École Polytechnique student culture

TODO is there a publicly visible list?

The student organized bar of the École. There's a corresponding Binet that takes care of it.

The Khômiss was a Binet that had 12 undisclosed participants every year.

They intentionally projected the idea of a semi scary and cool secret society/cult/Fascist/Gestapo/non-racist Ku Klux Klan-like organization

Khômiss members would wear a face cover whenever they would go out "on duty", notably to break a student's door with a fire axe when some student had fucked up particularly bad.

The Khômiss had an ambivalent character: while on one hand they would punish students that they felt had fucked up, they were actually semi approved by the school's head.

And conversely, they could also play pranks on the school head, e.g. vandalizing their office with funny objects if they had made some decision that was particularly unpopular to the students. This also likely with tacit approval, and as a way to be a "cool independent organization that also represents the students".

As such, the Khômiss aimed to be a sort of a "conscience" of the cohort, punishing the evil deeds of either side.

They were apparently unfortunately disbanded by the school in 2013 it seems, just after Ciro Santilli left. They took some poor student out by car and left him more than 1km outsie of the school for some reason. But he had a cell phone and walked came back, so doesn't feel that serious. Likely the political correctness of the times just caught up with them.

Bibliography:

This is likely a joke binet, but the idea is epic: its members would in principle take the hardest courses and purposefully get bad grades on them to improve the grades of others, as grades are always normalized to a Normal distribution.

Public facing GitLab instance: gitlab.binets.fr/, e.g. a repo in Ciro's account: gitlab.binets.fr/ciro.duran-santilli/china-dictatorship

wikix.binets.fr runs an internal MediaWiki instance available to all logged in alumni.