything that wasn’t locked got stolen.

2) Walking across the Harvard Bridge, Yuki realized that he had to go to the bathroom. What did he do? He ran across the street so as not to pee into the wind, and went to the bathroom off the edge of the bridge. Very classy. Yeah, we got into MIT, what now!?

Continuing our trek we stumbled upon a minor hack across the street from the great dome. They were doing construction on the sidewalks and therefor had piles of bricks laying around. Somebody had taken the bricks and spelled out IHTFP, MIT’s unofficial slogan.

We went back into the school and wandered down the infinite corridor and stumbled upon the door to the admissions office.

We decided to leave the admissions committee a note to express our gratitude. Here’s Hank signing it:

Next, as we were wandering down the hall, we found one of the coolest drinking fountains ever! Oh, quick note, Sara calls drinking fountains bubblers. We make fun of her for it. She said it’s a Boston thing, but we asked other Boston people and they call them drinking fountains. It’s a Sara thing. That being said, we found a reall cool one! It had some kind of blue light behind it that was moving around. Here’s a video:

At this point we were out of things to do, and the next Firehose class didn’t start for a while, so we went into some kind of cool green lounge off the infinite corridor and chatted for a bit. We were all REALLY tired, but Jon and I refused to sleep, and the rest were holding on.

Oh, and this guy has an unfortunate middle name:

At this point Michelle decided to go back to her hotel so we walked her home. The rest of the group decided to sleep as well, except for Jon, Hank, and me. We decided to go to the next Firehose Class.

Late Night Learning

2007-04-12T17:37:00.000-07:00

Jon, Hank, and I all headed back to the weird random room where the firehose classes were happening. Oh, did I mention that Hank was on Teen Jeopardy? Anyway, the firehose session we walked in on was about how to build your own speakers. Turned out to be REALLY boring, and it was way too late to stay interested, so we set the alarms on our cell phones and took a one hour nap. That was the first sleep we’d gotten, and it was quite refreshing.

No, we didn’t get the hammock, sadly.

We woke up halfway through the next class, which was about conditioning and brain stuff. The teacher said “Hey, you three in the back, good morning!” We nodded, still kind of out of it, and started listening. It was actually really interesting, but we had slept through most of it. The next class was about Lambda Calculus.

Lambda Calculus is some scary math, and would be hard to understand at any time of day at any age, yet alone at 4 in the morning by 18 year olds. Here’s the basics of it: Imagine normal math, like algebra and basic addition and subtraction, is an atom. Lambda Calculus are sub-atomic particles. Lambda Calculus defines operators (+ - x / ), numbers, and everything else. You have to define + before you can use it. Here are some reasons why it just didn’t make sense:

It’s true in Lambda Calc! -1 = 0, what now yo?!

Here’s us trying to absorb this:

About 45 minutes into the class we were completely zombified. We were confused by everything, even variable assignment. It got to the point where the teacher had to yell

“Variables don’t matter! This ‘y’ could be anything! It could even be an octopus!” (he draws an octopus, with 4 legs). “Except, this doesn’t have 8 legs, so it’s an octopus with ‘n’ number of legs. Actually, it doesn’t look like an octopus, I should label it.” so he wrote “this is an octopus” next to it. There you have it folks, you can use an octopus as a variable in Lambda Calculus.

We survived this particular class, and then went to the next one, ominously entitled “Math until death,” whose basic premise was to teach us math until we fell asleep. The teacher was so excited about what he was teaching, and he was soooooo good at math, but I was barely conscious.

The goal of the game was to stay awake, and there were three categories you could be placed in: KIA, MIA, WIA. Killed in Action denotes somebody who has fallen asleep. Missing in Action denotes somebody who left the room, and Wounded in Action denotes slipping in and out of consciousness. About five minutes in, Hank was KIA. Another kid died too, and he snored really loudly, it would have been very funny, but I was pretty WIA at that point. We made it an hour before we just couldn’t handle it anymore, so Jon and I stood up to leave. Hank was still KIA, and he looked comfortable, so we just left him. We felt a little guilty about leaving him in some classroom at MIT, but we figured he’d wake up eventually and figure out his way back to his dorm. Jon and I took this opportunity to go to our respective rooms and shower, change, and get ready for another action packed day. One hour of sleep, remember that.

HACK(s)!

2007-04-11T17:43:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the morning of the hack. Three hacks greeted us on Friday morning.

1) Big paper airplanes in Lobby 10.

2) CalTech’s fake newspaper! A bunch of graduate students from CalTech put together a very accurate replica of MIT’s newspaper, “The Tech”, but used it to make fun of MIT. They flew in from California and distributed it all over campus, they had thousands of copies. It was basically two jokes spread over the entire newspaper: bad weather and ugly buildings. My favorite part of it had to be the comics, because one became our official comic of CPW.

