Best inspiration for trouble-making nerds

The idea behind MIT is deceptively simple: assemble a large number of brilliant technical minds, give them access to the stuff they need for experiments, and see what happens when they're subjected to intense competition. If this makes for good science, it's also a perfect recipe for stress-relieving mischief. It comes as no surprise, then, that MIT has a long and distinguished history of pranks, or "hacks," as they're known on campus. The MIT Gallery of Hacks is an Internet effort to catalogue these high-tech, high-stakes high jinks for the benefit of future generations. The gallery organizes hacks by year, by location, and by topic. Chief among targets is the university's Great Dome, which has been converted into a beanie with rotating propeller, the Star Wars robot R2D2, a giant pumpkin (twice), and an outsized breast. The dome has been topped with a piano, a working phone booth, and a reconstructed campus police cruiser attended by a dummy cop with a box of doughnuts in his lap. Hackers have also hidden the door to the office of an incoming president, and have staged a series of famous stunts at the Harvard-Yale game. Read about enough of these and you'll reflexively check out the roof of the dome every time you pass by.

Go to http://hacks.mit.edu. The infamous MIT hacks are also documented in an ongoing exhibition at the MIT Museum, 265 Mass Ave, Cambridge, (617) 253-4444.