Glossary of terms used elsewhere

22

22 is a mystic number of cosmic significance. As TEPs rediscover year after year, the more you look for it, the more you find it. What more proof do you need? If you don't understand, I can't enlighten you. Note for Illuminati readers - they had to change the number they used in the Illuminati trilogy to be 23, because they couldn't publish the TRUE number of cosmic significance.

18.02

aka Multi-Variable Calculus. Since MIT is such a nerd school, EVERYTHING is labelled with numbers: the buildings, the majors, and of course, the classes. In fact, one way to know for certain whether somebody went to MIT is to ask them what course they were. If they say "Physics" they didn't. If they say "Course 8" then they probably did. Another story I heard was that somebody was visiting a friend, and got lost, called his friend up, and told her he was in the Vassar Building, how did he get to her office. And of course, she had NO idea what the Vassar Buidling was. So she told him to ask the next person who walked through which building he was in. He insisted, I'm in the Vassar Building, it says so right here. She said, just ask the next person okay? He did so, they told him he was in Building 13, and he was found post haste.

5000.3a regulations

The Department of Energy, which runs Fermilab, was starting to get tough on safety by my last summer working at MDL. To enforce this view, they detailed a set of procedures to follow in the event of, as they put it, "an unusual occurrence." This set of procedures was called 5000.3a. We received a sheet of paper listing questions to ask to determine if a situation was "a 5000.3a occurrence." The first question was, "Did the occurrence lead to multiple deaths or injuries, loss of the faciilty/building, and/or widespread environmental damage?" A question from the middle of the list was "Did the occurrence require somebody to be hospitalized?" The last question was the best though - "Did or could the situation lead to possible injury, equipment damage, and/or environmental damage in the future?" Since at the MDL, we were always cutting ourselves, minorly damaging equipment etc., and the situation that precipitated this was that summer students were always there, we immediately declared ourselves a 5000.3a occurrence, and dismissed the whole thing as silly.

Angst

Angst, rhymes with gong, not with fang. An all-purpose word at TEP used to describe any sort of stress, pain, indescribable anxiety, etc. Something which is in great abundance while classes are going at MIT.

Assassin's Guild

The Assassin's Guild of MIT writes, runs and plays large-scale (80+ people) live-action role playing games. The amount of work that goes into writing and running one of these games is truly impressive as I found out when I helped Brad with his. However, the impression most people have of the Assassin's Guild is of people running around shooting disc guns at each other (disc guns being the preferred simulation weapon of choice). Large overlap between the Assassin's guild and SIPB.

Back Bay

Boston's Champs Elysees. There's a song about that, y'know. Seriously, it's the area of Boston which used to be swampland on the Charles River, til they filled it in the mid 1800's, making it the only area of Boston which has a rectangular grid of streets. In the 40's and 50's, it was a depressed area, which is when all the MIT fraternities moved in because the buildings were cheap. Now of course, the real estate prices have skyrocketed in the area, and all the rich yuppies around can't stand the fraternities. Eit them! We were here first.

Batman

aka Kohta Ueno. Bats is amazing when it comes to anything involving carpentry, home repair, and just generally fixing stuff. Some of the lofts he's done are absolutely amazing. Another of the disaffected direction-less burnt-out Asian kids like me. Batman was one of the original Second Front Fascists.

Beef

aka Daniel Steinhurst. Beef was one of the original Second Front Fascists. He was House Manager of TEP for 3 terms, and ran again, leading to the campaign slogan, "Elect me to an unprecedented and a completely unwarranted fourth term as House Manager." Currently at University of Arizona graduate school in chemistry.

Beemer

Beemer is just this guy, ya know? Well, actually, he's one of the few other TEPs who was a physics major even if he is doing that weird chaos stuff now.

Bradley James C.F. "Ladybug" Rhodes

Brad is just a phenomenon. One of my best friends. The once and future Weenie King. Brad was one of the original Second Front Fascists. Former Georgia Tech/MIT/Stanford student who is currently doing AI research at the MIT Media Lab.