The math comic dictated how we greeted each other from then on. You go up to somebody and say math. They reply with math. You lol. Beautiful poetry.

3) Medical Center Hack. Somebody turned the three round windows in the medical center into a giant stoplight.

Hacks, they make MIT awesome!

The Science Museum

2007-04-10T21:21:00.000-07:00

Get ready folks, this is gonna be a long entry.

We decided, as a group, that we wanted to do something in Boston, separate from CPW on Friday. We decided on the Science Museum because it was cheap and close, not to mention that it was science-y. We hopped the T, Michelle’s first time riding it.

and arrived shortly at the Science Museum. Before we even got in the door we knew it was gonna be good, and you know why?! THEY HAD AN R2D2 MAILBOX OUT FRONT!!!!!!!

This was a big time photo opp. Enjoy!

Here’s Yuki “mailing something” (it was actually his CPW schedule)

And Sauza seems to have fallen in love

But I consider it more of a best friend

So we get into the museum and wander over to the ticket-buying place to see how much it’s going to cost. $16.00 a person. Not good. We start deliberating and rethinking our decision to come here, when Alie suggests just going up and asking if we can get some kind of student discount or group discount. We go up and deliver our case.

“Hi, we’re here for MIT’s Campus Preview Weekend. We were accepted and will be students next year but aren’t quite students yet, can we get some kind of a discount?”
“Do you have ID?”
“Um, we have meal cards and schedules and (at this point we just start pulling all this MIT crap out of our pockets and backpacks) stuff, but none of it has our pictures on it.”
The ticket guy stares at us for a little bit.
“OK, you guys are fine, go on in.”
“THANKS!”

So we got our hands stamped (after we shoved all our MIT crap back where it belonged) and garnered access to the Museum of Science for free! It felt kind of good to flex some MIT muscles, it was the first time we had. Guilty pleasure I guess.

So the first stop in the museum is Mathematica, the room about math. Michelle and I were in love, it had the same name as our favorite computer program of all time!

Inside were tons of exhibits demonstrating various mathematical models. One of my favorites was the normal distribution machine. Basically, balls fall from a hole centered above a pegboard. The bounce around like in plinko (Price is Right) and eventually fall into a glass tank, which has a normal distribution painted on it. Since the balls start at the center and bounce around randomly before hitting the bottom, they should lie in a normal distribution, very cool concept.

Also in there was a graphic display of, can you guess? The Four Color Theorem! Group photo!

Out in the main area, hanging from the ceiling, was a Naboo Fighter (Star Wars).

An awesome 3D model of Mt. Everest that was printed by layer, and the layers were stacked.

A giant grasshopper

And the nail game. Now, the nail game was quite the experience. Basically, it was a nail that had been driven part way into a board, and then there was a small container full of nails sitting next to it. A sign challenged visitors to balance as many nails as you can on the head of a single nail. It said that you could balance up to six nails on it and challenged you to figure out how. Well, psh, 6 is too easy. As Sara and an old lady nearby watched, I proceeded to pwn the nail game and balance 14 nails on the head of a single nail. w00t! The lady was so impressed, she kept complimenting me and telling me I was some sort of a genius. That’s right ladies, I can balance nails. Just leave your phone number in the comments!

Next was a giant wall of mirrors, very cool.

and the border between Boston and Cambridge, which Alie straddled like a champ

There was also an exhibit that dealt with some type of physics law that I can’t remember, but here’s the concept. Stand on a turnstile and hold a spinning bicycle wheel. The inertia from the spinning wheel will spin your entire body. I’m immune to the laws of physics, so it didn’t work for me, but here’s a picture of me trying to figure it out.

Next was the sex exhibit, a hometown favorite. Unfortunately, the video that talks about giving birth was broken, so we just sat in the birthing area and talked for a while. Not awkward at all, nope. Just chillin in the little dark room in the sex section of the Science Museum, surrounded by pictures of fetuses in various stages of development.

Soon we stumbled upon the beaver exhibit, which was another photo opp. It’s a beaver, of course we have to take a picture!

We found a contest that looked intriguing. Close your eyes and see who can balance on one foot the longest. I won. People said I cheated. I won. That’s why I’m smiling in this picture and the other people are losing their balance.

I’d like to take this opportunity to point out the injury Yuki has on his left arm. He was hit by a car a couple of days before coming to CPW. Like I said, he’s a ninja. Not even cars can kill him!

I was antsy at this point. I knew there was a dinosaur in the museum and I wanted to see it! We finally made our way towards the dinosaur!

Thus concluded our trip to the science museum, but we needed to take one last chance for pictures in the lobby before we left. The girls spelled out MIT and we took their picture.

The guys decided to spell out IHTFP, but needed some help, so Sara helped us out.

