warrior geeks

[Tim Churches]

Garry Hodgson wrote:
> 
> a funny thing happened at IPC9.  a bunch of were sitting in the
> lounge (bar) talking, and one person mentioned that he was going
> to study kendo while in japan this year.  i asked if he had previous
> martial arts experience, and he said yes, he'd studied judo.
> it then turned out that in this group of maybe 6-7 people, we had
> this judo/kendo student, another who's done karate and now kickboxing,
> another who did karate, myself (okinawan karate, aikijutsu and others),
> and a pa qua practitioner.  at the next table sat another tae kwon
> do/aikido
> student.
> 
> it seemed like an odd coincidence, but it made me wonder: is there an
> unusually high percentage of MA practitioners among the python
> community?
> or the open source community?  or software in general?

I'll use our time zone advantage to jump in early on this thread and
opine that it is way off-topic. Not that I am opposed to
marital...whoops...martial arts (although they are not my cup of tea),
but I am concerned that if this threads continues, sooner or later
someone will mention the whole "Geeks with Guns" thing that Eric S.
Raymond promotes (see http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/geeks-with-guns/ or for
even worse IMHO see http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/guns/ ), especially given
ESR's apparent fondness for Python. That sort of thing gives me a fit of
the shudders (playing with guns, not ESR's fondness for Python). I would
have thought that if male hackers were looking for a hobby which
involves phallic-shaped objects and chemically-propelled projectiles,
then model rocketry would be just the ticket.

There, that should put an immediate end to this very off-topic thread...

Tim C
Sydney, Australia
PS Damn! I was cooking porridge (oatmeal) for breakfast and became so
carried away composing this message that I completely forgot to stir the
pot...