Carpe Noctem T-shirts

These were T-shirts that I believe were initially marketed by Wes Carroll, or at least he was the first I saw marketing them. They just had on the front, "Carpe Noctem" (Seize the night), and on the back, "I do more after 2 am than most people do all day." These shirts were immensely popular at MIT of course. They also lead to spin off shirts, "Carpe Joltem" - "I drink more caffeine after 2 am than most people do all day", (after the failed Russian coup) "Carpe Kremlin" - "We've had more political revolutions in the last century that most countries ever had" etc.

Center Room

The Center Room of TEP, is located at the base of the center stairwell. It connects to the front room as well. It's where the foosball table is located, as well as the purple board. A good place to play Ridiculo-Ball, as defined in the TEP glossary.

Center stairwell

The center stairwell is one of the best features of TEP. We have a large, open stairwell, with about 20 feet square of open space in the middle, extending up 5 stories. While possibly slightly dangerous, and currently illegal in Boston due to fire codes (our stairwell has a grandfather clause with regard to that regulation), it is really nice to have communication between all levels of the house like that. If you need to find somebody, you use the TEP intercom. If you need to vent frustration or angst, nothing works better than to run out of your room, and start screaming down the center stairwell.

The Charles River

The Charles River runs right between Boston and Cambridge, and thus I crossed it at least twice a day while at MIT (since TEP was in Boston and MIT was in Cambridge). It's icky and polluted, and very little could be done to make it more toxic.

Commonwealth Avenue

A main street in the Back Bay where TEP is located. It has a nice "mall" which is a strip of greenery with grass and trees about 50 feet wide down the middle of it as part of Boston's "Emerald Necklace." For some reason, frivolity is discouraged by Boston policemen on the mall (they've stopped us from playing frisbee there a few times ("But officer, we only hit 2 BMW's, a Mercedes, and Saferide!"), having a picnic there, etc etc. Never stopped us though.

Copious free time

A common expression of MIT students - "I'll do that in my copious free time" where italics indicate a heavy undertone of sarcasm, the implication being that free time is something that was once known long ago, but the concept is one that has unfortunately fallen into disuse and therefore, the concept of copious amounts of it is even more ridiculous. Or something like that...

Crock Opera

The TEP glossary gives a basic definition of the Crock Opera. More important than just being a musical comedy, it's a time for all to sit back and have fun. The freshmen have never seen anything like it before (unless they're seriously warped), the brothers get a break from Rush, and the alumni get to drool over all the ancient jokes and songs that are told and sung. Source of "Back in the Back, Back, Back Bay" and "Tuition", as well as the perennial source of the tradition "joke."

Crusher

aka Michael Ernst. One of the older alums of TEP that I got to meet, because he was doing a graduate degree in Computer Science at MIT when I was a freshman. He was also treasurer of the League for Programming Freedom at that time. Then he sold out, quit grad school, and went to work for Microsoft, something we still kid him about.

CyberGroupie

aka Me. I came up with this nickname for myself, when Brad was running an Assassin's Guild game called Cyber. Actually he was one of several GM's, all of whom I knew in one way or another. Anyway, on the first night of the game, I wandered into the control room of the game, where all the GM's were frantically trying to work out last minute details and one of them grabbed me and told me to do something. I did it, came back, and got sent out again. Before I knew it I was a full-fledged gopher of the game, and was spending way too much time watching it and helping out with it. Since all the GM's had little badges with names like "CyberBug" or "CyberMommy" or "CyberGod," I decided I was "CyberGroupie" and liked the sound of it. Never had an appropriate place to use it til now though.

Danger shirts

Danger shirts are one of the things that first attracted me to TEP. I walked in the door Friday afternoon of Rush, and saw people wearing shirts proclaiming, "DANGER: High Weirdness Area - Wear Brain Protection," with a silhouette of a guy wearing what looked like a metal bowl with big antennae sticking out of it. Since I had already dubbed myself The Weird One during high school, I immediately liked this place. And, of course, ended up pledging and living there.

Downstairs kitchen

The large kitchen located in the basement of TEP. I have been spoiled forever by having a huge stove of the kind we did there with burners that emit flames 6 inches tall. Makes cooking go a lot faster.

Eit

One of the most amazingly useful words ever invented. The History of Eit explains it better than I can.

Fermilab

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, located in Batavia, IL, just 15 minutes from my home in Wheaton, IL. It's one of the leading particle accelerators in the world at the moment, and yet is really open and nice. There are no guards at the gate, most of its land is nice reconstructed prairie (complete with a bison herd!), and it's a nice place to go biking as well as work. Working as a student there was nice because it was so open - I could go anywhere and do anything I needed to without being hassled.

Fire extinguishers

The premier water war weapon. It has a range of 30+ feet and has good accuracy. However, running around with a fire extinguish gets clunky. The solution at TEP was to take old backpack frames (the big metal kind), and mount extinguishers on them. That way you can hold the hose in one hand, and a string attached to the trigger in the other, actually RUN because it's out of the way and attached firmly to your back, and still fire at will at any targets. It works REALLY well.

Foosball

aka table soccer. You know, the stupid game with little plastic guys on rods that you shove back and forth and twist to kick a little plastic ball? Yeah, that one. It's an obsession at TEP. It always follows the same cycle. Freshmen enter TEP, they play foosball, and get destroyed by the upperclassmen playing with one hand tied behind their back (I've done this :) ). They then vow to become better at foos, and destroy the upperclassmen - seeing as they are freshmen on Pass/Fail, they have infinitely more time to practice, and generally by the end of that year they are the best in the house, at which point a new crop of freshmen enter, and the cycle repeats.

Fred Fenning

Fred is one of the older alumni of TEP who actually still maintains relations with the current house. He was one of the pledge class that started off the recolonized TEP, and has been around ever since. Fred is, to me, Mr. Engineer. He has a motorcycle, a van, and a plane, all of which he maintains himself with great pride and joy. He built Tep-a-phone, and is still the only one who understands it. He also helped start, and did a lot of the research for, Image Engineering, a laser light show company which did the laser shows at the 1984 and 1988 Olympics, as well as the one at the centennial of the Statue of Liberty in 1986.

Fred died in a plane accident as he was flying out to California in August 1997. He will be missed.

Front Room

The front room of TEP is a general gathering place. It has a piano, several couches, a bar (nothing in it, just a piece of furniture), and currently a TV/VCR. Great place to play Power-ball, as defined in the TEP Glossary.

Funnelators

3 man funnelators are also effective water war weapons. These are essentially just big slingshots - a long loop of rubber surgical tubing, with a pouch or funnel to put water balloons in. 2 tall people hold the ends, somebody puts a water balloon in the pouch and pulls WAAAYYYY back, and you can get a pretty decent range and power. For example, in our water wars we have taken out 3rd floor windows of our nemesis, PKT, with funnelator-launched water ballons - TWICE. (We paid for the replacements afterwards)

GEM

Gamma rays, Electron and Muon detector of the SSC, which I worked on at MIT. One of the two major detector collaborations of the SSC, the other being the Solenoidal Detector Collaboration (SDC), which I worked on at Fermilab.

Harvard Bridge

The Harvard Bridge connects Boston to Cambridge - but curiously enough, connects it to Cambridge at the site of MIT's campus. So why is it called the _Harvard_ Bridge? Well, there are several stories about it. The simplest is that when they named the bridge, Harvard and MIT had a crew race to decide the name, and Harvard won. The more complex version is that MIT won, and then had a team of students examine the blueprints to be used. After looking at them, they decided that it was shoddy design and would fall apart, and that MIT should not have its name associated with such a bridge. As it turns out, they were right - the Harvard Bridge had to be rebuilt from 1986-1990 in order to remain structurally sound. The Harvard Bridge is also precisely 364.4 Smoots + 1 ear long as measured by a famous fraternity pledge.

David Andrew Honig, Objectivist

An almost legendary individualist alumnus of TEP, whose name somehow became used as a greeting between TEPs as a sort of recognition call. If you're at an LSC movie, and you want to find TEPs, you enter the hall, and yell "Honig!" for instance. More info on him is available in the TEP Glossary.