Right after the pictures we started gathering all of our stuff to leave, but somebody noticed on the digital clock in the distance that it was 3:15.

“Aw, too bad, we missed pi you guys!”
“Wait, didn’t we just take a picture?!”

[mad scramble for cameras]

*zoom zoom zoom zoom zoom*

Result:

And boy did we cheer! People started to look at us funny again, seems to happen a lot. It was good luck, we’re just an amazing group of people, numbers love us. We left the museum and headed back to Cambridge in very high spirits.

Skiing and Bouncy Balls

2007-04-09T16:10:00.000-07:00

Ok, so this is when I started to hit a downhill slide. It's 8 o'clock Friday evening and I've slept one hour since Thursday morning at about 6 am. My body was just about to give out unless I had some exciting event to go to. Well, turns out that the MIT Ski team info session I went to with Sara didn't quite do it in the "Keep Snively Awake" department.

I had to employ several interesting techniques to stay awake.

My first reaction was to down a Bawls Soda. That helped, well, a little/not very much. I was still fading in and out of consciousness, ESPECIALLY when they turned the lights down and started to play a ski movie. My second trick was to physically hold my eyelids open. All this did was dry out my contacts and make me want to close my eyes more. My last ditch effort was to film the movie with my camera, hoping that if I had to keep the movie in the frame, it would take enough willpower to keep me awake. That didn't work for very long, but I will share the lovely video I made.

In the end, there was no use fighting it, and I drifted off several times over the course of the hour. Not sleeping though! It was actually kind of cool. I'd close my eyes, have a quick 2 second dream/hallucination about the last thing I saw before I closed my eyes, and then wake up right away because of the music on the video. It was basically just hallucinating, not really sleeping.

Eventually the movie ended and Sara and I headed to our next adventure: The Senior House Bouncy Ball Drop. Basically, a dorm (Senior House) spent hundreds of dollars on thousands of bouncy balls and dropped them off their balcony. Now, Senior House has a reputation for being a bit sneaky, so during the time leading up to the drop a lot of us were concerned that they may throw water balloons at us or start shooting us with paintball guns, but in the end it turned out to actually be bouncy balls, so it was cool.

The logical thing to do after being pummeled with, what turned out to be 6000, bouncy balls was to a) throw them back and b) grab as many as you could and shove them into your backpack. Hank alone managed to gather over a hundred and totally filled his bag. After ransacking and grabbing as many bouncy balls as we could, we headed off to our next adventure: Meet the Bloggers!

Meet the Bloggers

2007-04-08T16:31:00.000-07:00

As I said before, I love the MIT Blogs and read them religiously. And, ask any of the Fab Five, I was itching for Meet the Bloggers to come as soon as possible. It was one of the events I was looking forward to the most! It was on the second floor of the student center and there was ice cream, which instantly made it the place to be. Almost all the bloggers were there, so it was a great chance to meet everybody in person whose blogs I'd been commenting on for months.

Here's Ben

and Laura, jealous of the attention Ben was getting

Sam

Bryan Owens

Jealous Laura again

and Matt McGann with Ben Jones, preaching at us

At this point it was pretty obvious that I was taking an obnoxious amount of pictures, as can be seen here in my photobucket album (pictures DSC02601 through DSC02631), so Matt whipped out his camera and took a picture of me. So, I present to you, a picture of Matt McGann, taking a picture of me.

Here's what the other picture looked like:

All the bloggers then went up front and went down the line, introducing themselves and just kind of chatting about what they do. Then, of course, somebody brought up the "First Post" fiasco, which went over like a sack of rocks. Turns out that first post depresses many of the bloggers, but I'd just like to mention that this in no way will stop it from occurring. Sorry, that's the way life is. After that we hung out, took some pictures, but had to hurry to our next adventure: The super secret tangerine tours.

Tangerines, or Lack Thereof

2007-04-07T12:07:00.000-07:00

MIT has been my dream school since 7th grade, and I've now visited it twice. Believe it or not, I still have not been on a campus tour, but that's not to say I didn't try. There are special tours that take place during CPW that are secret, meaning nobody knows about them. Shhhhhh, it's a secret!!! Via word of mouth, a couple hundred prefrosh were all organized to meet at a certain place at a certain time in order to be whisked away to all the secret parts of MIT (tunnels, roofs, illegal places). Such tours are known as Tangerine Tours. Obviously I needed to do this, so our group of 9 went to the place at the time and waited.

We were the first there

but eventually there were a ton of people, all ready to go.

Soon the tour guides started to arrive and whisk people off. We were so excited, but then, wait, we heard a voice from above (not God, just somebody on the second floor). "The tours are now full. Time to leave."

