I recently acquired a copy of Programming Perl, often referred to as "The Camel Book" in the Perl community. After reading the first 4 chapters I thought I would share a few Perl tidbits I found interesting.
Source: 4 Unrelated Perl Tidbits, an article by Nicholas Hubbard.
Jumping spiders have REM-like twitches when they sleep, suggesting dreams may be much more widespread in the animal kingdom than previously realized.
Source: Spiders Seem to Have REM-like Sleep and May Even Dream, an article by Betsy Mason.
Pretty much every Python programmer out there has broken down at one point and and used the ‘pickle’ module for writing objects out to disk.
The advantage of using pickle is that it can serialize pretty much any Python object, without having to add any extra code. Its also smart in that in will only write out any single object once, making it effective to store recursive structures like graphs. For these reasons pickle is usually the default serialization mechanism in Python, used in modules likes python-memcached.
However, using pickle is still a terrible idea that should be avoided whenever possible.
Source: Don't Pickle Your Data, an article by Ben Frederickson.