2007 ME 72 contest

The 2007 ME 72 engineering design contest was held in Beckman Auditorium today. I know one of the participants a little bit but this is among the weakest senses of "knowing" possible, so I was there to see carnage and root for Dr. Placebo.

I hadn't seen the ME 72 contest since 1998, so it was really nice to watch it again. The carnage was better than in most years I witnessed, though Dr. Placebo was craptacular -- the guy controlling it could never even get it to move. (That didn't stop it from winning one round.) The last time the contest was run publicly was in 2003 (though apparently it was still done privately; the competitions were just less photogenic or something), so the crowd wasn't used to rooting for Dr. Placebo from the beginning and the auditorium wasn't completely filled as it used to be. By the end, however, people had started rooting for the Placebo a lot, so people picked up the proper etiquette pretty quickly.