WHAT?! We were the first bloody ones there, and we didn't get picked up by a tour guide. They took 300 kids of the 350 that showed up, and we weren't picked. We were MAD, so we said screw it, we'll find a group and latch on. We ran through a door, up a couple of flights of stairs, and then started wandering the halls, looking for a group. We found one group, but weren't able to latch on, so we decided to find the roof ourselves. Wandering some more, we found a door to the roof! Lo and behold, it was even unlocked and propped open slightly. Now was the moment of truth, do we go onto the roof or do we leave? We pushed the door open, it was definitely outside on the other side. Hmmmmmmm, what to do? We ended up leaving, not wanting to risk getting caught on the roof without a guide. We were all just glad that we'd found the door, we felt sneaky all the same.

Here's the funny part, you ready? Turns out, the Campus Police suspected CalTech of pulling a huge prank that night and had doubled their security. The end result was two groups of 100 hundred students each getting nabbed and sequestered. One of the groups had been spotlighted while on a dome, very smooth. Basically, the kids on the tours had some fun, right until they were caught by the police. In the end I guess it was better that we didn't go on the tours, because we wouldn't have experienced our next adventure: Chillin' at Burton Conner.

Chillin' in Burton Conner

2007-04-06T10:10:00.000-07:00

Our Friday evening plans consisted of, well, going on a secret tour of the campus. Guess what fell through? Right, so, we had nothing to do and it was late. Jon and I were still doing the “no sleep” thing, having had just one hour since CPW began. We couldn’t go to bed and we couldn’t just wander (boring) so we looked at our options. It came down to two choices: frat party or just sit and hang out at Burton Conner. We went with the frat part first since it was right next door, but we realized that there were WAY too many people in WAY too small a room, so the only dancing/partying that we’d be doing would be in Burton Conner. We wandered over and went into their basement rec area (there’s probably a name for it, I’ll learn it next year, but for now it’s the “basement rec area”). We sat there for a while, just kind of zoning out and chatting, when lo and behold, blogger Sam. He was a little surprised to see a group of pre-frosh just hanging out in his dorm, but he came over and chatted with us. We explained our tangerine tour issue to him and after much thought about the issue (actually, it was more like an immediate angry outburst) he suggested we go **** the **** and tell them to **** and that we should **** be on the **** tour. We smiled. We also decided that the basement wasn’t the coolest place to hang out, so Sam led us upstairs.

That was when we discovered the amazing flashing room! I can’t remember whose room it was, but she had quite the setup. There were icicle lights strung all across the ceiling that were hooked up to some fancy box. If I remember right, music from her computer was sent into the box and the different frequency spikes were measured. The different frequencies lit up different icicle lights, which were all different colors of course. The result was a room-wide music visualization party-place, and what kind of blogger would I be if I didn’t make a video of it?

Did you hear mention of SolidWorks at the end? That was in reference to this bar:

Then we went to Mason Tang’s (’10) room and got to listen to Mason and Sam serenade us with their golden tones.

After some more room tours (including Sam’s room) we crashed in a commons are where we discovered a Wii. Well, psh, have Wii will play. Sam and I teamed up against all takers and dominated at Wii Tennis, no contest.

Here’s us just sitting and “Chillin’ in Burton Conner”

Remember when I said I’d talk more about this girl?

That’s Laura. She’s also an MIT blogger and lives in Burton Conner. She came and visited us as well!

What I discovered about Laura is that she may, quite possibly, be more sarcastic than me. I think I spent more of my time in Burton Conner attacking each other back and forth than anything else. It even continued past CPW, as you can see in this blog entry that Laura posted.

I made a video of us just chatting and hanging out, which is relatively uneventful, except for two things. The first was the explaining of the “Tang”, the unit of orthagonality to conversation. That’s because Mason had a tendency to say something in the middle of a conversation that made everybody just stop and stare at him. They even had a whiteboard with a tally of all the Tangs Mason had pulled off. The second thing happens about 1:50 into the video. Mason tells, quite possibly, one of the most inappropriate/hilarious/if-you-laugh-at-it-you-go-to-hell jokes ever! Watch Hank’s reaction! It’s hysterical! I think it’s hilarious too, but others were less thrilled. Meh, judge for yourself.

So that was the Burton Conner Experience! The next story, however, is priceless. Read on my friends, read on, and you’ll hear one of the most defining stories of CPW.

