Phong

CS Students to be Decimated, Roman Legion-style

By Phong • Vol 2, Issue 4 • Oct. 23, 2024

Early this week, SCS students would have been informed via email that a tenth of the SCS student are to be culled, and the email would have included details on how which students are selected to be put to death. Any SCS students who have not seen such an email are asked to urgently check their spam folder. The decimation of SCS, as a direct order from our Dark Lord Biden, is likely to commence before the next United States president-elect gets sworn into office on January 25. All SCS students are thus currently forbidden from leaving the country.

The upcoming Roman-legion-style decimation of an entire CMU college is a drastic measure following a ban on C, the programming language, and all of its variants, beginning this summer. Given this fact, the future massacre should not come as a surprise to most SCS students as many computer science courses at CMU still stubbornly refuse to adapt their syllabus to use a different programming language. Such flagrant defiance against law and order would not go unpunished by the government of this great nation, and killing one-tenth of all CS students at CMU was deemed an appropriate measure by President Biden, further stating in a recent press release that “[CS students] should be thankful that I am only executing ten-percent of them, I could just as easily personally kill all of them if I wanted to”.

It should be noted that given the proximity of their major to CS, some ECE students might be included in the pool of execution candidates; ECE software majors, your days may be numbered—and not in the countably infinite sense.

Various students from different majors at CMU have expressed solidarity with the CS students, sympathizing with them for their predicament. Several creative writing major students have reached out to us for comment, saying that “it would be very difficult to write without the letter C.” Similarly, an underwater basketweaving major (yes this is a real major at CMU look it up) student commented expressed concerns towards the ban and punishment, “banning the sea? What do you mean? I need the sea, it’s my entire livelihood!”

There have been some immediate consequences from this ordeal. The CS department began drafting plans to replace C with Rust to prevent further unnecessary deaths. Opponents of this proposal argue that Rust is an unsuitable substitute because it “ruins metals” and “advances the trans agenda.”

One unforeseen consequence of this ordeal has been an uptick in petty crimes committed on CMU campus: the rate of littering has skyrocketed in a desperate bid by international students trying to be deported back to the safety of their home countries, narrowly avoiding the ten-percent chance of death.

In the meantime of waiting for their eventual deaths, students enrolled in SCS may be pleased to know that they are temporarily safe from death as although our Lord Joe Biden’s orders are absolute, there have been complications in enacting the punishment. The decision to kill 10% of SCS students may be straightforward, but the execution itself would require the representation of 0.1 in binary. Thus, the decimation will be indefinitely postponed until a computer capable of storing a string of binary digits with infinite length is developed.

CMU's Cease and Desist to Radford University Finally Arrives After Being Lost in the USPS Pipeline for 103 Years

By Phong • Vol 2, Issue 1 • Sept. 4, 2024

At the beginning of this week, a The Tartan spokesperson revealed to Readme in an exclusive interview that CMU Administration and The Tartan were planning on reviving a copyright dispute that is over a century old against Radford University. As it turns out, CMU is not the only institution with a publication named The Tartan, with RU's student publication also sharing this exact name. "Given our school's namesake, we would be remiss not to pursue legal action in the name of the great American spirit of enterprise and capitalism", explains the spokesperson.

Details for legal action against RU were discovered when a group of students was rummaging through the UC's backrooms searching for old The Tartan articles for archival purposes, particularly one article whose content shall not be named. Upon discovering documents detailing the feud, they were forwarded to CMU Administration. Curiously, the cease and desist letter was supposed to be sent in 1921, the same year RU's newspaper began, but a whole 57 years before RU's publication, originally known as The Grapurchat, had changed its name to The Tartan. Perhaps Andrew Carnegie's business acumen allowed him to see the future and stop the dark timeline of a competing University stealing our beloved publication's name, or perhaps, being the ruthless capitalist that he was, he decided that he owns the very concept of a student­run college publication. Unsure of the grounds for the original feud, as well as the original plans for escalating legal action, CMU administration and CMU's The Tartan has decided to hire a team of priests and priestesses from various religions in the hopes of communing with the ghost of Andrew Carnegie (and maybe Andrew Mellon too as a little bonus, not that he matters).

Pushback against CMU's decision has been vocal. Some have voiced how petty it is to revive a copyright feud that is now over a century old. Furthermore, attempting to commune with the ghost of Andrew Carnegie is not without risk. Expert spiritologist John Spirit explains "Communing with [Andrew Carnegie's ghost] could bring calamity to campus if he discovers the absolute state of American work ethic. In my expert opinion, I would suggest that the University set up fake steel mills and hire child actors to be the workers.”

RU has only just received the cease and desist letter, and we all await their response with bated breath.

New ID Loopholes allow for underage drinking!