Hot Cocoa

A TEP tradition. The first night of classes each week (generally Monday night except for holidays and weird weeks at the beginnings of terms) TEPs and friends of TEPs and friends of friends of TEPs, etc., get together at midnight to devour sugar (cookies candy bars etc), salt (popcorn, potato chips, nacho), and, of course, hot cocoa. A good social event where foosball is played heroically, people flame ridiculously, and other informal things often happen, such as water fights. The theory was explained to me once as being that it was hard to get back into tooling at the beginning of the week so Hot Cocoa was instituted. By midnight of Monday night, you were getting sick of tooling, and tired, but the sugar/salt/flaming combination woke you right back up, allowing you to get those extra few hours of valuable tooling in, and converting you back into the weekday night-shifted tooling mode. It's a theory at least.

House food

One of the best parts of TEP is that we cooked for ourselves. Each week you had to spend an afternoon cooking (~3-4 hours including preparation and cleanup) with a team of 3-4 others, in return for which you get dinner made for you 5 other nights of the week. There are two main advantages of this scheme: first of all, by the end of your time at TEP, you actually know how to cook well, which is amazingly useful. Secondly, it also means we can buy our food in bulk, which saves us a great deal of money.

Human Chess

Human chess is just like regular chess, except that instead of pieces, you use people. Pretty simple right? One variant of this requires that the participants all be good at some form of combat, and instead of the attacker automatically winning any capture, the two "pieces" would actually fight it out on the board. In fact, one of the better computer games I've ever played, Archon, was based on this principle. Tis a pity that my only copy of Archon only runs on an Atari 800.

IAP

Independent Activities Period. MIT has a fairly unusual system, in that rather being quarterly or semesterly, it goes on a 4-1-4 schedule, which means our fall term ends in December, and our spring term does not begin til February. What do we do in January? That's IAP. You can do whatever you want. Despite the lack of any formal structure, there's a phenomenal number of activities going on, from short-term intensive classes offered by departments, to the other end of the spectrum with paper-airplane contests. It's the one time of the year where you can be at MIT with all of your friends and not be totally stressed about classes. Very nice. I hope it never goes away despite certain faculty initiatives to cancel it.

Julie Hollenback

A very good friend of mine who lived at pika during her years at MIT. She earned the nickname Julie Hollenbackrub due to her tendency to attend Hot Cocoas, and give backrubs to all the TEPs there. Naturally, this made her much beloved at TEP. Currently working on a Biology Ph.D. at University of Wisconsin.

Andrey Korytov

I worked with Andrey extensively over my last two years at MIT, and in fact he was my direct supervisor, even though Prof. Osborne was my official UROP/thesis advisor. Andrey is amazing. He's so dedicated to physics it's unbelievable. He worked 10-12 hour days every day, and had been named an SSC fellow before the funding got slashed. In the little blurb they had in MIT Tech Talk about him when he was declared an SSC Fellow, it said that he had published on the order of 70 papers in the 7 years since getting his doctorate. That's impressive. It was a privilege to work with him, although I often felt lame in comparison.

Laurel Cook

Laurel is awesome. A non-shit-taking Navy woman currently working in Washington, D.C. designing nuclear reactors after earning a B.S. in Physics and a M.S. in Nuclear Engineering at MIT. She lived at pika while at MIT, and I got to know her because she is Beef's huggie.

Leper

aka Robert Calhoun. An older alum of TEP who I got to meet because he is still at MIT doing his PhD work. Cool guy.

Lobby 7

Lobby 7 is the huge rotunda area that is the official entrance to MIT. It looks quite impressive, big stone pillars, balconies etc. Hence, it is a prime target for hacks. One of the most amazing hacks ever seen at MIT was turning Lobby 7 into the Cathedral of Our Lady of the All-Night Tool.

