CS Students and Guns
The Squirrel Nest
Presentation announcement
22-May-87 19:26
Olin.Shivers@h.cs.cmu.edu
It's common knowledge that whenever you get two or more CS grad
students together, the conversation will inevitably drift to the
same topic: automatic weapons. Lately, we've noticed that whenever
we attend a CS party, picnic, or bullsession, we always hear the
same questions and discussions, usually from the younger grad
students:
"When I switched from guncotton to standard ball powder on
my .223 loads, the gas ports on my M16 would clog like you
wouldn't believe. Steer clear of that stuff."
"You haven't cleared an ejection port jam until you've
cleared one in the Hill district at 4:00 AM on a Saturday
morning."
"I want to mount an M60 in front of the sun roof of my
Tercel, but the mounting bracket wasn't drilled for import
cars. How did Josh Bloch do his?"
"What exactly are those special 'conference rounds' that
Newell hand loads before AAAI every year?"
"Some of my friends at the MIT AI Lab don't like M203's
because the grenade launcher adds too much weight, but I
wouldn't have gotten out of IJCAI-85 in one piece if it
hadn't been for those 40mm flechette rounds. What do you
think?"
"Do you have to be a god-damned tenured professor to get
teflon rounds at this place?"
"Does the 'reasonable person principle' cover hosing down
a member of the Soar project after he's used the phrase
'cognitively plausible' for the fifteenth time in a 20
minute conference talk?"
"Where *did* Prof. Vrsalovic get that Kalashnikov AK-47?"
"I used to use Dri-Slide to lube my M16. How come my
advisor says Dri-Slide is for momma's boys and Stanford
profs?"
"Does the way Jon Webb keeps flicking the safety of his
Mac-10 on and off at thesis defenses make you nervous,
too?"
In short, there is a lot of concern in this department for the
proper care, handling and etiquette of automatic weapons. So as a
service to the department, we are starting a two week daily series
on "The Care and Handling of Your M16A1." Every day for the next two
weeks, we will post on the wall outside our office the day's helpful
hint on care and maintenance of that good old departmental standby:
the M16A1. Our thanks to the US Army, whose training manuals we have
shamelessly cribbed for material.
We would like to encourage other knowledgeable members of the CS
community to share their expertise in a similar fashion. There is a
real need for this kind of dialogue in the department. The new
students come in here every fall, and are totally unequipped to
handle the realities of graduate student life at CMU. Computability
theory and lexical scoping are fine things to know about, but they
just don't cut the mustard when somebody from the Psych department
opens up on you with an Ingram set to full auto.
-the friendly automatic weapons enthusiasts of SkyCave1,
Olin, Derek, and Allan
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 26 May 87 09:55:15 PDT
From: jkh%violet.Berkeley.EDU@BERKELEY.EDU (Jordan K. Hubbard)
To: Olin.Shivers@h.cs.cmu.edu
Subject: Supporting one's opinion with sustained fully automatic
weapons fire.
I had recent occasion to view your Presentation Announcement on care
and feeding of automatic weapons during lecture hall. I found it
most amusing. I would very much like to see and/or contribute future
material.
We have similar problems here at Berkeley, though it has been
difficult to wean our students away from more the more mundane
assortment of Browning Hi-Power's, Beretta 92SBF's and Sig-Sauer
P226's. The 9mm clique is pretty strong here, and the young grad
students fairly parsimonious. They tend to balk at the idea of
spending enough money on ammo to make full auto firefights
practical. Lately, they've taken to sniping at each other from the
Campanille tower and engaging in loose hit-and-run guerrilla tactics
during finals. This is obviously not the American Way and needs to
be changed. While I've been able to slowly ween them into more
progressive arms (such as the Beretta 93R and an occasional
mini-uzi), I still can't seem to get past the supply problem. My
questions are:
"Do you buy your ammo in bulk, or do appointed individuals
do shifts on a progressive reloader?"
"Does the school pay for this?"
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Jordan Hubbard
U.C. Berkeley
moderator of rec.guns
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27-May-87 02:16
Olin.Shivers@h.cs.cmu.edu
Automatic Weapons, part III
My reply to Mr. Hubbard of UC Berkeley:
Mr. Hubbard-
Thank you for your letter. It was certainly interesting to hear of
conditions out on the West Coast. What can I tell you about the
situation here at CMU? I'm really glad I came to CMU. The faculty is
absolutely first rate, and they all take pride in their weapons
skills. We are admittedly a pretty opinionated bunch, which provides
for many interesting interchanges within the community. I, for
instance, think the long barrel .44 Automag is more of a fashion
statement than a weapon, though you won't catch me saying that
within earshot of Prof. Fahlman. If you catch my drift.