By Phong • Vol 2, Issue 0 • Aug. 21, 2024

Readme is proud to announce that it will be hosting a party this Friday night to welcome all incoming freshmen present for o-week, and yes, there will be alcohol. To be invited, simply bring a copy of this week’s Readme issue with you and show it to our bouncer. “What about IDs? Won’t we need to show you our IDs? I went through the trouble of making fake IDs in preparation for college life all for nothing?”, my overactive imagination envisions you, the reader, thinking. Obviously, we won't serve alcohol to partygoers if we see their IDs stating that they are underage. Before giving more details about the party, I, as one of the writers at Readme, would like to reaffirm Readme’s core values and commitment to maintaining those values and high standards of conduct among our staff. Readme is dedicated to providing the facts, and only the facts, to the diverse student body of Carnegie Mellon University. We also pride ourselves on providing an example of how students ought to behave, not just as University students, but as moral, well-functioning adults, so readers may strive to become productive members of society. It is for all these reasons that Readme will continue to adhere strictly to the just laws of this great nation and state. The federal minimum drinking age in the US is 21; just as in past parties, if we see the IDs of anyone at the drinks table that states that they are under 21, we will peacefully (then forcefully if required) turn the student away from the drinks table, and remove them from the party altogether. To prevent this student from re-attempting to drink despite being underage, we will also forward the student’s name along with a picture of their photo ID to other student organizations whom we keep contact with, in case the student tries to drink at any of those organizations’ parties. With all this being said, Readme would like to announce our updated ID policy for this Friday’s party: we will not ask to look at your ID. It’s quite simple, see: if we do not see that your ID states that you are under 21, we won’t know that you are underage and therefore have no obligation to prevent you from drinking. In fact, if you for whatever reason as an underage person decide to shove your ID into the face of our bouncers so we are forced to look at your IDs, we will simply pretend to be extremely nearsighted or illiterate. We look forward to all the students who will show up for a night of decadence and debauchery. Happy drinking

The Scramble for Element 119: The Race Continues

By Phong • Vol 1, Issue 5 • March 27, 2024

The quest to discover new superheavy elements has in the past been analogized to a race. Since the discovery of berkelium, in 1946, scientists from various laboratories around the world have competed, and at times collaborated, to discover new elements, leading to a string of discoveries of element 97 up to element 118. This race, however, has slowed to a halt after the most recent discovery, element 117, tennessine, in 2009. In 2017, the director of Riken, Dr. Hideto En’yo, not only announced that the search for element 119 had begun, but that elements 119 and 120 would be discovered within 5 years.

Dear reader, if you are capable of performing basic arithmetic mathematics, which I believe you are capable of since you are a university student, you might notice that 5 years after 2017 is the year 2022. Also, if you the reader have checked the date recently, you may notice that we are currently in the year 2024. That is, in fact, 2 years after 2022. Clearly, the current approach to discovering new elements isn’t working, and Dr. Hideto En’yo has been lying to us all.

Now, dear reader, you might be wondering what exactly is the process of discovering new elements. In a nutshell (not literally), researchers take one heavy element, such as berkelium, and then accelerate particles of another element, such as calcium, to bombard the first heavy element (this was how tennessine was discovered). With enough tries, and luck, this might lead to the creation of a new element. Sounds simple enough, right? At this point, dear reader, you might be wondering how exactly they accelerate these particles. Magnets are used to both steer the particles in a circular trajectory and accelerate them up to speed. Herein lies the problem. Magnets? What do you mean they use magnets to accelerate particles? By magnets, you mean those things people put on their refrigerators? Like fridge magnets? This was never going to work, they have played us for absolute fools, managing to convince us, the common person, to put our faith in them. Obviously, this method would never work, and the particle physicists of our time do not know what they’re doing.

Is all hope lost? Will we never discover element 119? Fortunately, I have not just brought to you, the reader, the problem, but also the solution to this very problem. If magnets can’t accelerate particles up to speed, what can? Evidently, a lot of things (try lifting the weights in the Cohon Fitness Center using fridge magnets, then lift that weight yourself). The best candidate for a viable method, however, are track athletes. Imagine for a moment two athletes, one holding a particle of einsteinium, element 99, and a particle of calcium, then have these two athletes sprint into each other at full speed. Not only would this finally allow the particles to move at sufficient speed, but it would ensure that the particles actually collide with each other, as two athletes colliding is much more probable than hoping two unimaginably tiny particles can be steered into each other using magnets.

Dear reader, we have plotted our course for the future. I have already sent my proposal to all of the scientists currently working on discovering element 119 (my editor has informed me that I have left out one scientist in particular, but I swear that was an accident). Dear reader, if you begin training now, you might just be able to become one of the athletes involved in the groundbreaking discovery of element 119. Another benefit that hasn’t yet been mentioned is that most likely, the new element would be named after an athlete, someone people care about, instead of some lousy so-called scientist. This of course means that if you train enough, you might be said athlete and receive naming rights. For reference, you would have to be able to run at speeds of 30 million meters per second, which admittedly is difficult but is fully within the realms of human possibility. Good luck, dear reader, and see you on the periodic table.