Lofts

Lofts are a very simple concept. If you have limited floorspace, which is true for ALL college students, then if you put your bed close to the roof, you have space underneath to put more stuff. One bonus of having your own house, as TEP does, is that you can build lofts anywhere you want, so long as you get the approval of your brothers. Batman's History of Lofts provides a nice summary of what sort of lofts have been done at TEP. One of my lasting contributions to TEP is the Maximum Bondage(tm) Loft in 21 (which I partnered with Schtick to do), a project which took an entire work week to complete, but is sturdy as all heck.

LSC

aka Lecture Series Committee. A student group at MIT whose main contribution is to show $2 movies every weekend. Fun place to go when there's nothing else to do because you can be can be a bit rowdier there than most theaters. For instance, when the projectioner screws up, the audience generally yells "LSC.......SUCKS!"

Macintosh computers

Macs. ICK! I just could not mention Macintoshes and NOT comment on how much I dislike them. Yes, maybe it's intuitive for your average Joe Schmoe off the street. However I hate mice, and I hate having to go through 6 menus and clickie-buttons to do what I want. I prefer being able to just type the damn command and away we go. Yes, maybe sometimes you can use hotkeys to do the same thing, but it still just doesn't cut it for me. It's too happy-feely, too dumbed down for me. Call me a techno-elitist, I guess.

Massachusetts Avenue

aka Mass Ave. One of the main streets in Boston near TEP. It's the street which goes across the Harvard Bridge connecting Boston to Cambridge and the campus of MIT.

Mr. Finley Markley

Mr. Markley was kind enough to take me as a student to work on a WSTS project with him. He was unfailingly kind and helpful, to the point of even writing me good recommendations for both college and graduate school. Mr. Markley was the head of MDL and loved having students to the point where every single summer student program at Fermilab had a representative in his lab. He is now retired, but I still appreciate all that he did for me.

MDL

Materials Development Laboratory at Fermilab. I worked there for 3 summers, under Mr. Markley. The MDL often had on the order of 15 summer students, as compared to 7 full-time employees. The only description to be given is chaos. My last summer there, we made up MDL T-shirts which had, on the front, a picture of a building labelled MDL, a 5000.3a occurrence, blowing up, and the quote, "We make more mistakes before 11 am than most people make in a lifetime," which is a blatant ripoff of the Carpe Noctem T-shirts, but oh well. The back of the T-shirt read, "We don't care, We don't have to, We're the government."

MIT

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bastion of nerds and techno-geeks of which I am proud to be an alumnus.

MUDs

Multi-User Dungeons/Domains. These are pretty cool creations of the net. On them, you can have real-time interaction with as many as 100 other people who have connected into the same MUD. Some MUDs are action/adventure-oriented, where you go out and kill monsters and gain experience like in D&D, while others are social-oriented, where you build areas for other's enjoyment, and interact with other people more. I think they're all just neat. The one I hang out on is called Overdrive, and I'm known as Kamikaze on there if you happen to stop by.

NERO

New England Role-playing Organization. Another live-action role-playing organization like the Assassin's Guild, but more medieval in tone. They make their own weapons (swords for instance out of PVC pipe wrapped in foam, so that you can't hurt somebody) and armor, and then run games in the woods near Boston. Although I think it's somewhat silly, I have to agree with what Morton said when he tried it, "I don't care about the game - I just think it's fun to run around in the woods and beat up on people with a foam sword."

The Net

The Net was an old high strength fishing net that had been converted into a monster hammock (dyed, oddly enough, red, not purple) in 33, one of the quads at TEP. 33 also had "The Loft of Brotherly Love", a loft which was approximately 8 by 24 feet, sleeping 4 people side by side. So the Net attached to that on one side, and into the wall on the other side (it originally had been attached to the ceiling but later they realized that trying to support something from above with screws was a really bad idea so they drilled lag shields into the brick wall and used 22 lag bolts to fasten it more securely), and when I was there, was still in good enough shape to be able to hold upwards of 30 people in it at once. One other nifty thing about the Net is that if you lived in 33, you picked up the trick of accessing the Net, by grabbing hold of an edge and flipping your way into and out of it.

