The opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics is going on today. It’s an over-the-top presentation meant to draw people into sport. And for the next few weeks, we’ll be seeing people from all across the world competing in their chosen physical activities. There will be triumph and defeat, front-runners who nonetheless lag behind on that day, and underdogs who sneak ahead. In short, a lot of ado about sport, and I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. Sports are fun.
But where is the Hacker Olympics? Or even more broadly the Science Olympics or Engineering Olympics? Why don’t we celebrate the achievements of great thinkers, planners, and builders the same way that we celebrate fast runners or steady shooters? With all the pomp and showmanship and so on?
Here at Hackaday, we try our best! When we see a cool hack, we celebrate it. But we’re one little blog, with about a millionth the budget of the International Olympic Commission. However, we have you all as our biggest multiplier. It would be awesome if we could take over the entire city of Paris in celebration of science and engineering, but until then, if you see something smart, share it with us. And if you see something on Hackaday that you think was awesome, share it with your friends.
Isn’t leet coding the equivalent of the Olympics? Specialisation in one pointless activity, achievement purely by repetition, and not being able to apply the skills to other areas.
It is a PRETTY easy argument that the skills required for code-golfing or size-coding are more useful in today’s world than those required to “throw stick/ball far” or “do more spins”.
Then again, when the robots attack because we insist on using iterative programming to make software we can’t really follow, maybe being able to run 20+ miles in under half a day would be more useful.
The winter olympics biathlon event always seemed to have potential real world applications.
Also I would probably watch more olympics if they only had events which have real world applications (which they did when they started, e.g. javelin, discus, etc. were still relevant skills in the real world)…
Javelin is good for getting one’s pointy across.
Otherwise, in terms of smart things, there is the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO): https://www.imo-official.org/
And physics, and chemistry, and computer science, and…
https://www.ipho-new.org/ https://www.ichosc.org/ https://ioinformatics.org/
Fine and dandy, but it is usually discouraged for adults to compete.
So embarrassing when science does not know the difference between the time unit “Olympiad” and the event happening at the end/beginning “Olympics”.
How can anyone trust the rest of the education they try to spread if they can’t get their basics right?
One could think of Hackaday or Instructable contests as “Olympian”.
(OK, I’m stretching it.)
Only happening every four years?
Isn’t our world filled with testament to our scientific and engineering endeavour? Every TV you watch the olympics on, every phone you post about it on, every high speed rail network which ran beautifully until some left-wing radical set fire to, every massive tall tower built by Mr Eiffel…
…oh, and every 1.36C the air is warmer than it used to be…
It’s an odd thing that I actually agree all the nationalism of the olympics is not a good thing, and yet disrupting the train sevice does not seem the way to protest it, but on the other hand since they locked down things so much due to a certain group of people what else can they do to make their point stick out? Post on Instagram? hah
Seems radicalisation begets radicalisation.
Still though, perhaps they should think a bit longer to find a way that does not piss off people; including ones that have no set view on the olympics.
If dumpster diving and/or electronics repair was an Olympic discipline, I’d gladly participate (and my shelves would not only contain lots of e-waste, but probably the one or other trophy)
Not sure if its been mentioned. But CTFs is the closest thing we have to “Hacking Olympics” .
But agree that theres no social level of celebrity for scientists / engineers. Would be an interesting world to live in that society!
At the small scale, the UK had TV shows like the great egg race, and scrapheap challenge. But how to scale them up, and find the worlds top 16 participants for the event?
Seeing the Paris opening ceremony – no, I do not miss any Olympics anymore at all.
Agree!
(Well, fortunately I didn’t watch that abomination, but what I have seen and heard reported about it was enough.)
In the United States, the U.S. olympic committee will quickly sue anyone using olympics, olympiad, or any related word for a competitive event. In the engineering field, Robolympics had to become Robogames.
After reading that the USA gymnastics team has pearls and Swarovski crystals on their uniforms, I have no intention of donating any money towards them ever.
We’d better move to mars and start learning Latin because i believe what we saw was an attempt to summon a Slaaneshi demon from the warp.
When I was in high school in the ’80s we participated in “The Olympics of the Mind”. Mostly physics students and intersections with gifted classes, we were challenged to build a balsa wood bridge of specified length that was then tested – along with submissions from other regional high schools – for ultimate compressive and shear strength and modes of failure.
Our team finished third in the regionals, but rose to second after the winning team’s submission was found to be using illegal techniques – lamination with massive but hidden quantities of glue. A different kind of Olympic doping, I guess.
It appears this competition has fallen by the wayside. Maybe Hack-a-Day and its readers could resuscitate this!
More, if scanty, information:
https://www.edweek.org/education/in-the-olympics-of-the-mind-the-race-is-to-the-quick-witted/1982/01
MakeRiga hackerspace did a hackerspace olympics” contest at least twice in my memory, I’ve talked about it in https://hackaday.io/project/18031-hacker-olympics-2016-at-makerga-hackerspace back then! It sets a nice example of “what you can actually do”.
Okay. But the real push behind the actual Olympics is money, popularity and political positioning.
A bunch of engineers huddled around some equipment or streaming a view of coding isn’t exactly thrilling live TV. The MS Excel championships we’re novel, but where’s the excitement and drama? Robot Wars got/gets close. Junkyard Wars was the closest. Build a big thing, then do something silly with it.
Money: So who’s going to buy advertising on that? I suppose the sponsorships would get very interesting. How do you include all the infrastructure projects that the Olympics are famous/infamous for?
Popularity: You could bring in some very famous geek teams. Or would this be less country based and more brand based? Facebook vs Google directly? With independent teams from universities and public collectives?
Politics: How would that tie in? How can dictators bring in teams and participate “on this world stage”?
I think that I might have seen a couple of episodes of Junkyard Wars.
I got the feeling that some of the “junk” was seeded to ensure a better outcome.
What triggered me was a running Land Rover “found” by one of the teams.
It’s at Defcon you all. Come on, you know this!