Creative Hacking?

A. Unabashed Pacifist:

The leader of my Peace Party outlined a radical platform:
- turn the other cheek
- put away the weapons, for those who live by weapons will die by weapons
- our true citizenship has little to do with that offered by nation-states
- love enemies and do good to them, thus making them friends

Will it work? We won’t know unless we try it.

B. Unabashed Christian:

Holy One,

You lead me to believe:
- You created the awesome universe.
- You made us in your image.
- You created us for freedom and dignity.
- You give life as a marvelous opportunity.
- You care what happens to us.
- You have faith in our ability to take good advantage of this gift.
- You sent Jesus as a revelation to us of who you are and to show us what it is like to live with you in mind.
- You forgive us when we do not follow through on our knowledge and ability.
- You provide hope and love as powerful influences for good in our lives.
- You made us more than physical beings and that life is not entirely bound to time.
- You made us so that our life is entirely bound to you.
Amen

C. Un-quoting Jesus:

“What do you think, Peter, is Mom qualified to lead in my church?”

[We have it on lots of authority that He never said this. Still, one wonders…]

D. Blog: The Meaning of “Hack”

[Thanks to Eric Raymond’s “Jargon File”]

“The word hack doesn't really have 69 different meanings”, according to MIT hacker Phil Agre. “In fact, hack has only one meaning, an extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation. Which connotation is implied by a given use of the word depends in similarly profound ways on the context.”

Hacking might be characterized as ‘an appropriate application of ingenuity’. Whether the result is a quick-and-dirty patchwork job or a carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that went into it.

An important secondary meaning of hack is ‘a creative practical joke’. This kind of hack is easier to explain than the programming kind. Of course, some hacks have both natures. But here is one example of a pure practical joke that illustrates the true hacking spirit:

In 1961, students from Caltech (California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena) hacked the Rose Bowl football game. One student posed as a reporter and ‘interviewed’ the director of the University of Washington card stunts (such stunts involve people in the stands who hold up colored cards to make pictures). The reporter learned exactly how the stunts were operated, and also that the director would be going out to dinner later.

While the director was eating, the students (who called themselves the ‘Fiendish Fourteen’) picked a lock and stole a blank direction sheet for the card stunts. They then had a printer run off 2300 copies of the blank. The next day they picked the lock again and stole the master plans for the stunts — large sheets of graph paper colored in with the stunt pictures. Using these as a guide, they made new instructions for three of the stunts on the duplicated blanks. Finally, they broke in once more, replacing the stolen master plans and substituting the stack of diddled instruction sheets for the original set.

The result was that three of the pictures were totally different from those planned. Instead of ‘WASHINGTON’, the word ‘CALTECH’ was flashed. Another stunt showed the word ‘HUSKIES’, the Washington nickname, but spelled it backwards. And what was supposed to have been a picture of a husky instead showed a beaver. (Both Caltech and MIT use the beaver — nature's engineer — as a mascot.)

After the game, the Washington faculty athletic representative said: “Some thought it ingenious; others were indignant.” The Washington student body president remarked: “No hard feelings, but at the time it was unbelievable. We were amazed.” This is now considered a classic hack, particularly because revising the direction sheets constituted a form of programming.