April 1, 1994 THE CAROLINA BICENTENNIAL OPEN HOUSE or "The greatest threat to UNC Chapel Hill since the Civil War" ========================================================================== On Saturday, April 9, UNC Chapel Hill will host a campus-wide "open house." They will throw open the doors of all the buildings, (leaving Physical Plant one heck of a job the next day trying to put them back in place) and anybody will be allowed to walk in and take a look around. Anybody. The beer-guzzlers from fraternity court. Pit preachers. The guy who lives next to you and plays Metallica at 120 dB at three in the morning. Duke students. Unfortunately, this bodes ill for our normally tranquil and peaceful Department of Computer Science. You see, there was a survey taken of visitors at the Friday Center, and out of all the planned events around campus, [I am NOT making this part up] all of them picked our Virtual Reality demos as their number one choice of things to see. All of them. The number one choice. You don't have to be a Ph.D. student to figure out what this means. For those of you who haven't passed the DWE [or POQE] yet, let me mention a bit of history. Carolina has never held an open house previously, but I've been through one before. I did my undergraduate work in Berkeley, the only city in the nation that has a foreign policy. Once every five years or so they hold a "Cal Open House" where 30,000 to 40,000 crazed souls storm the campus. Every department works hard to put on displays to entertain all of these guests (and I do mean entertain; if this Second Coming of the Mongol Horde wanted *knowledge*, we'd funnel them into the library instead). It's a big pain in the you-know-where, and it takes a few weeks before the lawns look green again. For this particular open house, two friends and I pulled an all-nighter creating [I am NOT making this part up] two jello models of transistors. We made a BJT (Bipolar Jello Transistor) and a JFET (Jello Field Effect Transistor). You see, our illustrious team leader was inspired by reading a SIGGRAPH paper about ray-tracing jello... She didn't realize it was a parody, so we were stuck boiling and coloring six dozen packs of jello, using ice packs to cool the layers down and hair dryers to melt together new layers. This is a little different from doping silicon wafers. The only neat thing about this process was that you could see actual diffusion between the different layers. Unfortunately, this subtlety was lost on the average six-year-old that looked at it ("Can I eat it?"). However, Paul Heckbert, the author of the parody paper, thought it was neat, so all was not lost. Overall, there are probably stupider reasons to pull all-nighters, but I haven't heard of any. Anyway, back to the present. Now UNC is about to hold an Open House. And the CS Department is the prime target. Ground zero. The E-ticket ride to end all E-ticket rides. Even though, in my opinion, other departments are holding demonstrations that are far more attractive and interesting. For example, a little-known fact about this University is that we have a top-notch traffic safety department. No, I'm not talking about the parking lot Mafia who collect billions each year in campus parking tickets. I mean the ones who study automobile accidents. They are going to demonstrate the importance of safety belts and air bags by putting two volunteers into a Pinto, one side with a seat belt and air bag, and the other without either, then smashing the Pinto head-on into the Chancellor's residence. Shortly afterwards, there will be a live demonstration of the "Flight for Life" helicopter that will airlift the survivors to NC Memorial Hospital. See? Much more exciting. But unfortunately they all want to come HERE, to Sitterson Hall. In a way, it's our own damn fault. We could have been like most other computer science departments around the country, which in our situation would offer nice lectures on NP-completeness or error propagation analysis. The visitors would flee faster than IBM has been shedding employees. Then we would be left in peace to do the important work that we always do, like read news and play bolo. Faced with this situation, what would a reasonable graduate student do? Well, the smartest have already made plans to be out of town that day, but the rest of us will have to stick it out and weather the storm. Having ingested the necessary hallucinogenic drugs (six cans of Mountain Dew), let me share with you my vision of April 9th: 10am The doors to Sitterson Hall fly open outward, smashing the first few visitors who camped out all night to be the first in line. 10:01 The remaining thousands stream in, stomping on top of the crumpled bodies of those who were first in line. 10:30 University officials chase away the CSA officers who were charging $5 admission ($10 if you came from Duke or State). Even so, los co-presidentes (or should that be locos presidentes?) Mark and Eileen report that enough money has been gathered to "run TGIFs until the year 2009." 10:45 In the 011 teleclassroom, a special program to help people who have phobias about computers begins. The program includes films like 2001, Demon Seed, and The Lawnmower Man. 11:00 Colab tours begin, with two graduate student guides: "Hi, welcome to the Colab. This is where we use computers to help us work together. Now we going to start by showing off a nifty routine that I developed..." "You didn't write that. I did." "What do you mean? This is all my work!" "No it's not. You took all your ideas from me." "Did not!" "Did too!" "Liar!" [General scuffle and melee ensues.] 11:30 A group of Nintendo-trained 12-year-olds wastes our finest hackers in a lively game of Xtrek that takes up all the machines in the Glab. "It's hard to compete once you get old," confessed one shaken hacker. "I'm not seventeen any more, you know." noon A live demonstration of the highly effective Sitterson fire alarm system is provided by a visitor nuking a bagel in the 3rd floor microwave. 12:45pm Pit preachers screaming about the evil influence of "daemons" lurking everywhere inside our computers are politely escorted away from the graphics lab and sent into the 011 teleclassroom. 1:00 Free VR pregnancy tests are performed by the ultrasound group in the HMD lab. 1:10 The demonstrations of scanning in paper money and printing copies on the color printer prove to be very popular. 1:20 Mary Louise's son, Johnny is very interested in the Information Highway (whatever the heck that is), so a grad student sets him up with an Internet connection. 1:35 Mary Louise discovers Johnny reading alt.sex.necrophilia, and revokes Johnny's driver's license on the Information Highway. 1:47 Crews begin cleaning up the glass from the door between the Glab and the video editing suite, caused by a missed 360 degree windmill slam on the nerf hoop that used to hang on the door. 2:00 A special recruiting session for prospective graduate students begins: "Now look at Simon. He's been here for seven years, doesn't have a topic yet, and he could make more money frying burgers at Hardees. Do you want this to happen to you? DO YOU?" 2:15 The CSA pads its bank account further by selling aspirin at $1 per pill to visitors who just finished wearing the ceiling HMD. 2:30 The recruiting of prospective graduate students continues, with the explanation that students who want more than an MS but aren't quite ready to pursue a Ph.D. can go for the newly formed post-MS degree (also known as the PMS). 2:45 Tourists who looked through the various optical devices in the basement vision lab discover that they have "black eye" ring marks around both eyes. 3:30 Bill Howell and University Police inform some newly-obese visitors that Department Macintoshes are not souvenirs to be taken home. 3:45 CS department alumni gather to reminisce about the "good old days" when all the machines were VAXen named after dwarves: dopey, grumpy, happy, sleepy, sleazy, hungry, and horny. 4:00 The SARCOS arm in the Glab retires as the undefeated arm-wrestling champion of the entire building. Hey, it could happen. So you had better watch. ========================================================================= This message has been sponsored by the letters 'N', 'S', and 'F', and the numbers one, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero...