Elegant Chaos

I was just reading some old papers about Self, and was wondering about the relationship between Self and Dylan (my favourite language).

This lead me (via Google of course) to The Encyclopedia of Computer Languages, within which I discovered this utterly crazy pdf document: which is a language family tree!

I'd quite like to print it out and put it on my wall, but I don't think I've got a large enough wall...

I recently visited the site for the Institute for Public Policy Research.

What is the first thing I see?

"ippr is the UK's leading progressive think tank"

Oh dear. If there's one thing I can't stand (and believe me, there are many more than one) it's organisations which claim to be "The UK's favourite...", "The world's best", "London's leading...".

According to who exactly?

I am finding the debate over the proposal to introduce a new offence of "incitement to religious hatred" really scary.

Free speech used to be one of those cornerstones of English liberal democracy (like... erm... the right to trial by jury) but it looks like it might be the next thing for the chop in this brave new labour / new puritan / Christian right world of ours.

Some comedians caused a minor splash recently by focussing on the danger that religious satire might be banned by this law. Whilst I'd be sad to lose Father Ted, I have heard far more scary things suggested. I heard a British Muslim "leader" on Radio 4 this mornin suggesting, apparently in all seriousness, that it would have been handy to have had this law in place when Salman Rushdie published the Satanic Verses, as it would have allowed them to force him to "change a few words here and there".