I wonder how many people refrained from using an otherwise-useful mailing list because of someone they didn't want thinking about the color of their underwear.
I further wonder if reluctance to talk about their underwear color publicly impacts different genders disproportionately.
I wonder why the top comment in this thread is being downvoted so hard. I could see it being a legitimate concern for some people.
Yes, it seems likely to me that talking about underwear color would prevent some students from using the list and those students would disproportionately be likely to be female, based on my own experiences in engineering school. But I posted what I did specifically because I wanted to see if my suspicions were correct.
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/15/magazine/the-great-ivy-lea...
> ONE AFTERNOON IN THE LATE 1970's, deep in the labyrinthine interior of a massive Gothic tower in New Haven, an unsuspecting employee of Yale University opened a long-locked room in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium and stumbled upon something shocking and disturbing.
> Shocking, because what he found was an enormous cache of nude photographs, thousands and thousands of photographs of young men in front, side and rear poses. Disturbing, because on closer inspection the photos looked like the record of a bizarre body-piercing ritual: sticking out from the spine of each and every body was a row of sharp metal pins.
In case it wasn't clear: several US universities took nude "posture photographs" of most people who attended, and did so for decades. They took the photos in the name of science, but that science was probably junk.
That feels worse than an unofficial email list asking people what colour underwear they have on before accepting their post.
Oh, the interesting people! The interesting projects!
How I wish I had worked harder.
The undergrad population is much to my dismay similar to any American school trained on the professional treadmill; most conversations I overhear involves seniors applying to medical school or law school or consulting or underclassmen discussing Google internships.
To use a Bostonian (maybe NYC too?) metaphor that Bostonians can understand, there are just as many people with Canada Goose jackets on MIT campus as on Newbury Street.
Like any school, it is not a homogenous population, "nerd's paradise" as parodied in the 80's movie "Real Genius"; although there are people who are genuinely interested in tech, there are people who want to pursue academic route who don't care for the Slashdot culture, jocks who are also science nerds, theatre geeks, int'l students who don't get the "American geek" culture...
The only real insight I can offer in a Computational Biology class I audited, I've never seen so many interruptions in lecture when the professor is flying through the slides on the derivation of this algorithm and that proof. Hands fly up right there asking for clarification on what is this greek variable on the previous slide... whereas during the same undergrad class I took years ago, none of us would have spoken on the spot due to lack of confidence to avoid looking dumb/lack of drive to try to understand something right there on the spot.
As a person who dropped out of high school and never went to college, i've worked on big art builds involving mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, software engineering, thermodynamics, biotech, and mixed media art. The only thing i've ever worked hard on are these projects, which were all for fun.
I'm sure a school like MIT is great, but thankfully you don't need it :-)
I can only imagine the volume of email that entails; how do people deal with it? I would guess that these days the mailing lists are through Google Groups so you can at least turn off emails and use the list as a forum, but I doubt most would know or bother to do that and let themselves drown in email.
... Try to sort through it when you are bored... Realize you don't get anything out of it anymore -> Un-Subscribe to EC-Discuss email list.
Clarification: EC-Discuss = East Campus (of MIT) discussion email list... it is known for this mass email of random nature.
people just make filters.
I'm sorry, but I don't feel the need to qualify that statement. This is just one of those absolutely crazy projects that people do from time to time (although MIT certainly has a reputation for hosting a lot of them), and I love that sort of thing. As much as we talk up the importance of Bayes' theorem and other algorithms as things that can change the world, etc., sometimes, you can just build something cool, and have a laugh.
Also, of course it was Senior Haus which had the highest prevalence of black underwear.
more seriously, The OP seems to be inspired by a well-established tradition at the institute--MIT's sand mandala, perhaps. I graduated in 1992 and i remember some of my classmates from time to time, engaging in self-assigned projects that (i) seemed to lack any discernible purpose or utility whatever--certainly none for the student and (ii) that required a mind-boggling amount of meticulous effort. Somehow seeing these two attributes juxtaposed in a single endeavor, was hilarious to us (likewise the OP). Sometimes, though not always, these projects were deemed "pranks" but separate in my view.
