As an avid reader of xkcd I was of course excited when the author Randall Munroe came to speak at our annual ACM Reflections | Projections conference this October. According to Wikipedia, Randy previously spoke at MIT and WPI, though I can’t say I knew about the WPI event before researching this. At those talks it has become a bit of a tradition to play some sort of prank or disrupt the talk with a thematically appropriate display of some element present in his comics.

It was not original, but compulsory to create some [citation needed] signs–just like the Wikipedian Protester displays. I used the CS Department Plotter, some scrap Foamcor, and spray adhesive to build them.

I got mine signed

But the signs were just for starters. Mo thought it would be a good idea to drop several thousand spiders from the ceiling of 1404, ideally more impressive than the meager number of playpen balls dropped from the ceiling at MIT. So she bought them, and several of us spray painted them red. Unfortunately at this point we did not know how to drop them. A Thursday night investigation of 1404 Siebel informed us that there was no way to access the ceiling. Blueprints didn’t help find any service catwalks, there wasn’t any way we could get a ladder up there. Let me give you the play by play from here on out:

• Thursday - Start painting Spiders red.
• 
• 12:00 AM Friday - Discover there isn’t a good way to reach the ceiling.
  Consider attaching something to the projector screen. Infeasible.
• 2:00 AM - Build the whole crazy remote controlled box thing. Extract some magnets from a hard disk, find and get a Futaba R/C Radio working. Apply duct tape liberally.
• ~Insert some sleep, things get fuzzy around this point. I think I took an exam in the interim as well.~
• 2:00 PM - Purchase balloons, fishing line, batteries
  
  • Add twice as many hard disk magnets to hold box to ceiling.
  • Rebuild latch mechanism, as we found it didn’t work with the weight of the spiders.
  • Head to ACM Conference Room and build crazy balloon rig to get a wire over the rafters in 1404.
  • Get very worried while trying to eat dinner, afraid there won’t be enough time.
• 6:15 PM Yahoo Hack Day Competition finally clears out. We begin hanging box in front of a few people still left in the lecture hall. Everything goes to plan, except the cable that we pulled it up with doesn’t descend as planned. Nobody notices.
• 7:00 PM finish hanging up box
• 
• 7:15 PM Yahoo Awards begin
• 7:45 PM Talk starts
• 7:56 PM Randall mentions something about what would be interesting to drop from the sky on unsuspecting people (in the context of a kite flown 2km high with a dangling string from the line).
• 
• 7:57 PM 2000 red spiders fall from the sky controlled by radio.
• 
  

More Pictures

I think it was a success. We all had fun, and the crazy contraption held up all right. Perhaps the most interesting part of it was getting the wire over the beam in the lecture hall. I’m not quite sure how to illustrate it, perhaps a cartoon is appropriate? I’ll get sketching.