What are you doing for winter break?

In a few hours, I'm getting on a plane to go to an anonymous part of Florida, where the high is supposed to be 78 degrees today. Awesome. On the 26th, I fly to San Francisco, and then will spend New Year's weekend skiing in Lake Tahoe. My coworkers are all spreading around the country (and world, Libby) over the weekend.

The blog's been kind of slow lately; use the comments to tell us what you're doing for winter break.

I mean, obviously you guys are going to be filling out your reply paperwork and sending it in, so you'll be spending a lot of time thinking carefully about your choices for dorms and whatnot, but maybe there are some other things you'll be doing, too. Any fun family holiday traditions you want to share?

Only at The University of Chicago...

Other universities have Nobel Prize winners. None have as many as we do, as you've probably read and heard countless times.

Walking through the hallway just now I almost collided with James Heckman, a recent Nobel Laureate in economics. See: http://jenni.uchicago.edu/

This is actually the second time this has happened to Mr. Heckman and I since I started working here two years ago.

What am I trying to say? Well, if you come here, THIS WILL HAPPEN TO YOU, TOO. ALL THE TIME.

Les finances, en francais

Les merite scholarshipes - There was incorrect information posted on the financial aid website that said we generally send merit scholarships with decisions. Not true! We send them only with our regular notification decisions, because the scholarship committee meets in March. Scholarship recipients who are admitted regular notification will get their scholarship notification in their admit packet. Scholarship recipients who were admitted early action will just get an envelope with their scholarship notification. So wait for the mail!

Sometimes there is a rumour that accepting your offer of admission early will take you out of the scholarship running. This is not true for us—I had many students last year who accepted their offers in February or March and who still got scholarships. Well, not many, because we don't give out many, but a few. So, accept your offer, get into Snell-Hitchcock, and rest assured that you are still in the scholarship running.

Le financial aide - Your financial aid letters should come late next week. We're sorry it won't be any sooner, but you should get your estimate before you have to click submit for your regular notification applications.

Welcome to The University of Chicago Class of 2012

Some of you may have stumbled upon this site already if you recently received electronic notification of your admission to the Class of 2012.

Please let me add, on behalf of my co-bloggers, my welcome to that of Dean O'Neill's: Welcome to The University of Chicago community. We are happy that you are with us.

Now that decisions are out, this blog will start to become more active. Tell us what you'd like to hear!

AND CONGRATULATIONS!

OMG, it's suddenly a year later!

We're getting this blog ready for the Class of 2012, some of whom will be picked later this winter. For their edification, I am going to leave up the entire ThickEnvelope blog from last year. There's some pretty funny stuff. However, there are also some changes. Here are the notable improvements we've made to the enrollment process for this year.

• Students can edit their ENTIRE housing application online until July 1. Last year, you could only edit your housing application by emailing an overworked staff member in the housing office.
• All students must fill out their housing application online. Except for wait listed and transfer students, there is no paper housing application.
• Students will not have the option of commuting for their first year
• Students will not have to fill out any family information when they enroll -- that will come later
• We will not provide the Outstanding Teacher nomination form on ThickEnvelope -- that will also come later
• All first-year students will be provided with a pony
  

So, read the fun stuff from last year, and don't necessarily believe the technical stuff, because it may have changed.

Later... Jk, I will not leave up the entire blog, but will reveal stuff as time goes on.

JUDGMENT DAY!

Judgment Day is the culmination of about 80 - 90 hours of effort on the part of all the Scav Hunt teams. If we count individual man/woman hours over the four day period for all of the captains, page captains, road trip members, devoted team members, and others and multiply it by the nine participating teams, we have a large number. My back-of-the-envelope estimates suggest about 30,000 hours, give or take 10% or 15%, excluding the work of the judges. That's pretty damn sweet. It's also irrelevant to the present discussion, which concerns Judgment Day!

