Yes, I know that this is crazy and has a few wrong or inconsistent details, but it's still damm funny!

A series of posts appearing on the Opinion bboard at CMU in 1987.

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22-May-87 19:24    Olin.Shivers@h               Presentation announcement

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

27-May-87 01:14    Olin.Shivers@h               Keep those cards and letters coming
From defrocked psychoanalysts to Californian gun nuts, my posts really seem
to bring the fringe element out of the woodwork. Can't imagine why.

I received the following in the mail today. I thought it might amuse you all,
so I'm posting it here. My reply to Mr. Hubbard's mail is in a following post,
entitled "Automatic weapons, part III," for those of you who might wish to
skip it.

Let me take this opportunity to announce that Allan, Derek, and I posted the
third installment of our "Care and Maintenance of Your M16A1" series today,
which finishes off the section on disassembly.  We urge interested parties to
drop by and peruse the posts; we feel it's pretty important.

Thank you.
   -Olin

----- message follows -----

Date: Tue, 26 May 87 09:55:15 PDT
From: jkh%[email protected] (Jordan K. Hubbard)
To: [email protected]
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 Campanile 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 wean 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 02:22    Olin.Shivers@h               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
cappuccino 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.

But I digress.  At Felton's funeral, our departmental chairman delivered the
eulogy.  I'll never forget his summation:  "Poor Felton.  Published, and
published, and perished just the same." And that's the attitude that the
professors take here.  As my advisor said: "The tragedy of Galois is that he
could have contributed so much more to mathematics if he'd only spent more
time on his marksmanship." The professors at CMU aren't in the business of
turning out effete researchers, aimed at the big industrial labs.  They are
interested in training real academicians, suitably prepared for life in the
jungle of university-level computer science.  And that means time spent
practicing our teaching skills and weapons handling as well as making
fundamental research contributions to the field.  The department does not care
to just crank out PhD's, half of whom aren't going going to make it through
their first semester as a junior professor without winding up in a body bag.
They are committed to a solid grounding in small arms fire, and if that means
spending some grant money for the necessary resources, they are ready to stand
up to the line.

So the short answer is, the department supplies us with all the ammunition
we can use, and then some. Any caliber; any load configuration. They even
keep those crazy Czechs supplied, who come in here every year with the
absolutely strangest knock-off versions of other countries' guns that you have
ever laid eyes on.  The free ammunition has some nice side effects, too:  the
campus police never, ever give CS grad students parking tickets.  And you just
wouldn't believe how attentive the students are in the courses we TA.

                               -Olin

LOL, what IS this??
It's like somebody combined a crazy engineering curriculum message board with "The Onion".  All funny though, nonetheless.

pretty funny stuff.
[smoke]