An MIT Underwear Exposé (and Sorting Hat)

Reading this made me downright sad that I didn&#x27;t, and probably never will, attend MIT.<p>Oh, the interesting people! The interesting projects!<p>How I wish I had worked harder.

This is the best thing.<p>I&#x27;m sorry, but I don&#x27;t feel the need to qualify that statement. This is just one of those absolutely crazy projects that people do from time to time (although MIT certainly has a reputation for hosting a lot of them), and I love that sort of thing. As much as we talk up the importance of Bayes&#x27; theorem and other algorithms as things that can change the world, etc., sometimes, you can just build something cool, and have a laugh.

&gt; Reasons for emailing all undergraduates include event announcements for student groups and departments, flame wars, and occasionally lost items. In contrast, the kinds of emails sent within a dorm mailing list include, at the top of my inbox right now, parties, house meetings, and foodmobs to restaurants in Boston; decisions about when to turn off the heating for spring, invitations to test food experiments, and a memo to the person who left their clothes in the middle washer; and requests for empty gallon jugs, superglue, cooking scales, male-to-male audio cables, MIDI cables, 120V twist lock connectors, funnels, and hairdryers.<p>I can only imagine the volume of email that entails; how do people deal with it? I would guess that these days the mailing lists are through Google Groups so you can at least turn off emails and use the list as a forum, but I doubt most would know or bother to do that and let themselves drown in email.

Ofcourse Senior House had a lot of black underwear ;)

So, if you are aspiring to attend classes at MIT then you know what to do now. If you are applying for the admission, then you can choose your underwear color to increase your chances to get in.

Of course it was a fellow Randomite who put this together. :)<p>Also, of course it was Senior Haus which had the highest prevalence of black underwear.

This might be my favorite data science post ever to grace the front page of HN.

this is awesome. Eg, &quot;There is a sad, persistent decrease in multicolored underwear, ending with none by senior year.&quot; Does &quot;none&quot; refer to NA (None, null, etc.) or to the lack of color in the respondents&#x27; underwear, or to going commando? i suppose like all great research, it raises more questions than it answers.<p>more seriously, The OP seems to be inspired by a well-established tradition at the institute--MIT&#x27;s sand mandala, perhaps. I graduated in 1992 and i remember some of my classmates from time to time, engaging in self-assigned projects that (i) seemed to lack any discernible purpose or utility whatever--certainly none for the student and (ii) that required a mind-boggling amount of meticulous effort. Somehow seeing these two attributes juxtaposed in a single endeavor, was hilarious to us (likewise the OP). Sometimes, though not always, these projects were deemed &quot;pranks&quot; but separate in my view.

This type of thing makes me proud to be at MIT :)

How were those pie charts generated?

A silly question for the insiders: what does &quot;teal with cameras&quot; mean?

Shouldn&#x27;t MIT pay royalties if it&#x27;s using Harry Potter references in its marketing material?

&#x27;Creepy&#x27; is right.<p>I wonder how many people refrained from using an otherwise-useful mailing list because of someone they didn&#x27;t want thinking about the color of their underwear.<p>I further wonder if reluctance to talk about their underwear color publicly impacts different genders disproportionately.