To: “Lindy Li” lindyli@Princeton.EDU, dpuglies@princeton.edu, jmonagle@princeton.edu

Sent: Sun 24/04/11 12:28 PM

Subject: Fwd: Re: We need a secretary

Secretary Application: ************ 2012

Race: Caucasian

Gender: Male

Here are the questions that we would like you to answer:

1)  Why do you want to get involved in class government?

As a very outgoing and politically involved individual, I have found that my medium of choice, commenting on PrincetonFML and Daily Princetonian articles, can no longer give me the breadth of reach my visionary voice requires. Class government and its mass-email opportunities present a unique opportunity to let everyone know what witty commentary I have to say. Whether it is a simple yet timeless outpouring of “LOLZ” or the more sarcastic and biting “LAWLZ,” the people deserve to know my trifling opinions on the inconsequential news and gossip of Princeton life.

I hope through the extended mass emailing privileges of class government to instigate even more contention between class officers and the incompetent body known as the USG. Dominic Pugliese has done an excellent opening shot, but I believe the vitriol needs to go even further. Why stop at mere pronouncements of the USG’s ineptitude? Personal attacks on members have always proven effective – merely look at the current political climate! Outright lying is the norm of modern American politics – who cares if Yaroshefsky isn’t actually the love child of a midget and a capybara? If you tell it to the masses, some will believe, regardless of any “fact checking” or “correcting” that occurs after it has been said. You may even apologize for wrongfully accusing him of embezzling USG funds to invest in his chain of wee-man designer outfits, but the question will remain “Where did he get the money to design all of those tiny people suits?”

2)  Why are you interested in the secretarial position specifically? (”It’s the only open position in the senior class government” is a perfectly reasonable answer.)

I have always considered myself a natural candidate for the secretary position. While I firmly believe that occupations are very much gender oriented and that a secretary is as female a role as nurse or sandwich artisan, I understand that the modern progressive times call for new ways of looking at the world. With this in mind, I would propose referring to me instead as the “2012 Chief of Notetaking and Logistics.” Adding “Chief” to any position of course denotes the masculinity and power appropriate to the position. The name change would entail the creation of an underbody to serve said Chief of Notetaking and Logistics, specifically several aids and a woman to act as my secretary.

More original ideas, including a push to change Dean Dunne’s name to “Count Chocula,” after the jump!

3)  What ideas do you have for how class government can make our senior year unforgettable?

• Build a giant straw man effigy of Dean Malkiel on Poe Field. Place Dean Malkiel inside and burn said straw man to the ground in a sacrifice to the GPA Gods, so that we might be blessed with our pre-grade deflation GPAs.
• Reinstate the nude olympics. And by “nude” I mean naked and covered in fluffer nutter and by “olympics” I mean a tribalistic orgy of trance-inducing chanting charged with a shamanistic flow of hallucinogen-fueled energy, taking place in Tilghman’s office.
• Rename Nassau Hall to “The Official Residence of Sir Elton John” and have Benny and the Jets playing on repeat throughout the building
• Rename Dean Dunne to “Count Chocula”
• Abolish the USG and in its place have the students elect a series of intelligent animals – dolphins, monkeys, talking parrots, owls, etc, based on a series of panels and debates held in Frist.
• Hot tub study breaks, open to the entire Princeton Community
• Host a panel with Christopher Stalken and the P-Wanker titled “Masturbating Under your Window: An Open Q&A with Figures of Princeton Infamy sponsored by the Anscombe Society and LGBT Center”

Here are the questions that Nick Pugliese, our vice president, would like you to answer:

4)  The Class of 2012 has $100,000 remaining at the end of senior year and we can do whatever we want with it.  What would you do?

Buy $100,000 worth of puppies and set them loose throughout campus on Dean’s Date.

5)  At the last moment, our commencement speaker falls ill and can longer come. As luck would have it, both Will Ferrell and Janet Reno happen to be on campus. Who do you ask and why?*

I know what answer Nick wants, but I refuse to say Will Ferrell dressed as Janet Reno. Rather, I would ask Will Ferrell to host a game of Celebrity Jeopardy and invite Janet Reno, Cornel West, and Shirley Tilghman as Sean Connery to play as the contestants.

