Return-Path: Date: Mon, 1 Nov 1993 09:55:29 -0800 From: tar@isi.edu Posted-Date: Mon, 1 Nov 1993 09:55:29 -0800 To: cgdemarc@ai.mit.edu In-Reply-To: Carl de Marcken's message of Sun, 31 Oct 93 23:27:41 EST <9311010427.AA18003@theta> Subject: GSL/GSB Messages Cc: eps@princeton.edu Reply-To: tar@isi.edu What a great project! I beleive that the tradition of creating bogus announcements to remind people of GSL was started by Walter Hamscher (Hamscher@tc.pw.com) when he was the coordinator. Someone else to contact is Dave Braunegg (djb@mitre.org) who was a coordinator along with Bonnie Dorr. I might have my chronology a bit confused, but I believe that Elisha Sacks took over from Walter. When Elisha was coordinator, I became a sort of "ghost writer" in that I sent him messages which he then posted. Since the announcements went out under his name, he got most of the replies. It always amazed me to see how wide a distribution the supposedly internal messages got. A lot of the mail came from out-of-state sites. The most interesting story along those lines was caused when I butchered the announcement of a robotics summer school at CMU. It was one of the standard transformations, substituting names like Betty Crocker and Charles Beard for the distinguished lecturers running the school. The syllabus was also modified to give it a culinary flavor (Sorry :}). Early the next week Elisha, under whose name the announcement was posted, received EMail from one of the summer school organizers. If I recall correctly, the entire contents was the question "Who are you?" Elisha very matter-of-factly replied that he was Elisha Sacks and asked the sender who he was and why he sent such a message. The response was that the sender was one of the organizers of the summer school. He felt it was a very serious undertaking and did not appreciate the parody of his work. [I don't recall who sent the message to Elisha. I cc'd him, maybe he can recall. Then again, we might want to let the author remain anonymous.] A final message from Elisha explaining that we did this all the time to announce lunches seemed to end the matter. One week when I wasn't feeling too creative I just used a really bizarre abstract that I had uncovered during an on-line literature search. We just changed the name of the author (to protect the guilty). A week later we got mail from someone at UC Berkeley expressing regret at having not been able to attend the seminar and asking if we had any references to publications. In this case we were able to oblige, but then had to explain why we had changed the name of the author... I'll see if I can find these particular lunch messages in my archives. I don't think that they are in any of the recent ones. I may have some of the early messages archived somewhere. I will have to check some of my old disks. I do have the 1990 and 1991 lunch messages available. I will send them to you in separate messages. I also recall some of the more interesting ones being published as part of Walter Hamscher's GSL Cookbook. ________________________________________________________________________ Thomas A. Russ, USC/Information Sciences Institute tar@isi.edu 4676 Admiralty Way, Marina del Rey, CA 90292 (310) 822-1511x775