From wikipedia Ripley's Believe It or Not! is a franchise which deals in bizarre events and items so strange and unusual that readers might question the claims. The Believe It or Not franchise started in 1918 as a newspaper cartoon panel featuring unusual and startling facts from around the world. Conceived and drawn by Robert Ripley, the panel proved popular and was later adapted into a wide variety of formats, including radio, television, a chain of museums, a book series and a pinball game (produced by Stern Pinball, Inc.). The Ripley collection includes 20,000 photographs, 20,000 artifacts and more than 130,000 cartoon panels. With 50-plus attractions, the Orlando-based Ripley Entertainment, Inc., a division of the Jim Pattison Group, is a global company with an annual attendance of more than 12 million guests. Ripley Entertainment's publishing and broadcast divisions oversee numerous projects, including the syndicated TV series, the newspaper cartoon panel, books, posters, games and mobile phone content.

And more so from here: Robert LeRoy Ripley (December 25, 1890 - May 27, 1949) was an entrepreneur, anthropologist and cartoonist who created the world famous Ripley's Believe It or Not! series.

What's your favorite Believe-It-Or-Not story?

Lots of these things keep being repeated all the time like bad mantras. So maybe they are no myths, maybe you just made it up yourself being a victim of SelfFUDDing. Definitely, TWiki -- as every other software -- has its dirty corners. The important point to remember is that while you can overcome most of the technical issues you cannot gain back as easily the lost reputation once everybody internalized a certain amount of FUD. Get me right, I don't want to conceal deficiencies. But the TWikiCommunity has to stop shouting at each other and be more productive.

The fact is that the TWikiMyths are already out there. Let's take it with a bit of salt ... and leave the kitchen clean (mov).

Thanks goes to Vintage Paperbacks & Digests, all those marvelous artists and ``The Normals'' for their crazy song. Hope you don't mind I took some of those covers and mocked them up.

This one is from BoingBoing originally going back to the artwork done by Randall Munroe.

As you might know I am a Computational Linguist myself and so -- though I don't like taking a defensive stance -- I feel inclined to drop some words.

So what's the message? Well, if you visit the original cartoon you will notice that I somewhat cropped it, i.e. the ``Fuck Computational Linguists''. Sigh, yeah. Not, that Computational Linguists don't fuck. Maybe he just missed a comma somewhere like in ``Fuck, Computational Linguists'' (thanks for the advice) or ``Fuck computational, Linguists'' (how bizarre) ...

The other more substantial part of the cartoon says that the field of Computational Linguists was ``ill-defined''. In fact, Computational Linguists know quite well that given a room of n CLs there are n+m (m>0) opinions. So the field is highly contradictory not only among scientists but also everybody him/herself. Is this a weakness? Definitely no. If you meet someone who is strong enough to revise his angle given he followed one school for ages with quite some evangelism, then you are a lucky one because those scientists are rare. Most follow their track for ages not accepting what goes on to the left and to the right, taking all of their youngers with them. Hard facts and plain numbers are ignored just because it does not fit into the picture. If it happens that people come up with contradictory models and these get discussed and compared then this is good. I don't have to elaborate on that, I think.

``Ill-defined'', this also subsumes something like ``fragmented''. As said the field of CLs is fragmented in the way that there is a huge variety of models and methods at a first glance, which is good. What is bad -- and that's fragmentation too -- is the fact that Computational Linguists find themselves in the more broader area of Cognitive Science where we have all sorts of overlapping research going on that is much more connected to each other than we would like to modularize research. Neuroscience, Psycholinguistics, Philology, Anglistics, Theoretical Linguistics, and so on. And most of them stay in their camp, albeit they share the same object of interest: your blabla machine between your shoulders. That's not supprising because the material is very hard to get within one span of life, progress made very slowly. Some may even say there is a crisis of disorientation while overcoming Chomsky.

So maybe Computational Linguists are all loony because they contradict one another and themselves all the time but how about you: you talk talk talk all day. Did you wonder anytime why you say what you say, why you (don't) understand what someone tries to tell you, why you talk differently than you write, how this speech and language thingy can happen to work out at all? Probably not. For you, language is a natural given. You emit it. And electricity comes from of outlets in the wall.