Hacks
Because of its height and visibility from the Boston Back Bay neighborhood across the Charles River Basin, plus its rectangular grid of large (6 ft. wide x 8 ft. high) single-pane windows forming a crude 9 x 18 dot-matrix display, the Green Building has been the site of many hacks or pranks. In 1993, one widely viewed hack repurposed the 9 top-floor windows as an enormous digital VU meter for the traditional Fourth of July concert of the Boston Pops orchestra. Several other simpler hacks have used the entire window array for stationary displays; this practice is sufficiently commonplace to have acquired the term greenspeak (which should not be confused with the famously obscure Delphic pronouncements of former Federal Reserve Bank chairman Alan Greenspan).
In September 2011, hackers installed 153 (= 9 x 17) custom-made wirelessly controlled color-changing high-power LED lights into every window above the first floor. They displayed a waving American flag throughout the evening of September 11, 2011 in remembrance of the September 11 attacks of 2001. For a short time in the early morning of September 12, the lights displayed a Tetris game, thus realizing a long-standing hack proposal, the "Holy Grail" of hacks. The display hardware had occasional glitches, and was removed as of September 13. The hardware and software designs were further developed and refined for better reliability. On April 20, 2012, MIT hackers successfully turned the Green Building into a huge, playable Tetris game, operated from a wireless control podium at a comfortable viewing distance in front of the building. Visitors to Campus Preview Weekend (a gathering for admitted prospective freshman students) were invited to play the game on the colossal display grid (80 ft. wide x 250 ft. high), which was claimed to be the second-largest full-color video display in the US.
Instead of a one-shot temporary installation, the hackers have designed and built a permanent facility that can be re-used repeatedly by the MIT community. An understanding has been reached with the EAPS Department, which is headquartered in the Green Building, to allow the light display hardware to remain installed in each window. To avoid annoying the occupants and to allow late-working staff to "opt out," each light display is equipped with a manual override button, which will disable the pixel lighting for that window for several hours after it is pressed. In addition, the hackers have released Open Source software tools used to develop new display patterns, so that others can design and deploy new stationary or animated images, in cooperation with the hacker engineers.
As a prototype feasibility demonstration, the Tech Model Railroad Club, located in Building N52, had, years earlier, added a scale model of the Green Building to its HO scale model railroad layout. Passersby inside Building N52 can play a monochromatic version of Tetris via remote control, accompanied by authentic-sounding music, even when the Club is closed.
Other hacks utilize the height of the building, such as a 1974 failed attempt to operate a giant yoyo from the roof of the tower. Launching of projectiles from the roof is strongly discouraged, due to the unpredictable high wind gusts, posing a serious danger to passersby, and residents of nearby East Campus dormitory.
Read more about this topic: Green Building (MIT)
Famous quotes containing the word hacks:
“The American, if he has a spark of national feeling, will be humiliated by the very prospect of a foreigner’s visit to Congress—these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous, and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage, these persons are a reflection on the democratic process rather than of it; they expose it in its process rather than of it; they expose it in its underwear.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“In literary circles, the men of trust and consideration, bookmakers, editors, university deans and professors, bishops, too, were by no means men of the largest literary talent, but usually of a low and ordinary intellectuality, with a sort of mercantile activity and working talent. Indifferent hacks and mediocrities tower, by pushing their forces to a lucrative point, or by working power, over multitudes of superior men, in Old as in New England.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.”
—John Berryman (1914–1972)