(Have to wait until August 4, sadly…)

The Wolfram Blog, Hybrid Logos and a Fortunate Mistake:

The idea struck me as I was toweling off after a swim: what would happen if I crossed the Mercedes-Benz and Grignani logos from my February 2009 blog post, Exploring Logo Designs with Mathematica? Hybrid vigor is a well-known phenomenon responsible for increased yields in corn, and metaphorically, for the economic and cultural flourishing of civilizations that engage in foreign trade. Would the progeny of Benz and Grignani show similar effects?

A ray of light from the world of high-level programming, shining into the joyless den of C programming that I spent most of this week wallowing in.

I just tried to run anything.el on the ancient Emacs that comes with CERN Scientific Linux 4, and needed to bend it a little. In the process of looking for an online copy of with-selected-window, I found the delightfully absurd Antinews info page:

Appendix A Emacs 21 Antinews

For those users who live backwards in time, here is information about
downgrading to Emacs version 21.4.  We hope you will enjoy the greater
simplicity that results from the absence of many Emacs 22.1 features.
 

A.1 Old Lisp Features in Emacs 21

[...]

   * Many programming shortcuts have been deleted, to provide you with
     the enjoyment of "rolling your own."  The macros `while-no-input',
     `with-local-quit', and `with-selected-window', along with
     `dynamic-completion-table' and `lazy-completion-table' no longer
     exist.  Also, there are no built-in progress reporters; with
     Emacs, you can take progress for granted.

The most amazing thing about it is that it’s actually super-useful when backporting elisp code that wants to run on a current Emacs…