Get Your Robot On: SUMO Robot Challenge is Back! Is Requiring Sikh Biker to Wear Helmet Discriminatory? TorontoIAM

This is a selection of recent popular blog articles from TorontoIAM where you will find the best blogs from Toronto, Ontario as well as video uploads, social networking, rumors, and blog authoring

This Weekend: The SUMO Robot Challenge

Blog TO’s Kari announces that the Sumo Robot challenge is back! “If you too like watching motorized scrap traipse around the floor via remote, you need to head to OCAD this Saturday for the annual SUMO Robot Challenge.” She describes the event similar to “Robot Wars, but with a more traditional, sumo style, competition format.” The challenge began in 1992, and has since then “given OCAD artists, designers, local high school students and the general public a chance to show off their electrical and mechanical aptitude, as well as their creativeness in fabrication.”

The homemade robots compete in different classes that include a creative Dancer/Painter challenge, the “Autonomous and Lightweight Autonomous (robots fight each other without help from their remote-holding creators), and the Sumo Classic Heavyweight brawl,” which is a “no holds barred” event. If you’re a beginner, the Sumo Lightweight challenge encourages those “with limited funds and facilities to participate.” The SUMO Robot Challenge takes place tomorrow (March 1) at the OCAD Nora Vaughn Auditorium. More details available in the post.

Institute Without Boundaries Design School Focuses on Objectives Over Art

On The Torontoist, Sarah Pricket reports that at the Interior Design Show last weekend, “British innovator-icon Tom Dixon lamented the impossibility of creative rebellion in today's art and design world.” Due to the fractured nature of our current design aesthetic, “there is no one standard to either strive for or strain against. If anything goes and nothing is new, how are today's students to design anything truly radical?” Pricket responds that the answer might be “to redesign design itself.” This was her thought when she “came across the Institute Without Boundaries exhibit in the student section of IDS.”

In her post, she describes their display one of “idealism” more than “function.” The exhibit included a “newsprinted manifesto stretched across a series of cardboard tubes.” A student explained that the mission of Institute Without Boundaries “is to completely rethink the way we construct and create living environments.” Sarah concludes that while all the other school exhibits from Humber, OCAD, Ryerson, and Sheridan “displayed their eye-pleasing objets d'art, the post-grads at the Institute… talked objectives.” According to the IWB website, their goal is to create ‘new models that are collaborative, holistic, and consider the ecology, social equity, cultural values and economic properties of the world we live in today.”

Sikh Biker Fights Ticket for not Wearing Helmet

Joe from Biking Toronto poses and interesting question in response to a recent news article. Apparently, last week, a Sikh man named Baljinder Badesha, a local used car salesman, was ticketed $110 for not wearing a helmet while riding his motorcycle. Due to his faith, Badesha is not allowed to wear a helmet instead of, or on top of, his turban. Badesha says that he understands the dangers, and “is willing to take the risk to follow his Sikh tenets.”

According to the post, Badesha is fighting the ticket. His lawyer states that having to choose “between his religion or participating in ‘normal life’ in Ontario is descrimination.” Joe writes that this poses an interesting situation “if a mandatory bicycle helmet law ever comes into effect in Ontario.” He asks his readers if this is indeed a “human rights issue” and if Sikh cyclists “don't have to wear helmets when biking, isn't mandating non-Sikh cyclists to wear helmets also discriminatory?”

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