38 lines
2.4 KiB
Plaintext
38 lines
2.4 KiB
Plaintext
Physical Activity and Sports
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Many (perhaps even most) hackers don't follow or do sports at all and are
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determinedly anti-physical. Among those who do, interest in spectator sports
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is low to non-existent; sports are something one does , not something one
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watches on TV. Further, hackers avoid most team sports like the plague.
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Volleyball was long a notable exception, perhaps because it's non-contact
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and relatively friendly; Ultimate Frisbee has become quite popular for
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similar reasons. Hacker sports are almost always primarily self-competitive
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ones involving concentration, stamina, and micromotor skills: martial arts,
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bicycling, auto racing, kite flying, hiking, rock climbing, aviation,
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target-shooting, sailing, caving, juggling, skiing, skating, skydiving,
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scuba diving. Hackers' delight in techno-toys also tends to draw them
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towards hobbies with nifty complicated equipment that they can tinker with.
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The popularity of martial arts in the hacker culture deserves special
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mention. Many observers have noted it, and the connection has grown
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noticeably stronger over time. In the 1970s, many hackers admired martial
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arts disciplines from a distance, sensing a compatible ideal in their
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exaltation of skill through rigorous self-discipline and concentration. As
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martial arts became increasingly mainstreamed in the U.S. and other western
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countries, hackers moved from admiring to doing in large numbers. In 1997,
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for example, your humble editor recalls sitting down with five strangers at
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the first Perl conference and discovering that four of us were in active
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training in some sort of martial art and, what is more interesting, nobody
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at the table found this high perecentage at all odd. Today (2000), martial
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arts seems to have become firmly established as the hacker exercise form of
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choice, and the martial-arts culture combining skill-centered elitism with a
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willingness to let anybody join seems a stronger parallel to hacker behavior
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than ever. Common usages in hacker slang un-ironically analogize programming
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to kung fu (thus, one hears talk of code-fu or in reference to specific
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skills like HTML-fu ). Albeit with slightly more irony, today's hackers
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readily analogize assimilation into the hacker culture with the plot of a
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Jet Li movie: the aspiring newbie studies with masters of the tradition,
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develops his art through deep meditation, ventures forth to perform heroic
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feats of hacking, and eventually becomes a master who trains the next
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generation of newbies in the hacker way.
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