Judgment Day starts at 10:00 am (supposedly). As rule 11 says "Like in the Bible, Judgment Day should take, like, 45 minutes." I don't remember that from the Bible, but the Judges may have read it more carefully than I have. Anyway, it is outrageously wishful thinking. I arrived at Judgment at about 10:15 and left at 4:30. The winner wasn't announced until sometime after 6:30. On the other hand... In a non-literal interpretation of the account in Genesis (i.e., "it's not really exactly seven of our days"), we might be able to translate 45 minutes in the Bible into about eight or nine hours of regular time... But this is not an exercise in Biblical interpretation. For that, you should talk to Libby (AB '05 - Religious Engineering and Symbological Engineering).

The first items to be judged are the Road Trip items. Then the Judges judge the "Showcase Items," which are marked on the list with a dagger (e.g., 234, 256, and others). Finally the Judges get to the regular items, which we will see later. Here the Max P team is setting up. The road trip captain is one of the three people in this picture in green. Marvin is sitting on the floor in the front as he and Jeremy and I talk about Ted Stevens' internet, which no one had built.



The Thinker, in duct tape, holding a hand grenade. If you can tell me which item this is, I would be grateful because I can't find it. I took a picture a few days ago of this item under construction. I think the artist did a pretty excellent job.



The Gingerbread House of Ill-repute (item 71). I suppose the White House is a house of ill-repute for some people. I do not know whether the roof could be removed to reveal generous donors sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom, but I didn't want to touch it and risk breaking it. That would not have made me very popular with the team.



How many items can you find in this picture? I keep finding more! The pancakes in the page captain's hand are item 59 - "Pat Robertson's Age Defying Protein Pancakes," (another page captain actually took a bite of said pancakes and I wish I had taken a picture of his face), the bicycle in the background is item 38, the "triple-high" bicycle, you will also recognize item 3, the "dixie cup icosahedron," and on the ground in front of the trunk is item 214 "a chainsaw carving of a chainsaw" (ok, kind of... but it counted!). The trunk itself is an item I'm not finding on the list right now. You had to have as many of your team members as possible stand on a 'dead man's chest', and had to prove that it belonged to someone who was actually dead. Oh there's another one too: right next to the chainsaw carving of a chainsaw is the homemade theremin.



This item ruled. Item 55 - "Construct the periodic table in its native table form: a coffee table." This was worth 25 points, plus bonus points for each element (or compound including the element) included on the table. It looks like they found more than 40 elements. No other team did a job that good. At least one team just drew a periodic table on a coffee table and put some quarters and pennies on their various elements. Lame. Note that they did not get the lanthanides or actinides. Too bad.



Another view of this same amazing coffee table.



This was a funny item, not so much for what it was as for what people said about it. Items 300 and 301 were 3-D twister and 4-D twister respectively. Of course the first thing everyone said about "3-D" twister was something like this: 'well regular twister is played in two dimensions plus time, so it IS 3-D twister!' If you needed any more evidence that you are going to attend a nerdy school... well, you probably don't, especially now.



The John Wilkes Photo Booth. Ha ha.



Item 153 - "I know how much you like clowns, so I built you this bed. Now you can laugh yourself to sleep! (70 points)" I think this is making reference to a movie, but I can't remember which one. Anyway, here is another scary clown bed.



The Internet according to Ted Stevens. This one is better than Max P's, probably because they actually put it together before Judgment Day. "It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes." I keep quoting that because I keep finding it funny.



Four-trampoline Simon. Item 256 - a Showcase Item. Not just for show either... every team built a working Simon made out of trampolines. The problem with Max Palevsky's was that it did not notice if you made the wrong move, but most other teams fixed that.



In this picture you can see three versions of the coolest item in the Hunt this year: the Strandbeest. The one closest to the camera was the coolest. I linked to a few pictures and videos of this item yesterday and I will say again that it's one of the best ScavHunt items I have seen in seven years. While some of them had to be pushed along by groups of three or more people, the Strandbeest in the foreground practically walked under its own power. It needed just the slightest push to start actually walking. I wish I had taken a video, but at this point my camera was running out of space and battery power.



