It’s I <3 UCLA Week (in case you’re one of the three students who aren’t aware). One of the many events this week is the I <3 UCLA Blood Drive sponsored by Student Alumni Association. It may not be the most glamorous event this week, but it’s for a good cause. Plus, you get some awesome swag for doing it. I’ve donated blood before, and while I was apprehensive at first, I’ve come to actually enjoy the experience.

If you go to a blood drive, chances are you’ll be asked to sign up for the bone marrow donor list. Last year, I was actually a match for a leukemia patient. I ended up giving a peripheral blood cell donation (which is less intrusive than donating bone marrow), and it was a truly humbling experience. While it is a big time commitment if you do get called, I’d highly recommend signing up to be a bone marrow donor. I’m going to try to convince you by talking about all the sweet perks you get (at least, based on my experience).

1) Free Food: It’s every college student’s dream. Getting food without having to fork over money for it. If you donate blood, you usually get some cookies, juice and maybe some chips. But when you donate bone marrow, you get all that plus a free lunch!
2) The Nurses Pamper You Like Crazy: Again, I’m just speaking from my experience, but the nurses treat you like royalty. You’re selflessly giving something you have for the benefit of another person. In a hospital, that practically makes you a rock star. They’ll open your drinks and cut up your food if your arms are still sore after the procedure. And they’ll give you all the blankets you want. Oh, by the way…
3) The Blankets Are Frickin’ Awesome: Hospital blankets are the comfiest things I’ve ever had on my body. And they’re so warm. They must put them in a microwave or something because the blankets were so toasty. When your blanket loses its heat, they’ll take it away, and give you another one that’s just as warm as the last one.
4) You Get to Watch TV: If you end up giving a peripheral blood cell donation, you’re lying in a bed with two needles in both arms for 4 to 6 hours. Luckily, they’ll have a TV, so you can watch whatever you want. When I donated, I finally had a chance to catch up on the final season of Seinfeld. You really can only watch TV, so it’s a perfect excuse for not doing your homework. And one more thing…
5) It’s the Perfect Excuse for Getting Out of Class: You’re helping another human being. If your professor doesn’t excuse you from class, he/she has no soul.

The I <3 UCLA Blood Drive takes place Wednesday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the Kerckhoff Grand Salon. You can schedule an appointment at 310-825-0888. The first 250 donors get a free I <3 UCLA tank top. More free stuff! And everyone gets a movie ticket for donating. Even more free stuff!

—Mike Bedard

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Let’s play a game of “Who I saw in Ackerman today.” Here are the clues:

1) He’s Olympic gold medalist

2) He lit the Olympic Flame at the 1984 summer games in Los Angeles.

3) He also happens to be a fellow Bruin (class of ‘59)

It’s Rafer Johnson, who I spotted sitting near Panda Express, just sipping some boba and chatting with students about politics–Los Angeles politics that is.

He came to help his fellow Bruins support Wendy Greuel, Los Angeles City Controller who is running against Eric Garcetti in the Los Angeles mayoral elections. Voters hit the polls on May 21.

Since early spring, students have come together to help promote Wendy Greuel’s campaign for office, and Johnson was the special guest at Thursday night’s phone bank.

So how exactly did he get involved in all of this? Well, it all goes back to his days as a student athlete here at UCLA.

While a student here Johnson ran track, and he also played basketball under the coaching of John Wooden. He credited his success to all of the support that people, like Wooden, gave him over the years.

“You know I worked hard to be good at what I did, and you don’t get that way alone.”

After he retired from sports in 1960, Johnson decided he wanted to give back to the same community that helped him with his achievements. Since then he has been involved in charities and events that serve the community, including the Special Olympics, which (coincidence!) is how he got to meet Wendy Greuel.

“I’ve known Wendy for many years,” he said, “We got to work together with fundraising opportunities for the Special Olympics.”

Cathi Cohen, a third-year political science and psychology student, was working the event as part of an internship. She and her fellow interns work for the Greuel’s West Los Angeles campaign office, and have been working to promote student interest in the election, and Greuel.

“Voter turnout at the first election was pretty small, about 18% of registered voters in L.A.,” said Cohen. “Students just don’t know what’s going on, especially with USAC elections going on this week.”

Johnson said he supports Greuel because she is works for the community.

“Wendy gives back, and not just once or twice, or in one specific place. No, it’s all across the board, all over L.A.,” he said.

And out of curiosity, as a UCLA alumni what was his hope for students here?

“I feel that I made the right choice in coming to UCLA, and I just hope that more students would feel the same way.”

That school pride was obvious, especially when he mentioned how he’d been involved in some board or another here since he graduated. He’s also just one alumni of an extended Bruin family (his wife, mother in-law and children are all UCLA graduates)!

His pride for the school was clear when I snapped a picture of him at the campaign table.

“Should I wear my UCLA jacket?” he asked, laughing.

-Estefani  Herrera, Bruin contributor

—Kate PM

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Similar to the quotes engraved on the top of North Campus’ Humanities building, South Campus has its own nod to the power of knowledge. It’s just that South Campus’s public quote is in, well, let’s just say… a different language. The language of mathematics.

While unnoticeable to the common eye, the message is more easily detected by Boelter Hall’s common inhabitants – those students fluent in the language of zeros and ones.

