Sunday, October 14, 2007

How MIT Students Spend Evenings

In high school I sometimes wondered what type of environment college would provide me. Would I feel out of place? Immature? Not know how to approach new people? Most of all, what happened late at night when everybody was hanging out? Was I to feel out of place with all of the upperclassmen talking about upperclassmen stuff? What happens in college?!?!?!?

Well, I can't speak for every college, but here's what happens at MIT:

Me: "I wonder what kind of grade you'd get on a physics PSET if you converted all of your distance units to smoots."
Jared: "If I were grading it I'd give you a zero"
Me: "Wouldn't it be better if you gave me zero + an ear?"
Me: "Oh, and have you seen Star Wars? Remember how Han Solo bragged about being able to fly a circuit in a certain amount of Parsecs? A parsec is a distance, how does that work?
Rick: "Just hold the speed constant at C and a Parsec becomes a time, it's just astronomical units."
Me: "Oh, I guess that makes sense."
Rick: "Hey, let's play with google!" (Rick proceeds to take out his laptop and go to google) "Let's Convert!"
Me: "Ok, what are we converting"
Rick: "How about one smoot*angstrom*parsec to gallons?"
Me: "Do it!"

We then proceeded to google every convoluted conversion we could think of. Here are our some of our results (in no particular order):



I recommend doing this sometime, it provides a shocking amount of entertainment. Oh, and remember how I was worried about what college kids talk about? Not so worried anymore, because MIT is a cool place where we talk about cool stuff that matters!

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