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April 3, 2012, 7:45 pm
Video Wednesday
A team from St. Olaf College won the 25th annual Rube Goldberg Machine Contest on Saturday at Purdue University by creating a machine that inflated and popped a balloon to musical accompaniment.
A team from Purdue University placed second in the contest with a machine that took 300 steps to inflate and pop a balloon. That apparently breaks the Guinness World Record for the most steps by a Rube Goldberg machine, a mark set by the same Purdue team in last year’s competition. Here is this year’s record-setting machine at work.
In non-Rube Goldberg news, Zorro saved the day last month in a chemistry classroom at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the professor gamely played along.
Stephen Colbert unveiled a do-it-yourself Super PAC starter kit last week on The Colbert Report in response to a letter from a student at the University of Texas at Austin.
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April 3, 2012, 2:28 pm
Another April Fools’ Day, Another Student Editor Resigns
College journalists have a long tradition of publishing fake news on April Fool’s Day and an equally long tradition of getting in trouble for it (see here and here and here and …).
The latest student journalist to step down as a result of an April Fool’s misfire is Chelsea Diana, who was editor in chief of The Daily Free Press, Boston University’s student newspaper. The joke issue of the paper made light of date rape, among other things, just months after two of the university’s hockey players were accused of sexually assaulting students in separate incidents.
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March 27, 2012, 4:53 pm
Video Wednesday
Students at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion have skewered the Tony Award-winning musical The Book of Mormon with a musical satire of their own, “The Book of Purim!” Below, a sendup of “Hello!” the opening number from the original.
Students at Scotland’s University of Aberdeen welcomed Maitland Mackie as the institution’s new rector last week by parading him around the campus atop a stuffed bull named Angus. Afterward Mr. Mackie, chairman of Mackie’s Ice Cream, bought the students a round of drinks at St. Machars Bar.
Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas and Virginia Tech have created a robotic jellyfish that is fueled by hydrogen and oxygen and that could one day be used for surveillance or rescue missions.
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March 23, 2012, 11:49 am
Jim Yong Kim’s Other Talent
The White House announced today that President Obama has nominated Jim Yong Kim, president of Dartmouth College, to lead the World Bank. Most of us know that Dr. Kim is a physician and anthropologist, and even that he played quarterback on his high-school football team. But did you know that he can also dance and rap? Below and at bottom, Dr. Kim onstage at the “Dartmouth Idol” shows in 2011 and ’10.
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March 20, 2012, 9:51 pm
Video Wednesday
The political scientist Francis Fukuyama, like seemingly everyone else these days, is mad about drones, he revealed last month in a blog post. We wrote Mr. Fukuyama to see if he would discuss his hobby with us. His polite reply: “Thanks for the message but I’m not going to have time to talk this week.” We’re guessing he’s too busy hanging out at Stanford, proving the adage that “the only difference between men and boys is the price of their toys.” Who can blame him?
Scientists at the University of Cambridge make use of Lego Mindstorms robots to perform repetitive tasks in the laboratory.
On their way to the University of Kansas women’s basketball game in Little Rock on Sunday, members of the university’s spirit squad and pep band stopped to free a guy who got pinned under a vehicle that he was working on when the jack broke. This is a television news report after the fact,…
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March 13, 2012, 1:19 pm
Plumbing the Depths of Campus Safety
With campus firearms laws in flux, it’s the kind of thing that might happen to any of us. But on Monday, it happened to Michael Martinsen, chief of police at Wright State University.
Chief Martinsen needed to use a campus toilet, the Dayton Daily News reports, but the weight of his service weapon threatened to push his trousers and belt into a puddle on the floor. He solved the problem by wedging the gun behind the plumbing.
Unfortunately he was in a hurry to get to a meeting and left the gun behind. An alert student spotted it and turned it in.
“I lost focus for a minute,” Chief Martinsen told the paper. “So I humiliated myself in front of the police officers.” As punishment, he ordered himself to undergo four hours of firearms safety training.
As states like Colorado and Oregon debate the constitutionality of banning guns at colleges, campus planners would be wise to…
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March 6, 2012, 8:27 pm
Video Wednesday
As a farewell to the space shuttle program, a Romanian teenager sent a Lego shuttle aloft tethered to a weather balloon and recorded the whole thing on a GoPro Hero video camera. “The launch took place from central Germany (easy flight clearance) and reached a max altitude of 35000m,” writes the teen, Raul Oaida, on YouTube.
Via the Mary Sue
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency reported this week that the “Cheetah” robot, developed for the agency by Boston Dynamics, had set a new land-speed record of 18 mph.
An animated short by students at San Jose State University imagines a future in which robots have been banned.
No Robots from YungHan Chang on Vimeo.
Via MetaFilter
A reader of Time magazine asked the astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, “What is the most astounding fact you can share with us about the universe?” This is his reply.
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March 1, 2012, 1:17 pm
Damn You, Autocorrect!
How far have technology and education advanced our civilization? This far:
A student at Lanier Technical College, outside Atlanta, intended to send a text message on Wednesday to a friend saying that he would be at nearby West Hall High School, according to a report by the Gainesville Times, in Georgia.
Instead he typed, “gunna be at West Hall today.” The autocorrect software on his smartphone changed that to “gunman be at West Hall today.” Next the student hit “send,” unaware that he had mistyped his friend’s number.
The unintended recipient of the message, not knowing what to make of it, called 911. Authorities put the high school and a nearby middle school on security lockdown until they could figure out what was going on.
“Our investigators followed up the leads pretty quickly, and they were able to determine that the texts came from a student from Lanier Technical…
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February 29, 2012, 3:01 pm
When Leap Day Is Your Birthday
All born on February 29, 1992, five sophomores at Washington and Lee University are celebrating their fifth birthdays today. These “leaplings,” as Leap Day babies are called, are among 440 members of Washington and Lee’s sophomore class. Left to right are Lauren Boone, James Helvey, Annie Howard, Andrew Seredinski, and Jena Glavy.
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February 28, 2012, 8:58 pm
Video Wednesday
Theo Gray, the author and cofounder of Wolfram Research, shows off his “periodic table table.”
Arne Duncan, the U.S. secretary of education, makes an amazing pass last week during the NBA All-Star Celebrity Game. Too bad his teammate missed the layup.
Mike McLaughlin, an MBA student at Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis, describes his plan to hike the Appalachian and Ozark trails back-to-back, a distance of more than 2,500 miles. Mr. McLaughlin, who was emotionally and physically abused as a child by his mother and stepfather, hopes to bring attention to the plight of underprivileged children in St. Louis and Africa by raising funds for both the Family Resource Center and a school for neglected blind children in Cameroon, Africa.
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