MIT is a little strange

I like MIT a lot; my department is very nice and everyone I speak to is pretty much normal and very friendly (Hi Employers! Don't worry, I'm being nice about you on the internet - please don't fire me! Plus it's true, MIT is great. Go Beavers!). But every so often, or rather, most days, when I'm walking to work I'll see something and just think to myself "Wow! MIT is really MIT-y". By which I mean it's charmingly nerdy. Nerds are King! You can even buy "Nerd Pride" stickers and shirts in the Coop.

Today's nerdiest moment was seeing this in the lobby of building 7, which is the building you can see behind me in my current profile picture, up there on the right. 

Yep, MIT has already decided whose side it is on when the human/robot war comes, and it is standing with Skynet. Hell, someone in MIT is probably building Skynet right now. Maybe they have already built Skynet! Just because they wanted to see if they could, and they thought to themselves "It'll be a cool project, robots are cool". 

In fact, stuff like this is ALL OVER campus. Every day I walk from the lobby of building 7 to my building through the infinite corridor, which traverses most of campus and is lined with poster boards and has little seating areas. There are always nerdy posters advertising nerdy events, like a recital from the singing group "The Asymptones", or another recital, from another nerdily named singing group, "The Logarhythms". Yesterday I saw a girl in an amazing unicorn hat. If the corridor wasn't so busy I would probably stop to take a photo of a cool poster every 10 metres. Even today there wasn't just one thing that I thought was worth taking a photo of on campus:

So, admittedly this isn't as good as the robot overlord thing, which really made me chuckle and stop dead in my tracks, but the sign did still made me laugh out loud (LOL IRL). I saw this in front of the student center (by Dunkin' Donuts). Yesterday morning this sign said "tech fair" - this morning "car thief". There are just low-level hacks happening everywhere. MIT has a big tradition of "hacks" (a wikipedia article is proof of real, legitimate thing, people). According this site - "The word hack at MIT usually refers to a clever, benign, and "ethical" prank or practical joke, which is both challenging for the perpetrators and amusing to the MIT community (and sometimes even the rest of the world!)". There are even posters all over campus explaining the best hacks, my favourites are this, this and this. 

The first day I arrived here I came across a hack. I walked straight through the lobby of building 7, very jet lagged, and the entire lobby was covered in xkcd comics. The comics were marking the 1000th xkcd (now that I think about it, I'm surprised MIT didn't wait for 1024 to celebrate). There was a big banner and everything. I totally didn't realise it was a hack (which it was, because it's featured on the hack website). I thought that MIT was doing something nice for xkcd, because it is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and it is nerdy, and xkcd is nerdy too. Boy, is MIT nerdy. On my first weekend there was a giant puzzle game happening all over campus. Last weekend there was a cardboard boat regatta in the Zesiger pool, which I did not realise was for boats that should carry people until I saw that photo on the front of the Tech. The regatta is called the "Head of the Zesiger". 

It's not just the big hacks all over campus that make me smile, this is what the fire alarm looks like on the floor above mine at work.

Little nerdy moments are everywhere. It certainly makes walking to work more interesting.

I can't wait until Pi day - I have been assured it will be good. I hope there's pie........

UPDATE: The soldiers are everywhere!