Sleeping in the Student Center

2007-04-05T10:50:00.000-07:00

After hanging out in Burton Conner until the wee hours of the morning, we decided that it was time to leave Laura and Sam to get some sleep. We, however, had no intention of sleeping. Well, by “we” I mean Hank, Harrison, Yuki, Jon, Dan, and myself. The girls weren’t as macho and went back to their respective dorms and hotels to get sleep. Psh. After dropping Michelle off in her hotel room we sat downstairs in some deserted hallway contemplating what to do next. We tried to order pizza but soon realized that there were no pizza places open at that time. What time you ask? 3 in the morning. Having exhausted our food options, we opted for a journey to the student center, open 24 hours, to buy some snacks at La Verde’s. Yuki and Harrison had a really hard time with burritos, they kept buying more and more, but kept forgetting whose was whose (Yuki’s a vegetarian, borderline vegan, and Harrison kept buying meat burritos). We plopped down on some couches in the middle of the student center and watched the burrito madness for a while, eating our own snacks throughout. Jon, restless, decided to wander off upstairs and find a piano. We’re not sure why Jon suddenly felt compelled to find a piano at 3:00 in the morning, but he did, so he left.

After we were fed and comfortable on our couches, we decided to check the schedule for exciting late-night events. The only thing going on was “Pancakes at Random Hall” at 4:17 am. The obvious conclusion, reached by all members of the group, was to take a quick half hour nap, spend the next half hour waking up, and then walk to Random for food. Jon wandered back after having found a piano and agreed with our decision to take a quick nap. Unfortunately for Jon, the couches were full, so he had to wander off to another part of the student center lobby to lay down.

Unfortunately, there was a fatal flaw in our plan. This isn’t entirely surprising, seeing as we concocted all of this in a state of insomniatic stupor (I made that word up!), but we forgot the little detail of an alarm to wake us up. I guess we figured that after two days without sleep we could take a nap on a comfortable couch and wake up in a half hour ready to go. That was a bad assumption.

The next thing I know, I hear these voices saying “Stupid pre-frosh sleeping in the lobby!” That startled me, so I opened my eyes and looked around. To my horror/amusement/I’m-not-quite-awake-and-don’t-know-what’s-going-on-ment I saw lights shining in through the windows, people bustling around, and all of my friends in various states of unconsciousness around me. I checked my watch. 8:00 am. Great. CPW registration was back in full swing, parents were wandering everywhere, soaking up the premier technical institute in the world, and a group of tomorrow’s leaders were laying on couches with their mouths open, drooling on themselves. Honestly, we are SUCH a class act! Oh, did I mention that Hank, who was smart enough to fill his backpack with hundreds of bouncy balls from the bouncy ball drop, was also dumb enough to leave it open and perched on the arm of the couch? Well, he did, and he kicked it in his sleep, so we also awoke to the site of about 50 bouncy balls having spilled from his bag and all across the floor of the student center. I helped wake everybody up, and we sat there for a while, trying to orient ourselves and stop yawning.

All of a sudden we realized that Jon was missing! He had gone to a different couch and we’d never seen him come back! We all jumped up and started looking for him. On the other side of the lobby was a collection of couches. All of them were completely full of families, and others were standing because there was nowhere to sit. They were also kind of staring at one couch in particular, but its back was towards us so we couldn’t see the object of interest. We walked over and looked at the couch that was fascinating so many people. We had found Jon.

He took up the entire couch and was fast asleep. I think the group of people almost applauded us for waking him up and freeing the couch for them to sit down on.

Remember how I said, way back when, that I only got 5 hours of sleep, 4 by accident? This was the accident, and it was also the last sleep I would get until I left CPW for home.

Course 2 and the MIT Museum

2007-04-04T09:43:00.000-07:00

After my nap in the student center I felt kind of grimy and disheveled so I wandered back to French House to get a shower and change my clothes. After making myself decent I chatted with my host for a little bit. I felt kind of bad, he was supposed to be my guide, teach me about MIT, and in general give spend some time with me. I had seen him twice since I’d gotten there for a combined amount of about 15 minutes. So, we chatted. We talked about the history of the MIT marching band, the kinds of things it does, the 2.007 competition that sophomore mechanical engineers do, and about various other mechanical engineering projects. One of them those projects was to build this little engine:

To be honest, I don’t remember what it was called, but I was fascinated by the fact that you could design the flywheel with whatever you wanted, in this case small fish. If you want some more details about it, check out Melis'sblog entry about the little gadgets here.

I made a video of it spinning, just for you (well, ok, I wanted to watch it again too, but a lot of it was just for you)!

It’s powered entirely by that little Bunsen burner there, and it spins surprisingly fast. I was pretty fascinated, that’s when my host started to think I was a little weird. I bid him adieu and went off to meet my party.

The Fab Five assembled and ambled over to Kresge to figure out what to do next. There wasn’t anything good in the schedule and we were just exhausted enough to not have that spontaneous “let’s do something fun and exciting!” attitude, but we still wanted to get out and keep ourselves entertained. We decided on the MIT Museum since nobody had been there before (except for me! I felt special there for about a minute). We all went down Mass Ave. and wandered up to the museum. Again, we found ourselves faced with an entrance fee, and again, we begged and pleaded and garnered free entry. I know, we’re terrible, but hey, we’re also cheap!