Spring Break 2011: Geeks Gone Wild

Calling all math nerds, Pi lovers and Einstein devotees! If you’re staying on campus for spring break (so near and yet so painfully far), don’t miss out on the second year of a recently birthed Princeton tradition: Pi Day.

Mimi Omicienski of the Princeton Tour Company dreamed up this celebration of all things geeky last year, when she realized that March 14th coincides with Albert Einstein’s birthday. Last year, Omicienski worked with the Princeton Public Library and Joy Chen from JOY Cards (on Chambers Street, close to Masala Grill, FYI. Check it out if you want a cute alternative to Paper Source) to create the first ever Pi Day. It included pie-eating contests, an Einstein look-alike competition, and an intense pi recitation showdown. The winner? Gareth Conway, son of our own superstar mathlete John Conway.

But this year, the Pi Day people are stepping up their game. March 14th has been extended to an entire “Geek Freak Weekend,” featuring Dinky and plane rides with Einstein (as in, Einstein re-enactors. Not his dead body. That would be morbid), presentations from our plasma physics lab, pi-themed sales, more pie eating, and a math competition with a $314.159 prize.

“Think Disney, and instead of Cinderella, you have Einstein,” Omicienski said.

Yeah. Get excited.

Einstein Aficionados: Extreme

By the way, Omicienski is just about the biggest fan of Princeton you’ll ever meet. Or just the biggest fan of Princeton ever, period. No offense to Orange Key, but Omicienski’s tours blow other Princeton tours out of the water. She eats breakfast with townie old-timers at Carousel at 6 a.m., just so she can get their stories about the days when Princetonians were still segregated/woman-less/fighting in Vietnam. She has a website devoted expressly to Princeton’s black squirrels. She won the Nassoons’ #1 Fan Contest earlier this fall.

She also tells genuinely creepy stories about our campus being haunted, like how the Fitzrandolph family’s ghosts visit their corpses, which are supposedly buried in the walls of an arch in Rocky … I was skeptical, until she pointed out how many devoted alumni throng to Reunions every year. Did I really think that they wouldn’t keep coming back to Old Nassau after they crossed to the “other side”?

Hm. Good point.

Even if you won’t be around for the Pi festivities, you can still celebrate (read: procrastinate on studying for midterms. I mean, this is semi-academic anyway, right?) by contributing to Omicienski’s online collection of Pi paraphernalia. Example:

PI TRANSPOSED INTO MUSIC FORM. WHOA.

More pi, ghosts, and Omicienski at the Princeton Echo.

They move so fast you can't even capture a clear image.

Not unlike this,

The fencers make lots of noise too. It really is a sight to see, if only because you’ve never been to a fencing duel(?) before.

It will likely be going on for at least a few more hours.

Correction: A previous version of this post contained two spelling errors, as our keen commenters have pointed out. “Duelly” noted; our apologies!

This couple has been competing together for 12 years straight. Could our town get any cuter?

When I mentioned to a friend that I was going to the New Jersey Oyster Bowl on Sunday, he looked confused for a second – “What, is that like, an ocean science competition?”

Typical Princeton kid. Unfortunately, the Oyster Bowl isn’t related to marine biology in any way. It is, however, a perfect example of the small-town charm that surrounds our university. For the 12th year in a row, hundreds of townies gathered at Blue Point Grill on Nassau Street this Sunday (if you haven’t been there, I can now vouch for their amazing oysters and clam chowder, and I’m sure the other dishes are great too. Dinner only, though) for Princeton’s 12th annual Super Bowl Sunday oyster-slurping contest!

Highlights included a surprise appearance by Congressman Rush Holt, a competitor who’d been on Hell’s Kitchen with Gordon Ramsay, and a thrilling one-minute slurp-off between the two women’s finalists – one of whom had cut her finger on an oyster shell in an earlier round, but still slurped her way to victory with blood dripping into her cocktail sauce, refusing to take a band-aid in case she accidentally ate it. Hardcore? Yeah. Fo real.