Max P's effort. The creator is in the red shirt to Louis' right. While this contraption looks like it might just fall apart, it actually worked.



This one walked... kind of. It was far, far too heavy to be very graceful, but it did technically move, albeit with some human help.



A close-up of the really awesome Strandbeest, with another Judgment phenomenon underneath - a sleeping Scavvie. Despite the high level of noise and light, people could be seen basically passed out all over Ida Noyes. After staying up for 70 hours, you'd probably do the same. This guy was probably protecting his beautiful creation too, which he had walked over to Judgment from his dorm. Full points for these guys.



Ha! You call that a 'Wheel of Fish'? We'll show you a real Wheel of Fish in a little while.



Here Judgment actually gets underway. The Judge on the left is quizzing the Road Trip captain about the items. Because all of the Judges are in Chicago for the whole Hunt, Road Trip teams take pictures and videos of their various items.



Item 310 - "Solve a Rubik's Cube with your feet, and no cheating like the dastardly Michael Gondry." Michael Gondry is a French director whose most notable film is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. You'll see another picture of this same guy working on the same project taken about three or four hours later. It's not easy to solve the Rubik's Cube with your feet, but it was worth a whole 15 points.



Now THIS is a Wheel of Fish. Item 126 - "Wheel of Fish! [U62/2 points.]" Why build such an elaborate contraption for such a small-point item? Because it's cool. As you can guess from the picture, just building a wheel and painting some fish on it would be considered very lame. People on the Max P team bought three fish to put on the wheel itself for Judgment Day. Unfortunately when the time came two of the fish had disappeared. Who stole the Red Snapper? Who stole the other fish? We will never know. Anyway, as you can see this fish is much too large to nail to the wheel. What was the solution?



Ew. That is the solution. Chop the fish up into pieces with a machete. Ew.



This is about the most disgusting thing I have ever done - definitely top five or ten. This fish was dead, frozen solid, and actually quite tough. It was NOT easy to cut. Basically I had to swing at it with the machete a few times to cut pieces off.



Once the fish had been cut into pieces, it had to be nailed to the Wheel of Fish. This was also pretty nasty. While this was not a Showcase item, we decided it would be best if we left it outside. In the end it was judged about three or four hours after the fish was nailed up. You can imagine how it smelled then. We did spin the Wheel of Fish for the judge, which he found very amusing. If you want more of this nastiness, I am pictured in this issue of the Chicago Maroon nailing a chunk of fish to the wheel (it's on page 8 or 9). Let us never speak of this again!



The World's Largest Newton's cradle! I would reprint the supplementary letter (which I cannot describe on a family blog), but it is highly inappropriate. Rest assured that it was very, very funny.



Inside the Hall of Judgment, which is where you all stored your luggage during our first overnight program.



When Judgment of regular items began, each Judge was assigned a page (here is the page 10 Judge), teams looked for the pages they wanted judged, prepared the items, invited the Judge over and had them evaluated. Because our Internet according to Ted Stevens was taking up a lot of space, we decided to have page 10 judged first. Here we are sending "internets" to ourselves using this "series of tubes." (In case you haven't read the wikipedia article about this, Ted Stevens used the phrase "an internet" when he meant to say "an email" or "a message," and for this he has been relentlessly made fun of (for good reason!).)



The Page 10 Judge talks to the Page 10 Page Captain about the Four My Little Ponies of the Apocalypse (on the table in the foreground). (Item 204)



Using a strobe light we make droplets of water stand still. You can't tell, but they were.



A Page Captain and a Judge.



A home-made theremin is at the bottom right. At the top is "The Anarchists' Cook-book, complete with the Anarchists' Crock-pot." Ha ha ha. I can't find it on the list right now, but it's there.