The first thing I saw was a new addition since the last time I’d visited, it was the giant brass rat that they fit on the CalTech cannon they stole a while back.

Do you see the mirror right behind it? That’s so you can see the underside if the ring and the hacker’s map. Those hackers have such attention to detail! Now, in case you don’t know, the MIT museum showcases a bunch of technologies or artifacts that have some sort of tie to MIT’s history. Either that, or they are the creations of somebody who attended MIT. They also have a small gift shop (it’s actually just a bookshelf behind the main desk) where I bought my pi shirt that I’m wearing in my senior picture (which you can see in my picture at my normal blog, http://snively.blogspot.com). One display case had a bunch of glass pumpkins that were blown from glass during IAP.

Another was a strobe light demonstration. A green strobe light flashed on two streams of water and, by turning a knob, you could make the green balls of light travel down the water, travel up the water, or stay stationary. I didn’t get a movie, but I got a picture for ya!

I did get a video of some dueling cocktail swords, behold:

Another display we were fascinated by was a walking wishbone wheel. A what?! Here’s the pic:

It was walking to the right, which generated some questions as to what it would do when it reached the end of the table. To our amazement, when it reached the end the table split and rotated. This can be seen in the video, and you can hear the amazement in our voices.

Two more displays worthy of note were the holograms and Kizmet. The MIT Museum has the largest collection of holograms in the US. Unfortunately for blog readers, the awesomeness of holograms is REALLY hard to convey in a picture. Here’s my best effort:

One hologram in particular absolutely stunned me. It was a hologram with a starry night as a background. In the foreground was a telescope. When you looked through the holographic telescope (yes, look into the hologram!) you see a completely different view of the sky, just as if you looked into a real telescope. It was a hologram inside of a hologram! We were fascinated, I’m not going to lie, I’d love to know how they did it.

Kizmet is a robot that was programmed to display emotions.

Most people just think it looks like a scary Furby, but I think he’s neat. He’s the desktop background on one of the computers in the microelectronics classroom at my high school now.

After exploring for a while we decided it was time to head off and do something else. The student center was essentially a hub for all of our group activities, we always ended up back there. This time when we went back we saw a neat soap box derby car.

And, our favorite buddy Tim dropped by and we got a group shot. The little girl on the right? No, we don’t know who she is, she just happened to end up in our picture.

After all of our exciting museum adventures and having spent a lot of time in west campus, we figured that it was time to visit east campus. Coming up next, shopping cart jousting and a lemonade toilet!

An Adventure in East Campus

2007-04-03T10:51:00.000-07:00

I’m going to tell you right now, I’m a west campus guy. No offense East Campus dwellers, I’m just more comfortable in a more “standard” way of life, no scary murals or smoking for me. That’s not to say there weren’t some exciting adventures to be had in East Campus. One of the events I was looking forward to the most was shopping cart jousting. Unfortunately, it turned out to be one of those events that had a ton of potential but just fell flat. The culprit was the pool noodle that we used as our spears. The amount of speed we built up caused them to flop from side to side, making it impossible to knock the stuffed animal off of our opponents heads.

I’m not sure I’ve mentioned it, but Hank was a contestant on Teen Jeopardy. That means he’s smart and sophisticated, right? Um, I’ll let the following picture and video speak for themselves.

We’re the leaders of tomorrow folks, get ready for us!

East Campus is notorious for building things, including a rollercoaster at one point. This year we saw a handcart thing, which was actually very creative. The only problem was, well, it didn’t have any way to turn, but that’s ok.

We were watching this cart go back and forth across the courtyard

when all of a sudden it got a new feature:

A couch! Here’s the funny story behind the couch. Around where I live, whenever something goes right or something good happens, you hear somebody say “That’s awesome” or “That worked like a charm” or “Perfect!” When they discovered that the couch fit perfectly on the cart, I heard the following “That’s ideal!” I’d never heard somebody have such a polite outburst, it was quite funny!

The next fun feature in the East Campus courtyard was the lemonade dispensing toilet.

A lot of people thought that this was gross but I thought it was really creative! I leapt at the opportunity to drink the lemonade, and lemme tell ya, it was QUITE good. Kudos East Campus.

After all of this excitement we decided to take a tour of senior haus. That was, well, an adventure. Again, no offense, but it’s not the dorm for me. We also got a tour of East Campus dorm, home of the disco dance floor. I snagged some pictures of it, but they aren’t nearly as glamorous as some of the pictures you’ll see of it on the internet. Consider these pictures the “disco dance floor without its makeup on.”

That about sums up our experiences at East Campus. After finishing our tours we were in a tour-y mood so we decided to get an official tour of Simmons. That story next!

Simmons!

2007-04-02T13:02:00.000-07:00

We’d been to Simmons several times before, but we decided we needed an official tour. It was a very interesting tour, but I kept getting distracted in the various rooms and got separated from the tour guide a bunch, which I think made her kind of angry, but she got over it and I got some good pictures.

