This post will only make sense to Oliners, and that's okay.
Eric VanWyk, Chandra Little, Juliana Bernalostos-Boy, and myself (all Olin '07) held Alumni Storytime in EH tonight with a crowd of students. Two things (among many) that came up were the Psimulink Psalm [slides] and [accompanying missal] and Rhomeo and Julihat [pdf].
We were looking earlier on the Olin Alumni facebook group for the files, and found them (as you can see). We present them here for posterity. Have fun.
The Psimulink Psalm is a prank that Eric and I played on our first-year professors (Gill Pratt and Brian Storey) at the end of our "Freshmen Learn About Electrons" class (which has, through the years, been called ModCon, ModSim, ECS, and a host of other names we can no longer recall). Every single lab in that class was the occasion for a mass all-nighter by nearly the entire first-year batch. So when the last lab had been turned in, Eric strode into the classroom dressed in black with a reverend's collar, and the students (who had been handed missals earlier by Mel) rose and held a memorial service for the labs. This featured text such as:
Yea, though we walk through the shadow of the valley of nonfunctional data acquisition cards, we fear not MATLAB, for thou art with us. Thy jumper wires and thy pliers, they comfort us.
Gill and Brian fell over laughing and made us reprise it for the other sections of the course. We reprised it once again when Eric and I were NINJAs two years later. We now present it to future generations in case it is ever once again useful.
Rhomeo and Julihat has been mentioned earlier on this blog, but not uploaded. It's a math play. I'll quote:
But, soft! What flux through yonder plane doth break? It is the E, and julihat is the source. It is my lady, O, it is my love! O, that she knew that both being equivalent to "it," by the commutative property, my lady and my love must be likewise equivalent! See, how her hand lies tangent to her cheek! O, that I were the tangent component of that hand, That I might touch that cheek!
I still dream of finishing the script at some point.