Now THIS is the sweetest series of pictures I have. "Item 134 - Diet Coke and Mentos Jetpack." If you have never put a mentos in a diet coke, you should try it but BE CAREFUL. You will get soaked if you are not careful. If you have, you already know what I am talking about. You can find videos on YouTube easily enough. (There's one in which a guy pretends to die, which is silly, to which a response has been posted which is even lamer - don't watch those.) Anyway, Louis and Alan devised a pretty cool method for creating Diet Coke and Mentos Missiles. There are probably liability issues involved with my describing it in detail, so you'll have to ask them yourselves. Here they have started the reaction and are shaking the bottle to make it more intense. They will wait until the top of the cap starts to bulge from the pressure in the bottle, then they will unscrew it a little bit and then...


They throw it right at the ground. The cap blasts off and the bottle takes off like a rocket. I saw this with my own eyes. This bottle went 20 or 30 feet into the air and over 50 feet horizontally. I really, really wish I had taken a video instead of just a picture. This was probably taken about a quarter second after the bottle hit the ground. You can kind of tell that it is moving quickly because it's blurrier than the rest of the picture. If you are going to try something like this at home, be really, really, really careful. Louis (on the left) almost got blasted in the chest by a flying Diet Coke bottle on Saturday night as he and Alan (on the right) practiced.



Here is where the bottle came to rest. It actually landed about one foot away from a tourist taking pictures of Rockefeller Chapel. He looked at us with shock and horror, as if to say "you almost killed me... with a bottle of Diet Coke!" Before he could recover from his surprise, we picked up the coke bottle (= "the murder weapon") and ran back into Ida Noyes. That was a COOL item.



These fools tried to make an actual jet pack. I gave them a box of our Mentos... unfortunately they didn't really know what they were doing. Their plan was to drop the mentos into the bottles, close them, let the reaction get started and then open them again. I warned them that it would move much to quickly for that, but they didn't believe me.



As soon as the Mentos were added to the Diet Coke, all the carbon dioxide came out of the solution, bringing most of the Diet Coke with it. They succeeded in completely soaking this guy in coke, but not in anything else. Nice work!



He he he... Item 122 - "A painting of Invader Zim's [ = President Zimmer's] mama. Note: mama must be depicted with the wings and teeth of an African bat, a glass eye with a fish in it, a peg-leg with a kick-stand, and an afro with a chinstrap." These, of course, are components of your-mama jokes (and of a song by that name by the Pharcyde). Previous ScavHunt lists always involved President Don Randel, who was referred to as Tony Randall. Bob Zimmer's tenure (so far) has been a bit stormier, shall we say, so the Judges are not being quite as nice. I hope they donated it to the President when Judgment finished...



At least four hours later the Rubik's Cube is still unsolved, but he's getting closer.



And this was the last picture I took before leaving to go home with Judgment far from over (it was about 4:30 at this point). Someone was supposed to jump out of this cake and probably did, but I had no space on my camera, no battery power and no energy. Happy 21st Birthday, Scav Hunt!



In the end, the winner was announced at about 6:30 or 7:00 pm, about 9 hours after Judgment began. Snell-Hitchcock was victorious, beating out Max P by about 200 points (out of about 4,000). While this was sad, it is not good to have any one team win too frequently, and many of my friends who are graduating this year have now promised to come back next year to ensure that Max P beats Snell-Hitchcock. They will not be satisfied until victory is ours again!

Max Palevsky came in second and The FIST (Federation of Independent Scavenger Hunt Teams) came in third. This is notable and important... The FIST has made great strides since coming into existence about five years ago. It's good to have a third serious contender to balance out the recent dominance of Snell and Max P. My hope is that when the New Dorm opens in two years it will have an enthusiastic community of ScavHunt participants and so will be a third serious contender. We will see! If you are living in Shoreland next year, be sure to participate! From winning as recently as seven years ago they have fallen to second to last place this year. They should do better. (When I'm not working in admissions I'm a ScavAnalyst for ESPN...)

To conclude, I hope you have all enjoyed my chronicle of the Hunt and are excited about participating next year!

Saturday PM/Monday AM

[Note - I put up four or five posts today and restored the pictures to the post about Snell-Hitchcock's Headquarters from Friday which I had to remove over the weekend. Also, Libby put up an actually-important announcement from the Housing Office for any of you who wanted to change your housing preferences. Those items are all at the bottom of this page.]