Simmons has a unique design that leads to some interesting interior structures. Look down any hallway and you’re bound to see some type of strange protrusion, like this one:

It also has a bunch of spiral stair cases that link “lounges” (small rooms with some benches and tables, oftentimes a kitchen). Here’s one of those staircases:

And here’s a picture of one of the lounges.

It’s dark, sorry, but it’s the only picture I’ve got. Simmons also has a zen garden, featuring a ying-yang pool. The ying is water and the yang is gravel. Simmons also has this strange fascination with rubber ducks. Some were present in the ying-yang pool.

That pretty much summed up the Simmons tour, and since I’ve already spoken about Simmons a bunch before I’ll leave it at that. After we wrapped up our tour we were, again, out of things to do and quite tired, so we headed back to Burton-Conner to relax. We met Laura there and she showed us the Burton-Conner i3 video, several weeks before we were due to get it in the mail.

It was kind of cool to get sneak preview of the video before any of the other prefrosh, here’s the video we saw:

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After just chatting and hanging out, Sam mentioned that we needed to go back over to East Campus to see something explode. Psh, ok, sounds good to me!

Getting Back Home

2007-03-31T14:10:00.000-07:00

Sara walked me to my dorm so I could get my suitcase and all of my stuff. It was 2 in the morning and I had to take a cab over to my mom’s hotel in Boston. The plan was for me to stay the night there and then catch our flight early Sunday. I had the front desk call the cab and I went outside to wait for it. It took a while for it to get there so I took that opportunity to make a movie with my camera. What of? Well, have you ever heard of the Simmons LED display? Essentially, some kids in Simmons put a bright blue LED in each of 36 windows and hooked a computer up to them. They can then scroll messages through the windows for people across the campus to see. I was on the other side of the sports fields that are immediately adjacent to Simmons when I made this movie. I looked online for a really long time before going to CPW, looking for a video of the LED display and couldn’t find one. That’s my basis for the following claim:

This is the only video of the Simmons LED display that you will see on the internet.

There, I said it, I just claimed to have an exclusive on the internet, which is a bit like declaring yourself to be the Maharajah of some yet-to-be-discovered civilization. Without further adieu the video.

“Welcome to MIT – Enjoy Your Weekend”

I hopped into my cab, got to the hotel room, and crashed. It was the first time I’d gotten to sleep in a bed since I’d arrived in Boston, days earlier.

The next morning we caught a cab, took a couple of trains, and ended up at the airport. We got in line, if you can call it that. There were only 4 people in it, my mom, me, some girl, and her mom. The line for the other airline, however, was quite long. “Quite” isn’t the appropriate adjective, how about “Massively big-like?” How big? Well, here’s our line:

And here’s the other line:

Eventually we got our tickets and boarded the plane. We sat in the very back, next to the bathroom (gross) and next to me sat a little girl. She was alone, flying to meet her mom somewhere. We did arts and crafts in the plane together, focusing mostly on paper snakes:

I made a couple of cut-out snakes (more like tear-out) and decided to play a joke. I went into the bathroom and planted them on the counter for unsuspecting bathroom-goers.

The flight attendants thought it was hilarious, believe it or not. Nobody else seemed to notice. Ah well, I thought it was funny!

We got back to Salem in due time and walked to our car. Keep in mind, it’s Sunday night, about 10:00 pm. We drove the hour home (11:00 now) and I went to bed. . .only to get up at 5:00 am for an early bird band rehearsal. No rest for the weary!

Thus concludes CPW. 4 days absolute insomniatic insanity and I had a blast. If and when you get accepted to MIT, take advantage of CPW, meet some friends, and have a good time. It’s one of the few times you won’t have homework or something nagging at you, a precious commodity at MIT.

A Snively CPW

2007-03-15T16:26:00.000-07:00

This is the post that was featured here on MIT's Admissions website. It's a quick overview of my CPW. Consider it the reader's digest version.

Let me begin by saying that thanks to CPW, the rest of high school is simply a formality. Oh, and sleeping is overrated. Here’s just a quick glimpse at what made my CPW so exciting:

My total caffeine intake curing CPW looked something like this:

2.5 Bawls sodas
2 red bulls
1 Sobe energy drink
1 energy drink water thing
5 cups of coffee

I slept 5 hours over the course of CPW. 1 hour on purpose, 4 hours on accident (which is a funny story that I’ll share shortly).

So, from the beginning: I arrived in Boston Wednesday evening to catch an MIT Wind Ensemble rehearsal and received 2 free Rep CD’s from the director, very cool. Then, my last night of sleep for a long time.

