… what happened to Oliver Smoot? For those unaware, Oliver Smoot is the man who’s body was used to measure the Harvard bridge during a fraternity pledge event in 1958. The Lambda Chi Alpha brothers laid him end to end, measuring the length of the bridge to be 364.4 Smoots plus 1 Ear. So, just what happened to this infamous standard of measure?
He became the chairman of the American National Standards Institute and president of the International Organization for Standardization. Would you have expected anything else?

Well, no time travelers showed up. Were we surprised? Well, quite frankly, no. In fact, I didn’t even bother to go look for them at 10:00 PM with the rest of the crowd — which means that I missed the Delorean. Instead, I was inside stacking chairs and turning Walker from a lecture hall to a dance hall. But it was still one heckuva party.
The speakers were generally pretty excellent. In the middle of his speech, Dr. Farhi got a call from Albert Einstein, who is apparently living in the center of the universe. Apparently he got a nice place in exchange for three autographed copies of his first manuscript. The gymnastics coach and his twin brother did a cute little trick, pretending to travel through time. One walked on his hands and gave a little spiel before leaving the room — and as soon as he left, his twin brother instantaneously came through the back door and proceeded to walk on his hands and start the same spiel verbatim. I thought it was pulled off very well.
Following the twins’ stunt, Professor Alan Guth came up and gave his lecture on relativity and basically explained to us why no future time travelers were going to show up. And then he talked about wormholes, and I felt a little vindicated for my silly quote in the New York Times. Apparently, for pulling something out of my ass, I wasn’t that far off one of the leading theories. Maybe that physics degree I have is worth something after all.
After Guth came Joe Gibbons, a comedian claiming to be a time traveler. As he explained it, time traveling wasn’t that exciting. “They asked me to tell some funny stories about time travel,” he said, “and, well, there just aren’t any.” The final speaker of the night was Erik Demaine, who I have blogged about before. He talked about retroactively changing things – which he said was a kind of time travel. His speech got cut off at 10:00 PM when we sent everyone outside to “look for time travelers” while we set up for the bands.
I was amazed at how smoothly it appeared to go off. I was in charge of the guestlist and letting people in at the beginning of the convention, passing out blue wristbands to people on the list. Things got a little harrowing at times — primarily when the guy not on the list who claimed to have invented a time machine insisted that I let him in. We put him on the waitlist (so he eventually got in) but he wouldn’t leave the front of the line until Sargeant Vossmer came over and got him to move. The other big highlight of the bouncing duties came when “Theodore Logan” claimed to be from the future. Even with the Keanu Reeves getup he was wearing, at first I didn’t process the joke. I asked him to prove it. “Wyld Stallions!” he said.
“Go put yourself on the waitlist,” I responded.
Oh, and apparently it made the Weekend Update on SNL today. I’m really hoping The Daily Show mentions it on Monday.

Well, thanks to Amal linking to me from the Time Travel website, the number of hits on this website has gone up 10 fold today. (1913 unique visits so far — 11,023 hits.) So welcome time travel fans.
And for your listening pleasure, here’s me talking about the convention this morning.
And if you want another story about adventures Amal Dorai and I have had, check out the Beaver Escapades.

The New York Times covers the Time Traveler Convention
Man, do I sound like a nut.
Update: Front page of the national edition!!!!!!!!!!
The IM conversation with Amal:
(02:51:23) Erin Rebecca Rhode: http://www.nytimes.com/pages/pageone/scan/index.html
(02:51:28) Erin Rebecca Rhode: didn’t make the front page
(02:51:46) Amal Kumar Dorai: yeah I already know we didnt’
(02:51:57) Erin Rebecca Rhode: it did on the national edition
(02:52:01) Amal Kumar Dorai: !
(02:52:02) Amal Kumar Dorai: no it didn’t
(02:52:06) Erin Rebecca Rhode: the article
(02:52:07) Erin Rebecca Rhode: no picture
(02:52:10) Erin Rebecca Rhode: i just looked
(02:52:16) Erin Rebecca Rhode: clicked on “national edition”
(02:52:17) Amal Kumar Dorai: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(02:52:19) Amal Kumar Dorai: YESYESYES
(02:52:20) Erin Rebecca Rhode: below the fold
(02:52:22) Amal Kumar Dorai: YESYESYESYESYSEYSEYSEYSEYSESEYSEYSEYse
(02:52:27) Erin Rebecca Rhode: congrats!
(02:52:28) Amal Kumar Dorai: *pomp and circumstance*

An update on the Time Traveler Convention…
I’ve sort of taken over the task of “correspondence,” which mostly means monitoring the gmail account. The account has received over 200 e-mails. Most people seem to have the same sense of humor about the event as we have, but some people are really quite nuts. The other large portion of the mail is media requests – mostly radio stations wanting a quick 5-10 minute interview. Amal explicitly told me to turn down all interview requests “unless they are from the New York Times or something.” Well, upon checking the inbox today…

Hi time travel buffs,
I am a reporter for The New York Times, and your plea for publicity
about your convention has been forwarded to me. I found your web site quite
entertaining and I’d be interested in talking with you about the convention
to see if it is something The Times would like to write about.
Could you give me a call at your earliest convenience? I can be
reached at 617-***-**** or 917-***-****.
Thank you,
Pam Belluck
Pam Belluck
New England Bureau Chief
The New York Times
617-***-****

Update: A reporter from the New York Times will be on Putz tomorrow morning at 11 AM.

