As expected, you guys did a great job on last week’s quiz. Almost everything was correctly answered in the comments. Working backwards, we have:

3.)

From Mike Ross:  I’ll guess that it’s a calculation relating to the incline/spacing of the seats in the lower bowl of Rice Stadium. (Half is shown, since it would be symmetric.) 

That’s absolutely correct. I found the document in Herbert Allen’s papers. Allen was the trustee who headed the building committee for this project and his collection is a treasure trove of information about the construction process. This was the very first piece of paper in the file.

2.) This one was tricky because it requires knowledge of recent happenings in campus remodeling projects.

Hanszenite got it partly right: For question two, those owls look like the ones found on the expansion to Baker by Hopkins Architects in 2010: http://www.hopkins.co.uk/projects/2/158/ .

Fondren’s own David Bynong provided the rest of the story: Those are my favorite owls on campus. You can see a very small photo taken several years ago of them in their natural habitat here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8438085/Owls-Baker.jpg. This is one of the college additions that they tore down a few years ago near Baker and Will Rice, but I was always a bit confused as to which college the building was part of (and I thought that there were more owls than the ones that they situated in Baker College’s new area as shown in the Hopkins Architects site above). One of the rooms in the student center also has an extra one of these owls in the corner (unless he is one of the ones that flew over to the Glasscock School).

Either nobody figured out that the green marble in this picture was scavenged from the Geology Building in a major renovation a few years ago or nobody was willing to admit it.

The always alert Helen Toombs, though, correctly identified the two rascals in front of the counter as trustee emeritus Albert Kidd, ’64 and former Board Chairman Bill Barnett, ’55.

1. This turned out to be the most interesting question. Some of you identified differences that I did not have in mind when I asked what wasn’t there, but nobody saw one that I thought was obvious.

The first missing thing I noticed was the top of Allen Center, which several people noted. The second, though, just jumped out at me and I was quite surprised that no one else saw it (although you do have to zoom in in order to notice it). Here’s a photo of the same spot I took last year:

What’s I saw missing in the first image is the memorial plaque that marks where George and Esther Cohen’s ashes rest.

Bonus: Commencement prep, 2014. There will be some big changes this year but you can’t tell it from here.