Enjoy the humor :-)

 ---- Forwarded Usenet-message ----
 From: "Pascal Costanza" <pc@p-cos.net>
 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
 Subject: Re: Lisp Logo Madness!
 Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2005 00:21:40 +0200
 URL: news://<3sfmjlFnv7dfU1@individual.net>

 drewc wrote:
 > Alan Crowe wrote:
 >
 >> drcode@gmail.com writes:
 >>
 >>> I have built a logo set that I hope can fill this void.
 >>> There's several logos in different shapes and styles all built around a
 >>> central design.
 >>>
 >>> http://www.lisperati.com/logo.html
 >>
 >> The creature is very cute, but I think he should have a
 >> fifth leg, to match having five eyes.
 >>
 >> Alan Crowe
 >> small rock
 >> 93 million miles out
 >  This is a popular newbie request. In Common Life is is trivial add such a
 leg, and if you look around it has been done before. While i might agree
 that it is a useful feature, it's not worth revising the standard simply
 because the legs and eyes don't match.

 It's actually an advantage that the numbers of eyes and legs don't match
 because this allows you to infer from just partial information what you
 are dealing with. So, say, you see the number 4 mentioned in your
 program source, you will immediately realize that this is about the
 legs. Vice versa, if you see the number 5, you know that this is about
 the eyes.

 Schemers think that it is an advantage that their language has exactly
 one leg and exactly one eye, and they claim that a hygienic organ system
 can help you disambiguate the possible confusions arising from this. So
 when you see a 1 mentioned, the organ system can infer from the lexical
 scope whether it is a leg or an eye. However, I think this just appeals
 to some weird mathematical aesthetics. The 4-legs-5-eyes system has been
 around for nearly half a decade now, and noone in the Lisp community
 really has ever had any problems with that.

 > You must be a troll.

 Don't be so harsh. There is a whole chapter in Peter Seibel's "Practical
 Common Life" in which the 4-legs-5-eyes system is explained, so it seems
 to be a real problem for newbies - at least for those coming from other
 languages.

  Pascal

 But now executives at Scientigo, a small software maker based in
 Charlotte, NC, say the company owns two U.S. patents (No. 5,842,213 and
 No. 6,393,426), that cover one of the fundamental concepts behind XML: the
 idea of packaging data in a self-defining format that allows it to be
 correctly displayed wherever it travels.

The newest on-line resource for serious Ruby information has gone live.

Ruby Code & Style, an on-line magazine from Artima, has just published issue #1.

Check out the names on the advisory board. It’s a Who’s Who of everybody who’s anybody in the Ruby world.

The premiere issue has three outstanding articles:

First up, Jack Herrington, author of Code Generation in Action (Manning, 2002) and Podcasting Hacks (O’Reilly, 2005), has written Modular Architectures with Ruby

Next, Austin Ziegler gives us Creating Printable Documents with Ruby

And there’s a reprint of Ara Howard’s article, Linux Clustering with Ruby Queue: Small is Beautiful, which first appeared in Linux Journal but deserves repeat attention

A big thanks to the advisory board, and especial to Bill Venners for starting this whole thing.

To cut a long story short, we think that most financial online tools are a joke. We want to offer leading edge statistical tools with unknown ease of use. Then we combine these hard facts with soft facts :-). Stay tuned ..

Sven C. Koehler is still working on our conference videos, but a copy of our slides is available. Futurometer is still in the early development stages, but it's big fun.

I especially like the "bird flu" plot showing how much media attention it gets.