Net dreck

Net dreck is that stuff that inevitably accumulates in your e-mail box if you're subscribed to ANY sort of e-mail list on the Internet. The kid dying of cancer who's collecting postcards, the "Darwin award" to somebody who strapped a JATO (Jet Assisted Take-Off) engine to his car and smashed into a cliff, the various nerd tests, etc etc. The stuff that, if you're like me, and have been on the net for a while, you've seen many many times over...

Prof. Louis Osborne

Prof. Osborne was my 8.03 recitation instructor, then my UROP advisor, and eventually my thesis advisor. He was a very nice man whom I owe a lot of thanks to for taking me under his wing and letting me get a lot of research experience in his laboratory while at MIT.

Pass/Fail grading

MIT is very wise for having freshman year graded only on Pass/Fail. This allows all the good little nerds coming out of high school, where every single one of them was the best in everything, to have a year to adjust to the fact that A's are not guaranteed anymore, and that the people in your classes are every bit as smart as you are. I certainly needed the year to adjust.

PKT

Better known as the Evil Communist Godless Scumdog PKT Horde. Our opponents in water war, snowball fights and the like. A sensible choice of opponent considering their house was less than a block away, and they were nearly as goofy as us.

pika

pika is the co-ed independent living group at MIT that was originally the fraternity Pi Kappa Alpha, before they broke off to go co-ed. TEP and pika are generally on pretty good terms, attending each other's social events, and playing jokes on each other, and many a relationship has occurred between the two.

Punting

The opposite of tooling. Basically doing anything but what you're supposed to be doing. "What are you up to?" "Oh, I'm punting this problem set."

Purple

Purple is a neat-o keen color. What can we say? It was formerly the color of royalty in ancient times, and it's one of TEP National's colors; hence, we took it and made it our own to an extent nobody else would. Our front room is painted in light purple with purple trim, and with purple padding on the bar. In fact, I heard once that walking tours of the Back Bay have stopped and pointed out the front room, and just called it the Purple Room.

Purple Board

Purple is our favorite color at TEP. Hence we painted our bulletin board purple. Used for posting notices, letters from drooling alumni, social calendars, and target practice. Anything important is put on the white board anyway.

Saferide

aka Warmride, Dryride. This service was started up in my sophomore year in order to provide a safe way of travelling from campus to those living off-campus (in independent living groups, fraternities, etc). Of course, it also got a high amount of use when it was raining or cold (hence the nicknames) but it is a good service nevertheless.

Schmooz

aka Brian Lantz. Schmooz was my big brother at TEP in many ways, and I admired him and copied him so much my freshman year that I was often referred to as Young Schmooz. One amazing fella lemme tell ya. A founding member of the Second Front Fascists Currently a physics grad student at MIT.

Schtick

aka Derek Schulte. Member of the Lickwid Paper pledge class that rushed when I was Rush Chair. He obviously was brain-damaged in his time at TEP, because he agreed later to become Rush Chair himself.

Second Front Fascists

The Second Front Fascists were a group of 5 people who lived in the front half of the second floor (hence Second Front), who were intent on maintaining discipline, having people do their work assignments, and generally not having TEP be a nasty place to live. Of course this got them labelled as fascist, by some of our more anarchistic members, for telling them what to do. I was not one of the original Second Front Fascists, but I came the following year, and considered myself to be heir to that tradition. The original Fascists were Schmooz, Beef, Batman, 'Bug, and Xemu.

Slum Lum

aka Somerville Lumber. Large store in Somerville, which is just north of Cambridge, which is just north of Boston where TEP is, where you can get all sorts of neat construction type stuff. Very useful place to go during Work Week for instance.

SIPB

Student Information Processing Board. This is an association of students that provide many valuable contributions to the MIT computing environment - things that you take for granted til you go to another university and find they aren't there. However, their reputation as a collection of pale, CRT-tanned, computer weenies is not wholly unjustified, and leads to a certain amount of derision by members of the MIT community.

SSC

Superconducting Super Collider, aka "the big hole in Texas." I spent approximately 4 summers working on/for the SSC in some form, and was hoping to make a career out of it. However, my senior year at MIT, the funding got slashed by Congress just in time to paralyze my thesis briefly, but that's how it goes, I guess.

