École Polytechnique student culture by
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-04-24 +Created 1970-01-01
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:
- fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditions_de_l%27École_polytechnique#La_Khômiss
- 2013 www.leparisien.fr/archives/la-mauvaise-blague-de-trop-a-polytechnique-02-07-2013-2945871.php news about the dissolution of the Khômiss.
- 2012 www.lajauneetlarouge.com/la-khomiss-deux-cents-ans-et-resolument-moderne/ A profile of the Khômiss by the student magazine "La Jeune et la Rouge"
École Polytechnique internal student wiki by
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-04-24 +Created 1970-01-01
wikix.binets.fr runs an internal MediaWiki instance available to all logged in alumni.
One is reminded of Nick Leeson.
One things must be said: the root cause of all of this is the replication crisis.
This is why he managed to go on for so long.
This was the God OG physics journal of the early 20th century, before the Nazis fucked German science back to the Middle Ages!
Notable papers:
The second protein to have its structure determined, after myoglobin, by X-ray crystallography, in 1965.
Breaks up peptidoglycan present in the bacterial cell wall, which is thicker in Gram-positive bacteria, which is what this enzyme seems to target.
Part of the inate immune system.
Does this contain any structured data? E.g. can you list all papers by a given author besides just searching and hoping there are no homonyms?
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