I attended this talk at OSCon 2003 and it still remains the best talk I have ever attended. The last part about a message to the aliens truly blew me away. The

I attended this talk at OSCon 2003 and it still remains the best talk I have ever attended. The last part about a message to the aliens truly blew me away. The fact that Mark found an error in this set of binary bits, that nobody else had seen, just blew my mind, and I've had infinite respect for the guy since (and frankly already had huge respect prior to that). His higher order perl book should be required reading for anyone working in a language like perl that has functional features (eg JavaScript).