Yes, I am aware of the West Coast predilection for 9mm pistolry.
When I was an undergraduate, I spent one summer doing AI hacking at
the MIT AI Lab. We'd hired this west coast guy to do Lisp hacking,
and I can clearly remember being a little stranged out by his
attitudes. He just wouldn't shut up about Interlisp and Browning
Hi-Power's. Every time I tried to explain to him the way our project
did things, he'd interrupt with "the right way," i.e. the West Coast
Way, to do it. He just couldn't get it through his head that I
didn't want to hear about Interlisp, and I damn sure didn't want to
hear about 9-fucking-millimeter automatics; we were a Zetalisp/.223
project. I finally gave up on him; that was the first time I'd ever
personally encountered the east coast/west coast split in Lisp style
and weapons choice.
I'm not quite as adamant about that sort of thing as I used to be. I
guess these days I tend to have a "whatever gets the job done"
attitude -- even if it's franz or a .22 Woodsman. But I've always
thought that the west coast was really missing out on a good thing.
I mean, on the east coast, public comment sometimes requires you to
tuck a Beretta discreetly away in a shoulder holster. But when you
are in Berkeley, it being the sort of place that it is, you can
stroll down the street toting your automatic rifle of choice without
so much as raising an eyebrow.
I am very fond of Berkeley. I think that while LA represents the
dark, twisted
climb-the-water-tower-and-start-shooting-until-the-Marines-settle-it
side of California weirdness, Berkeley represents the very best of
the pure, innocent-killer side of it all. The first weekend I ever
spent in Berkeley was in the summer of 1983. I was sitting down at
one of those really delightful cafes you have out there. To my left
some old man was drinking cappucino and practicing Chinese
calligraphy; down the street some undergraduates were engaged in a
running firefight. I was taking it all in, thinking that Berkeleians
have remembered something about living well that the rest of America
seems to have forgotten, when this kid's stray .223 slug shattered
my glass of pomegranate soda. "Crazy undergraduates," I remember
chuckling to myself as I put the safety back on my Hi-Power and
returned it to its holster.
It seems a shame that ammunition is so hard to come by out there,
though. We are quite spoiled here at CMU. The departmental attitude
towards logistical support really crystallised for me in September
of my first year. One of the incoming first-year hot-shots had taken
out Prof. Felton with a head shot from 500 yards. We were all really
impressed, and I think it was generally agreed that Felton couldn't
have asked for a more painless, appropriate end. It was a beautiful,
almost poetic way to cap what had been a textbook career of
brilliant, original mathematical insights punctuated with outbursts
of random, deeply unhinged violence. Many were the stories of Felton
told that week -- we were particularly touched that, in a very real
sense, he'd died with his boots on. He may have been all of 65, but
his .357 Magnum had been in his hand when he hit the ground, a
reflexive feat of almost mystical proportions, considering that by
the time he'd become aware of the danger to himself, most of his
processing hardware had become so much organic garbage heading west
at Mach 1.
You've probably heard of Felton (National Academy of Science, IEEE
Past President, NRA sustaining member). My advisor told me later
that Felton's academic peak had come at that now-infamous 1982
Symposium on Data Encryption, when he presented the plaintext of the
encrypted challenge message that Rob Merkin had published earlier
that year using his "phonebooth packing" trap-door algorithm.
According to my advisor, Felton wordlessly walked up to the
chalkboard, wrote down the plaintext, cranked out the multiplies and
modulus operations by hand, and wrote down the result, which was
obviously identical to the encrypted text Merkin had published in
CACM. Then, still without saying a word, he tossed the chalk over
his shoulder, spun around, drew and put a 158grain semi-wadcutter
right between Merkin's eyes. As the echoes from the shot
reverberated through the room, he stood there, smoke drifting from
the muzzle of his .357 Magnum, and uttered the first words of the
entire presentation: "Any questions?" There was a moment of stunned
silence, then the entire conference hall erupted in wild applause.
God, I wish I'd been there.