During fraternity rush my freshman year, the fraternity went out to an alum’s house on the cape for lobster and sun. Some guys had brought along a three-person slingshot and started launching baked potatoes out into the sea. Eric thought they couldn’t be aimed with any accuracy, so he proposed that he and I go sit on the dock and see how close the guys could get the potatoes. Naturally, in two shots they hit him square in the leg and he conceded he had been wrong.
He was also an incorrigible joker who loved to mess with people. For his entire time at MIT, he had a suggestion for how folks taking Introductory Circuits (6.002, the 6 being Eric’s major, electrical engineering and computer science) could improve their class standing. He told friends that right before exams, while everyone sat in the exam room, they should chant “V I equals R! V I equals R!” so the other students would mess up Ohm’s law (which in fact states that V equals I R ). Perhaps inevitably, this joke backfired–our friend Randy took an exam and used the wrong version of the formula himself.
Eric once paid for a very expensive sushi dinner JUST so he could watch my reaction to the unusual texture of uni (sea urchin roe).
Jay