For text documents: http://docs.google.com/ (formatted text) and http://pastebin.com/ (plaintext and code)

For spreadsheets, including tables of information to be re-arranged into various orders: http://docs.google.com/

For drawing things online, and uploading drawings and pictures to be written/drawn on: http://dabbleboard.com/

For anagrams: Internet Anagram Server (a.k.a. I, Rearrangement Servant) http://wordsmith.org/anagram/

Basic info about MIT:

• founded in 1861. Yes, next year will be its 150th anniversary.
• Located on the north bank of the Charles River, in Cambridge, MA, USA, right across the river from Boston's Back Bay area.
• campus map can be found here: http://whereis.mit.edu/ . Map features include:
  • The campus is rougly one mile long.
  • Located on the Kendall Square / MIT stop of the red line on the "T" (the subway).
  • All buildings are numbered. Main buildings in the center have no letter prefix; buildings on the right, left above, etc. have a letter prefix corresponding roughtly to their location relative to the main buildings.
  • Main buildings are numbered mostly odd/even depending on which side of building 10 they are on. (The current exceptions are bldgs. 42 (new Brain and Cognitive Sciences building), 57 (Alumni Pool), and 51 (Wood Sailing Pavilion).)
  • Building 10 is the one with the Big Dome. This is where some famous hacks have occurred (more on this below).
  • The main street entrance, as well as the mailing address for the entire campus, is 77 Massachusetts Avenue. Entering there will put you in "Lobby 7", in building 7, with the Little Dome on top of you.
  • Many of the undergraduate dormitories are located on the west part of campus, called West Campus. The exceptions are East Campus and Senior House (on the east side of central campus), Random Hall (much more north), and a newly planned dormitory in the NW area if I recall correctly.
    • For some reason, while buildings are generally referred to by numbers, the dorms are generally referred to by names.
  • The buildings named Simmons Hall and the Stata Center are blamed on architects.
• The fields of study are almost all numbered as well. Their numbers can be seen here—and in the hottip following this line, I've made a list in number order:  ^{click here for list}
  ^{1 civil and environmental engineering, 2 mechanical engineering, 3 materials science and engineering, 4 architecture, 5 chemistry, 6 electrical engineering and computer science, 7 biology, 8 physics, 9 brain and cognitive sciences, 10 chemical engineering, 11 urban studies and planning, 12 earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences, 13 ocean eng (defunct), 14 economics, 15 management, 16 aeronautics/astronatics ("aero/astro"), 17 political science, 18 mathematics, 19 (defunct, sometimes assigned to "hacking" as a joke, was meteorology in the 50s before it was absorbed into 12), 20 biological engineering, 21 humanities (21A anthropology, 21F foreign languages and literatures, 21H history, 21L literature, 21M music and theater arts, 21W writing and humanistic studies), 22 nuclear science and engineering, 23 (defunct), 24 linguistics and philosophy}
  . These numbers are usually notated as roman numerals, and are called "courses"—a biology major would be also be referred to as a "Course VII major", for example.
• Student newspaper is The Tech. Official publicity paper is the Tech Talk. Official magazine is the Technology Review.
• The "Infinite Corridor" is the long hallway starting at the west end of building 7 and going to the east end of building 8.
• The school ring is nicknamed the "Brass Rat".
• Building 32, the (Ray and Maria) Stata Center, is a recent building designed by some idiot with Picasso on the mind Frank Gehry, and houses a lot of computer science people. It's divided into two "towers", the Dreyfus and the Gates towers. The latter is named after you-know-who. Noam Chomsky has an office there.
• Famous affiliated research centers include Lincoln Lab nearby and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) somewhere else in the state.
• For some reason, MIT has a Center for Real Estate.

For more info on MIT:

• MIT home page
• Wikipedia on MIT, including the template listing related pages

edited 15th Dec '10 12:34:01 PM by GlennMagusHarvey

Bumping this to pin it for the next one.

Ahh, thanks. Though, I'm planning to migrate to a our own forum, whose link I'll give out tomorrow when stuff is set up.

I'll be posting around this forum to mention it when it is.

...actually, it's set up already. I'm just not done (almost done) writing a set of Mystery-Hunt-style puzzles to help introduce people to the Hunt. Should I give it out already?

Give it out when it's fully set up and ready to roll. Unless you need people active on it to check for bugs and such.

Oh, and it might be a good idea to set up some sort of template for opening posts in each puzzle thread, or at least for thread titles.