Giant beer pong

The ingenious engineering students organized a fun, interactive "prank" accessible to every student at the college and harmless, while also being college-themed and lightly edgy. I admire the design, style, and execution of this idea.

Beer pong, but: giant. Sober. With enormous slingshots firing volleyballs into red-cup-clothed garbage cans!

It turned out to require a lot of knowledge about current wind conditions. Many trials were necessary to figure out a good angle and distance to get an even reasonable-looking parabola towards the targets.

In conclusion, this was an Extremely College "prank", more like an interactive performance art piece or, frankly, a game. No binge drinking required, all daylight-hours wholesome fun. Adorable. Students here are fantastic.


This post's theme word is endogenous (adj), "originating from within." I admire and am impressed by students' endogenous creativity and ability to execute ideas.

If you could give Turing machines one bonus feature, what would it be?

I like to give students the opportunity to be creative. Partially this is because I am noble and committed to good pedagogy practices and all that; partly it is for my own amusement. (Students had to create Twitter bots for my amusement, too --- you can see them here, Twitter login required.)

If you could give Turing machines one bonus feature, what would it be?

Some people were practical:

• I would add a more streamlined ability to count.
• Ctrl-F find value
• Writing proofs for me.
• remember marked spot (instead of needing to mark)
• Its head can go to any position on the tape instantly without having to step through the middle steps.
• to be able to jump to a location in the tape not right next to where the head is

Others were silly:

• snack dispenser
• a cool spoiler (illustration below)

• funny hats (illustration below)

• dance a jig

Some were infeasible:

• Always halt for every problem. [editor's note: provably impossible, you impertinent youth!]

And some were downright haunting:

• Express feelings. It would be nice to know how TM feels when in runs forever. Would it be sad? happy? bored? [editor's note: how would the TM know it is running forever? it could just be churning and doing real computation...]
• consciousness

By far the one that struck the deepest chord and has followed me, hounding me into my dreams, was: "teeth." Yikes.

This post's theme word is stenophagous (adj), "feeding on a limited variety of food." The zookeeper found the dietary needs of TMs a challenge; they were among the most stenophagous charges at the mathematical-hypothetical petting zoo.