Maybe someone from our undergraduate student body should compete next year – the grand prize last year was a trip for 2 to Cancun, and this year’s was a vacation in the Caribbean. Plus, all the proceeds went to support the Susan G. Komen Foundation for breast cancer research. If your eating club serves oysters, start practicing now.

More town cuteness available at the Princeton Packet.

How would you like the Prospect 12 to chauffeur you around? (image source: http://pave.princeton.edu)

Farewell, days when driving meant a texting hiatus and an inappropriate time to put both hands in the air when dancing to your favorite tunes. If you’ve ever wished your car could just, you know, drive itself, you may soon be in luck. The Princeton Autonomous Vehicle Engineering (PAVE) group is, by their estimation, less than a month away from creating the first car to get its own driver’s license.

PAVE was born in 2004 when several students in Alain Kornhauser’s transportation class watched the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge and became convinced, after watching each of the vehicles fail by the 7.5 mile mark on a 150-mile course, that they could construct a competitive autonomous vehicle.

The group entered their vehicle, Prospect 11, in the 2005 DARPA competition, placing 10^th out of 23 vehicle finalists. But they didn’t stop there. After acquiring a vehicle donation from Ford, PAVE began work on the Prospect 12 for the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, and then continued work on this vehicle, placing third out of 47 teams and winning the title of “rookie of the year” in the 2008 Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition.

If this is starting to sound eerily similar to those sci-fi artificial intelligence movies that have been giving you nightmares for the past decade or so, read on. Because not only can the car, you know, drive by itself, but it also has an obstacle-detection system good enough—or so PAVE hopes—to get it a passing grade on its road test. (Full disclosure: I, a human, did not pass my road test the first time. And not to be bitter, but I’d like to see this car parallel park). The car makes use of stereo cameras and software scans to locate regions of constant depth and note them as potential obstacles. These areas are then stored by tracking software as objects relative to the car’s current position, and estimates of the car’s motion are used to estimate locations of current and previous obstacles.

So get ready to hop into the passenger’s seat and enjoy the ride. And make sure to bring your cell phone, your iPod, and lots of snacks in intricately-wrapped packages. I mean, it’s not like you have to keep your eyes on the road.

The video, which took over a month to produce, was a joint effort between Jack Hutton ’13, Sebastian Steffen ’13, and Tim Delaney, a student at Penn. Having partnered with Delaney to produce films in the past, Hutton said he had fallen “into a bit of a creative dry spell” after coming to Princeton this fall. Steffen, a native German speaker, approached him about a video contest sponsored by Frontlineshop.com, a German clothing store that Steffen frequents. The two immediately began writing the script and partnered with Delaney for plotting and filming ideas. When the English script was composed, Sebastian translated it into German.

Hutton, who doesn’t speak any German, said the subtitles proved a bit tricky, as he often had to “intuitively figure out when each phrase and line should begin.”

The film received fourth place in the contest. Although he said that this was a bit disappointing, Hutton added that in the end he was “just happy to have made the video for its own sake.”

And in case you’re wondering about the final scene, it was shot around the same time that our campus masturbator still prowled campus. Hutton says no one really bothered or cared about the half-naked man standing in the middle of Whitman at 12:40 on a Thursday afternoon. “Thankfully, we didn’t get caught committing any act of ‘lewdness.’”

And yes, folks, Monday is the beginning of midterms, that most bitter of weeks when we hunker down and churn out page after page, pull all-nighters and give ourselves caffeine-induced heart arrhythmia, and have those long awkward silences in precept because, seriously, who would do the reading.

rlv.zcache.com

That’s why we here at The Ink want to help you out. We know what you’re going through, and we want to make you feel better, or at least less insane.

So we’re hosting a contest! You tell us how much work you have this upcoming week (in terms of numbers of pages, problem sets, and midterm exams), and the person with the crappiest week gets a shiny prize.

Oh, and you get massive bragging rights, of course. Because what do Princetonians love more than saying they have more work than one another?

The rules: Post everything you’ve got to do for midterm week in the comments below, or send an email to theinktips@gmail.com. (Be sure to detail how many pages you have to write, problem sets to solve, and midterms to take! And if you win, you have to prove it to us, so no funny business.) We’ll post the winners at the end of midterm week.

(Also, don’t have a mental breakdown before it’s over.)