Madness
Once a year or so, a whole bunch of New Yorkers get together for the enormous scavenger hunt/treasure hunt/codebreaking camp/exercise in sleep deprivation which is Midnight Madness. This has us doing such diverse things as interpreting art installations (How many seconds after the lightning does the thunder roll? Which light sticks are flashing and in what order? How can you put that together to get a phone number in Long Island? Is the curatorial note relevant?), following Lincoln around Chelsea (Oh look, here are some pennies on the ground. Which way is Lincoln's face pointing on that one? Oh, look, if I walk in that direction a few blocks, I find another bunch of pennies. Etc.), and assembling flip books based on the first 1200 digits of pi (hrm... 3.14159265357989... um... perhaps we should look this up). We began at about 11 at night. We finished at about two in the afternoon. And we won. Fantastic.That's all, really. Obscure clues, strange puzzles, fierce competition, no sleep. What a great weekend!
posted by Skay @ 1:19 AM
6 Comments:
that is so unfair. we dont have anything remotely like that in Johannesburg.
im actually quite jealous. sounds like a lot of fun. wen im in New York again, ill be sure to sync the trip around the same time as this event - in this way ill get to see what strange tings New Yorkers get up to!:)
OK.
I take it this is some kind of math genius thing?
Don't take that wrong, please. I appreciate that some people can make numbes make sense. The only part of math I did well in was algebra, and that's because it involved numbers.
There's a reason I'm a writer.
But you had fun, and that's the important thing here. Good times, good times.
I had a friend, in college, we'll call him Pi, who claimed to have 800 digits of pi memorized. To verify pi's claim, rather than just looking up pi's digits (we were a lazy lot), we ran an experiment: Pi was to write down the first 500 digits as quickly as he could, while another friend of ours was to write down 500 digits as quickly as he could, without making any patterns, the way that pi does not.
So who finished faster? Pi did, of course. His opponent was so concerned with not making any patterns (as our brains are wont to do) that he lagged behind Pi significantly. It was a fun experiment, with a satisfactory (though initially counterintuitive) solution.
Crag,
It's totally not a math genius thing. There are a lot of numbers, but you don't even need algebra to figure out what you're supposed to do with them. And there are stories to interpret, posters to compare, pennies to follow, etc. It's basically just a crazy night-time treasure-hunters' thing.
I love your experiment, Donovan. What a fine demonstration.
I remember being in Mrs. Kennedy's fourth grade class and trying to collect as many aluminum-can pop-tops as there were dollars in the then-national debt. We collected a few MILLION, I believe. They filled a closet. Trying to visualize a few TRILLION was just far beyond any sense of reason or possibility.
Anyway. Demonstrations. Awesome.
OK, I can interpret stories and things. You just mentioned the math stuff in your post.
Now I want to do this too. But I'll still need a math genius. Want to be on my team, Skay?
I'm hardly a math genius, but I'd love to be on your team nonetheless.
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