MIT's Sodium Drop: Good Clean Fun or Just Plain Stupid? Discuss.

Now that a partially dissolved piece of sodium metal has been deemed the culprit in the burning of several Charles River cleanup volunteers, the local news is playing up the MIT ritual known as the "sodium drop."

MIT students like to drop stuff. Sometimes they drop pianos. In this case, at the start of each school year, students get the sodium from somewhere on campus, tote it to the Longfellow Bridge, and drop it bit by bit into the Charles. The sodium ignites upon contact with water, and the fire is pretty.

After hearing about what happened to the cleaning crew, WBZ took it upon itself to tell the fire marshal about what the MIT whippersnappers were up to.

The sodium drop has been a source of controversy for a while. Back in 1997, Michael Halle, a former student wrote an editorial declaring "Charles Deserves Respect, Not Sodium." Halle argues that it's taken a lot of hard work to get the Charles clean (or at least clean enough for the Charles River Swimmers), and MIT students need to respect that fact:

There's no denying the human fascination with things that burn or blow up: it seems to come from somewhere deep inside the soul. But when the pursuit of that fascination results in the pollution of the environment, or the death of aquatic life due to the percussive force of underwater explosions, the cost of fun becomes too high.

A video of the Sodium Drop had been removed from YouTube. They forgot to take it down from Google video, however.