Happy 800th Birthday!

Officially, Cambridge was founded in 1209, although this is under some dispute. Anyway, that makes 2009 the 800th anniversary of the university, and the event was marked by a fairly bizarre show at the Senate House downtown. A slide show depicting scenes of the university's history was projected onto the wall of the building itself, giving a cool effect. Also, every bell in town was rung at 7:15 PM on Saturday, giving an incredible celebratory aura. I am told they do that only very rarely. There were some strange choices though, such as displaying raw HTML code in between scenes. After working most of the day on screen-scraping for a research project, that was the last thing I wanted to see. The crowding was also out of control which took away from the enjoyment. When huge crowds of people pack old, narrow city streets the traffic implications are bad news.

Still, made me appreciate being a part of a university with such a long and amazing history: Stanford's 800th anniversary is scheduled for the year 2691!