The next morning I met Sara ’11 at South Station and we headed over to campus to get all registered. The highlight was actually seeing people in person that I’ve been seeing online forever. Nance, Ben Jones, and Matt McGann were all at registration. I got my picture taken with Matt at 9:55. Then it was off to the Stata center and CSAIL for a tour, which is when the fun actually began. This is where I encountered “The Group”. For the last several months there has been a group of people on the MIT ’11 Facebook group that have always just kinda gotten along, and we all managed to find each other about an hour into the first day.

Meet (from left) Michelle Nason, Sara Ferry, yours truly, Tim, Hank Robinson, Yuki Yamada, and Jon Estrada. Unfortunately Sauza couldn’t make the picture, and the little girl, well, we don’t know who she is.

So what adventures did we go on? Allow me to steal the following format from Milena:

Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream
Didn’t spend a lot of time at this one, but it’s worth noting because it showed up on the schedule about a gazillion times. Throughout campus there were huge containers of liquid nitrogen, they were a common sight. This is what they were used for:

Simmons Ball Pit
WHY IS THIS NOT ADVERTISED?!?!?!?!? Look, if a dorm has a ball pit, I need to stay in it, because it is automatically the coolest dorm ever, hands down. We played in it a lot, here's Jon:

We also played the “Bury Snively under little colorful balls” game and I soon found myself completely in the dark. Good times.

Oh, and did you know that the dining room chairs in Simmons bounce? It’s true!

Fire hose: λ Calculus
So, lambda calculus is one of those types of math that is probably impossible any time of day during any time of the week at any age. I’ll spare you the explanation of what it is, sufficing it to say that three 18 year olds were probably not going to grasp it at 3 in the morning. Here are some highlights:

Look at us pretending to understand what’s happening!

Yes, apparently it’s true in lambda calc.

Did you know you could use an octopus as a variable?

Science Museum!
Alright, technically this isn’t part of CPW, but it is in Boston, so it’s worth mentioning. First off, we saw an R2D2 mailbox, which was far too exciting to handle.

We stretched our MIT muscles and bartered for free admittance because we were nearly MIT students, that was pretty awesome, no $16 tickets for us! After exploring we had our picture taken with the beaver exhibit.

And then we had pictures taken in the main lobby spelling various things. Here are the girls spelling MIT:

And here are the guys and Sara spelling IHTFP. After this particular picture somebody noticed that it was 3:15 and proclaimed “Gah, it’s too bad we missed pi guys.” Then somebody else chimed in. “Wait, didn’t we just take a picture?” We dove for our cameras and zoomed in on the IHTFP picture. Sure enough, completely by accident, the digital clock in the background was displaying “3:14”. We cheered, people stared.

Meet the Bloggers
Meet the bloggers rocked because the bloggers were no longer little pictures at the top of a web page. They’re real, believe it or not! I’ll skip the stories with this one and share some pictures instead:

(Me taking a picture of Matt McGann taking a picture of me)

Student Center Sleep-over
Remember how I said we accidentally slept for 4 hours?

Here’s the scene: Hank, Harrison, Yuki, Jon, Dan, and yours truly were all tired because it was 3 in the morning. The next event wasn’t scheduled until 4:17 (Pancakes at Random Hall). We decided to just chill in the student center lobby until it was time to leave, figuring we could even slip in a half hour nap before taking off. We took our places on various couches in the lobby. Jon had to separate from the group and go to a different couch because there wasn’t enough room near us. Well, turns out it’s hard to take a half hour nap after going two days without sleep. After dozing off I hear a voice faintly in the distance: “Stupid pre-frosh sleeping in the lobby.” This woke me up, and that’s when I checked my watch. 8:00 am. CPW registration was back in full swing, people were wandering everywhere, eating, meeting friends, and here we were completely asleep with mouths hanging open and backpacks strewn across the floor. I woke some people up and we all just sat there, disoriented, and trying to figure out what had happened. That’s when we remembered Jon, where was he?! We struggled up from our stupor and wandered around, eventually finding him taking up an entire couch, sleeping while people watched him from all the couches nearby. Oh, and did I mention that Hank’s backpack, filled with bouncy balls from the bouncy ball drop, had tipped over during the night and spilled bouncy balls all over the floor of the Student Center? Yeah, we’re classy.

Chillin’ with Sam and Laura in BC
While chillin’ in the basement of Burton-Conner we happened upon blogger Sam and blogger Laura! Sooooooo, both are pretty much amazing. Sam was amazing just because he was so cool, and Laura was amazing because you can insult her all day long and she’ll just swing right back and make you feel like an idiot. She makes up some pretty awesome words too. I look forward to a time when I’m not sleep-deprived and can argue with her without totally getting pwned, it’s ON Laura!

BTW, this has nothing to do with Laura or Sam, but if you live in Burton Conner, this is the kind of stuff you get to do to your room:

And Sam sings.