At the southeast entrance to the second floor of Boelter Hall, there is a row of alternating black and brown tiles that represent binary, a computer code made up of zeros and ones.

Viet Nguyen, a first-year computer science graduate student with a specialization in artificial intelligence, made the connection between the tiles and the code a few days ago, and he posted his discovery on the UCLA Subreddit.

To help understand the significance of these tiles, and how they convey a message, we enlisted the help of Ben Lin, a third-year computer science student. He explained that the black and brown tiles represent zeros and ones, respectively. Still confused? Watch the video below.

Starting from the entrance and reading each row from left to right, we were able to decode the message as:

01101100
01101111
00100000
01100001
01101110
01100100
00100000
01100010
01100101
01101000
01101111
01101100
01100100
00100001

While all this just seems like the “Binary Solo” from Flight of the Conchords, by assigning letters from this ASCII table to each line, these tiles clearly translated to “Lo and behold!” (Exclamation mark included!)

While “Lo and behold!” pretty much describes our reaction to finding out that there was a message behind these magical tiles (We’re putting on our red shoes and skipping along them to the Emerald City), it is most likely a reference to the first message transmitted across the Internet from UCLA to Stanford.

The Internet, which celebrated its 43rd birthday last October, was invented in the late 1960s in Boelter Hall by computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock and his team.

According to Kleinrock, the message was supposed to be “login” but after sending the first two letters, “lo,” the system crashed.

And that, kids, is the story of how the first message sent across the Internet was “lo,” as in “Lo and behold!”

Have you noticed any other “easter eggs” hidden on campus? Let us know by tweeting us @dbmojo or commenting below.

*The quotes on top of the entrances at the Humanities building are “Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law,” from Psalms 119: 18 and “Nothing is too wonderful to be true,” said by Michael Faraday.

—Kassy Cho

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Although they won’t be studying the new species of dinosaurs recently discovered in China (that’s a job for paleontologists), zooarchaeologists at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology study the remains of animals used by ancient civilizations.

Dr. Thomas Wake’s zooarchaeology lab was one of twelve labs open for public viewing Saturday as part of the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Cotsen Institute.

The laboratory resembled a mini-natural history museum, with elk, mountain lion, sea lion and bear skulls lined up on a table and animal skins displayed on another desk. They even had a sloth on display that many children identified as “Sid from Ice Age,” said Kay Hullet, a volunteer at the lab.

The first thing zooarchaeologists in the laboratory do is clean the bones sent to them by archaeologists in the field. They can do this by boiling the animals or by using beetles, which eat the skin right off the bone. Then, they have to identify what animal species it is. They do this by comparing it to other samples. Once they classify the animal, the zooarchaelogists catalogue it in the computer. Based on where the remains were found, what era they belonged to and what was in their stomachs at the time, zooarchaeologists piece together a narrative about what could have happened to the animal.

Wake also had arranged snake wine and turtle skulls on a small desk in the front of the lab as a talking point. Wake said he found the Vietnamese wine fascinating because it proved animals were used for other purposes besides food. Snake wine was used in traditional Vietnamese medicine and as an alcoholic beverage. Drinking it is meant to make men stronger, he said.

The Open House featured many activities targeted at young children. They had a children’s activity room with arts and crafts activities. The Egyptian lab had hieroglyphics-based games, including crossword puzzles and a scarab beetle making station. And the Mediterranean lab was decorated to resemble a cave, with stalactites made out of tarpaulin and tape hanging down. Perhaps some inspiration for the zooarchaeologists of the future?

-Chandini Soni, Bruin contributor

—Kate PM

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Compared to the violin-shaped figurine a UCLA archaeologist excavated from the Early Bronze Age (2200 BC), forty years seems like a paltry number.

How often do archaeologists celebrate something that is just forty years old?

Nestled on the ground floor of Fowler Museum, the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA is unknown to many students. The Institute is celebrating its 40th Anniversary in a series of two-week long events culminating with an Open House this weekend.

The Open House provides an opportunity for interested community members to visit all the labs and look at the research being conducted.

Although the Institute hosts an Open House every year, the distinguishing factor this year is the inauguration of the Lloyd Cotsen Prize for Lifetime Achievement in World Archaeology.

“The award involves an anonymous nomination process and will be given every three years,” said Abigail Levine, a student affairs officer of the Cotsen Institute and one of the organizers of the anniversary celebration.

Professor Ofer Bar-Yosef is the senior laureate of the Cotsen Prize this year and will receive $40,000, while Carolina Mallol, the Junior Laureate of the Cotsen Prize this year, will receive $10,000.

The Open House will also have a children’s room with different arts and crafts activities, so they can have fun with the various artistic techniques, Levine said.

Kara Cooney, Egyptologist and assistant professor of Egyptian art and architecture, plans to bring her three-year-old son along to the Open House again this year. Last year, she said, her son did flintknapping and was excited about the activity.

UCLA archaeologists work in many different departments, Cooney said, including the Department of Art History, the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and the Department of Classics.

“(Cotsen is where) we come together and discuss antiquity,” she said.

The Cotsen Open House will take place Saturday, May 12 from 1 to 4 p.m. The event is free.

-Vishaka Sriniwasan, Bruin contributor

—Kate PM

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