At midnight on Saturday night while on campus for other reasons, I decided to check out the activity at Max P's ScavQuarters. While I knew there would be people around, I thought you might not believe me unless I provided photographic proof.

As you can see, the room is still a mess. If anything the mess gets worse and worse with each passing hour towards judgment day. There was a lot of activity both inside and out. And remember - it's Saturday night. There is no homework on Saturday night.



Daniel works on the 'strandbeest'. This item had the highest point value of any item. Since I didn't know what a 'strandbeest' was until Judgment Day, I will provide a few links. (See this for a wikipedia article, plus a cool YouTube video here and the last fifteen seconds or so of this one, plus an explanatory/technical video here.) As the judges confess in the Maroon today, they were worried that no one would build one, but in fact EVERY team did, with varying degrees of success. You will see more pictures tomorrow when I post about Judgment Day. This item is one of the coolest I have seen in seven ScavHunts.



The world's largest Newton's Cradle. At this point the 'letter to the previous record-holder' (see item 116) which earned 25 bonus points had already been written.



A pile of junk, illuminated by lights so that Scavvies can work all night long. In the foreground is trampoline Simon (item 256).



Page Captains and Team Captains confer about some important issue. At this point most of these people have not slept more than a hours since about 2:00 am on Thursday morning.



On my way out I saw this enticing bed... but decided to leave it available for a more deserving person.



Tomorrow!

JUDGMENT DAY! Including... The Wheel of Fish, Louis and Alan almost killing a tourist with a flying coke bottle, many awesome scenes... and more.

Saturday PM: The Scav Olympics!

[A Note - After remaining neutral for two days, it was at this point that I decided to start helping my old team, Max Palevsky. If you feel this compromises my journalistic objectivity and integrity, you are absolutely right!]

The first event in the ScavOlympics was 'Super Mario Street Luge'. That's not what the judges called it, but that's what it was. This is item five on the ScavOlympics list. Max P's contender is second from the left, wearing a helmet and some really snazzy white pants (which, by the way, he liked so much he didn't take them off for a while after the race).



All the competitors take their places at the starting line. Even though this will spoil the ending, the guy at the top left with two black plungers was so good at this I have only to suspect that he is a champion Super Mario Street Luge-r. He beat all of the other competitors by many, many lengths.



And they're off. The above-mentioned Street Luge Machine from Snell-Hitchcock took off with the assistance of his rocket-powered plungers and had basically finished the course by this point. Louis (pictured here) showed grit and determination. Sadly it was at about this time that he ate a rock accidentally. He finished third.



On the final stretch! I don't know who is in second place, but whoever that person is he or she does not look as cool as the first or third place finishers. Style points matter, as you all know.



At the finish line, Louis celebrates. You can't tell because he's still tied to the skateboard.



As I'm sure you can guess if you are following along on the list, this is item 1 on the Olympics list: "Whip it. Whip it good." The object was to whip only the middle bottle in a group of three and leave the other two standing up. Unfortunately none of the contestants were any good at this game, so I'm not going to waste much space on it.



Nope, you missed.



And you missed too.



This dude issues a challenge, I think. Or maybe he's saying 'no one is any good at this game, so let's do something else'.



Something else indeed! This guy from the Max P team (whose name is Hercules (or Herakles, actually)) is chilling out waiting for event #4: "Foot race, only your feet are watermelons."



This event is item 7: "We whisper, you draw, you write, you draw, you write, we read. It's four person telephone Pictionary." The results were funny in the end, but I don't remember them and there's not much to look at, so I didn't waste pictures.



Now this was much more fun. Item 2 - RPS 25. That, for the unitiated, is Rock, Paper, Scissors - 25, i.e., a Rock-Paper-Scissors-like game with 25 different hand signs. As it says in the item description, "you'd better have the rules (and the moves) down." Because I know all of you are going to be curious, that information is provided here. What really surprised me is that all of the players and most observers really DID learn all the rules. For example, the axe reflects the light of the moon, so axe beats moon. (Yeah... some of the outcomes don't really make any sense, but that's ok.)