Update: Tonight (May 2, 2005) during the 4 PM and 6 PM (EDT) segments of All Things Considered on NPR, Amal will be interviewed. His segment is about 40 minutes in, he says.
About a week ago, Amal IMed me with a link to his web announcement of The Time Traveler Convention which was followed shortly by an e-mail to Putz with the same information. I laughed and shared it with a few friends who were also online at the time, because the idea seemed funny, but didn’t think too much of it.
The next day, Amal requested that we all publicize the heck out of this thing in order to make sure future human societies remember it and time travelers know to come back for it. Remembering that Craigslist is now sending posts into space, I mocked up an ad for the convention and posted it to various Craigslist boards in multiple cities. That, combined with word of mouth and posts on a few other Internet boards, got the Convention a little more publicity.
But it wasn’t until this weekend and the Convention was Slashdotted that the Inbox of timetravelerconvention@gmail.com started to explode with crazy responses. My favorite is from the people at Destination Day, who appear to be mad at Amal “Time Traveler Convention” for not acknowledging that they did it first.

Read the rest of this entry →

Someone who’s still an MIT student should look into some clever retaliation:
http://www.caltechvsmit.com/

Two years ago, the lovely Sheila Longo talked me into entering the first annual Miss Ugly Pageant held during Campus Preview Weekend (CPW) at East Campus. “You’d be awesome! You have to do it!” she said. Now, given that this is a pageant that rewards hideousness and a severe lack of talent, I wasn’t sure that was a compliment, but I entered anyway.
Borrowing a violin from a friend, I created some noise that didn’t even begin to qualify as music for the talent competition. I wore a rain slicker left over from CryoFAC for the swimsuit competition, complete with mascara on my leg hair. But it was my final statement in the interview portion, delivered with a thick Minnesotan accent, that got me a bonus -10 points.

I just wanted to let you all know that I’m bleeding pretty freely from my crotch here, and as of such, I got PMS pretty bad. If you don’t let me win, I’m gonna take it out on all the judges and the gosh darn rugby team.

Much to the surprise of the few people that actually find me attractive, I brought home the crown… er, trucker’s hat… that year as Miss Ugly 2003.
Last year, as the reigning Miss Ugly, I was asked back to emcee the show with the ugliest man I know, Mr. Amal Dorai. And now this weekend brings us the 2005 Miss Ugly competition, and I’ve been asked to perform a “talent” while the judges deliberate. And since I’m not doing anything better this Saturday afternoon, I’ve agreed.
I’m keeping my “talent” a secret until the day of the show, but it’s sure to be hideous.

Fun things to do on a Saturday night:
Ride rolling Athena chairs down slanted basement hallways at MIT. Ride tricycles down same hallways. Invent ways to roll down the hills in groups of four. Turn the group of four into a group of five halfway down the hill without slowing down.
Not fun things to do on a Saturday night:
Be on the front chair when the group of four crashes into the wall.
On the plus side, purple is a good color for me – just maybe not on my swollen knees.
Also, the Emergency Pizza Button is pretty sweet.

I was over at MIT this evening, running some rehearsals for The Vagina Monologues, completely unaware that there was no water until one of my actresses mentioned that she couldn’t shower in her dorm. As it turns out, a water main broke on Broadway, right in front of the Marriott, causing most of MIT and a good part of Cambridge to be without running water for the evening. After rehearsals, I headed over to Putz to hang out with a pair of foolios. Being hungry, we headed up to my neck of the woods where the dihydrogen-monoxide was still flowing.
But first, we made our way to the scene of the incident to survey the damage, dodging the firemen at the hotel by going around the back. It was quite the sight — a small bubbling geyser in the middle of the street, which had turned into a river. I couldn’t quite gauge how deep it was, but I’d guess 6-8 inches from curb to curb. We were pretty much at the head waters of the newly formed Broadway River, but from what I could see, it’s mighty waters flowed down for at least a block or two.
We left the river and headed down to the T, where we discovered that the main power was out. The lights that were on seemed to be running off of the very loud backup generator. On the plus side, since the card swipes on the turnstiles weren’t working, our ride to Davis was free. Which doesn’t mean much to me, since I have a T Pass.
During our hearty meal at Redbones, we had a water fight*, perhaps to celebrate the fact that we had the luxury of wasting it, while those back at MIT were stuck with nothing. And now I’m going to take a shower because I can.
* When I say that “we” had a water fight, I mean that Fucking Amal was spraying us with his straw.