Student Revolutionary Government

The SRG appeared one year around the time of MIT government (or University Association) elections. They stole one of the ballot boxes from Lobby 7, and later issued a communique declaiming that the UA was a tool of the MIT administration and didn't really represent MIT students, etc etc. Twas pretty silly overall.

Tau Epsilon Phi

TEP is where I lived as an undergraduate at MIT. More information on that aspect of my life is located on the Perlick home page.

Tep-a-phone

The in-house phone system at TEP. It was built by Fred back in the seventies sometime out of the parts being thrown away when MIT moved to the 5ESS switching system. A totally amazing construction. It cascades incoming calls through 3 lines (such that you call one number, if it's busy, the system automatically transfers it to the next line, and then to the third), and you can also use it to call each room's extension phone, as well as the washer/dryer (if you get a busy signal, the washer/dryer is in use - very useful when you live on the 5th floor and the washer/dryer are in the basement).

TEP intercom

The TEP intercom - go to the center stairwell, and yell really loudly for the person you're looking for. Some of the brothers, notably Schmooz, are impressively loud after having done this for several years. Of course, you could always use Tep-a-phone.

Tooling

What the rest of the world calls studying. For some reason, at MIT it's called tooling. As in I can't flame right now I have to tool.

Tradition

Did you say tuition? There's a song about that, you know. This has to be one of the oldest, lamest jokes at TEP - but I would have been required to turn in my drool glands to TEP if, as an alumnus, I did not have at least one reference to it in my home page.

Universal Gas Law

PV=nRT, for you nerds keeping track at home.

Upstairs kitchen

The small kitchen located on the first floor of TEP, which was mainly used for dish-washing, rather than food preparation. As opposed to the downstairs kitchen.

UROP

Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program. One of the best things about MIT. It's a program which pays students to do real research with the some of the best (i.e. MIT) scientists/engineers in the country. Well over half of all MIT students participate in this program, which is currently in danger of getting seriously cut in funding due to new governmental regulations concerning overhead. This would be a true shame if UROP had to end or be severely curtailed due to a stupid governmental regulation.

Vegetarians

I'm kidding of course about vegetarians being wusses. I don't happen to be one myself, but I respect that choice. However, after several times of having to order several veggie dishes for the benefit of the 2 vegetarians in a party of 12, you appreciate going out to dinner with only meat-eaters :).

Water Weenies

Water weenies can also work well in water war. These are pieces of surgical tubing with a knot at one end. When filled with water, they expand to 3 times their normal diameter, which looks quite impressive. Clip off the end with a large binder clip, put the water weenie in a jean leg with a strap attached as a holster, and you're all set.

Weenie King/Prince

Brad was declared the Weenie King of TEP at one point, due to his great mastery of not one, not two, but THREE different areas of weenie-dom. He was a member of SIPB (computer weenie-dom), he wrote an Assassin's Guild game, and he also had a decent character in NERO. Nobody else could match this wide-ranging weenie-ness, so his realm was split into the three parts and given to the three Weenie Princes. I (Perlick) was declared the Weenie Prince of computerdom, due to my hack'n'slash coding and addiction to MUDding, Xemu was declared the Weenie Prince of Assassins, seeing as he had just been elected GrandMaster Assassin (head of the Assassin's guild) at that point, and Rugburn was dubbed the Weenie Prince of NEROdom due to his position as a baron in NERO. Brad even gave us little cardboard crowns from Burger King with appropriate symbols (mine had computer chips, Xemu's had little plastic discs, and Rugburn's had foam blocks).

White Board

A white (wipe? never can tell) board with dry-erase markers located by the front door of TEP. All telephone messages and important announcements are put here.

Work Week

Twice a year, before the fall and spring semesters, all of TEP would get together and for 5-7 days, spend 8 hours a day working on fixing up the house and keeping it from falling apart. You can learn all sorts of useful skills during this time, or you can skate (the work week form of punting) massively.

WSTS

Westinghouse Science Talent Search. You submit a science project in December of your senior year of high school, and hope to break the top 300.