The first two players step up to the line. As you can see, they are all business. The guy on the right is thinking 'I'm going to Rock-Paper-Scissors your ass all the way back home to your momma'. You can see it on his face if you look closely.



I think this is Sponge vs. Monkey. If it is, the guy on the left wins, because "monkey tears up sponge." See the rules above if you don't believe me. These two players also threw the same sign three times in their round, which was impressive.



A captain in a fetching ball gown takes on someone who is not in a fetching ball gown. Too bad for him.



Oh the excitement! This was a higher-tension game than you might expect, as you can see on the captain's face. What sign is he making? I can't really tell.



I thought this was alien vs. alien, but the sign of the person on the right is not so clear. Maybe it's nuke? If it's not a tie, then she wins (because "alien defuses nuke"). You should all learn the rules of this game and introduce it to your high schools. We need a new and more complicated way of settling trivial disputes than RPS-3.



Item 6: "Needed: One Geometrician, one straight edge and one compass. Only the straight edge and compass... are people?!" None of the other teams had a chance to beat Max P's team. The guy in the green jacket is a high school geometry teacher (and recent alum). The girl in the pink (Agnes) is our secret weapon, as you will see in a second.



Ha! That's a straight edge. The task was to find the perpendicular bisector of a line marked with a string on the ground. Of course we just traced two arcs from the ends of the line (I picked Agnes up and turned her towards the center while someone held her foot to make an arc) to find their intersection, which marks the bisection point, and then found a perpendicular line through that point. Easy.



The point of intersection of the two arcs.



Now we have the midpoint...



Here we double-check our results. Just so you know, we were one inch off on one side and right on on the other. Go us.



While this was going on the watermelon foot race got underway. You will notice that some runners are facing backwards. They were ordered to do this because the judges judged that their feet were not actually watermelons. The guys on the ends, for example, had cut entirely through so their feet were sticking out the bottom.



Cool Herc leads the way to the finish line!



And the aftermath.



Three-legged limbo gets underway (item 3). This is much harder than you might imagine, though not at this height.



Round 2: Still pretty easy.



Snell-Hitchcock gets disqualified (for bending at the waist and touching a knee to the ground).



Oops. They did not make it.



Oral Jenga (item 8)... The judges are sick and devious. Fortunately, the competitors were amazing and the game lasted for a while.



Max P's man was an Oral Jenga machine into the 20th round.



The tower starts to fall... Can he hold it?



No! Damn!



This girl lasted for 23 rounds. I don't think I can play 23 rounds of regular jenga with my hands.



Alas, victory was not hers.



After TWENTY FOUR rounds, this girl won. Amazing. (And behind them is Eckhart Hall, where you will take your math placement tests in September. Yippee!)



The final ScavOlympics item: "Teams of two should bring their sledge and shifgrethor to compete in this year's ScavOlympics." Here the contestants take the starting line. Snell-Hitchcock's 'sledge' was a shopping cart. Other teams objected that wheels were a bit unfair. When the judges allowed them to proceed, one team tied a skateboard to the bottom of its sledge. Max P (at the right) stayed with our sled-sledge because that was the spirit of the item. Snell's shopping car did have a fire-extinguisher propulsion mechanism on the back which actually worked. Unfortunately I did not get to take any pictures. Mad props for that, Snell-Hitchcock.



These men could pull an elephant up a mountain... Fortunately here they were only pulling Agnes, who weighs much, much less than an elephant. Louis runs along beside them and offers words of encouragement.



The passenger is half-smiling/half-crying because the back of the sled is beginning to melt a bit from the heat so it's no longer very comfortable. At this point Max P's heroic champions are well ahead of anyone else who is actually pulling a sledge, though they are behind Snell's shopping cart.



The END. We win! Hoorah! This concludes the ScavOlympics. Now, on to Judgment Day!



Later today and tomorrow:

1. Midnight at Max P.
2. Judgment Day.