SFE Easter Eggs

John Clute recently posted on Substack about the many surprises lurking in the SF Encyclopedia for those who dare to explore interesting-looking links in entries. He cites two dozen examples [see link below], and many more could be added. There are several thematic entries for wildlife such as Cats, Dogs, Mice and Rats; and others for such indispensable sf concepts as Arrested Development, Basilisks, Creepypasta, Fermi Paradox, Jack the Ripper, Little Green Men, Ship of Fools and Swearing. To use the catchphrase of Dirac Angestun Gesept (not an SFE headword), the list is long.

Perhaps the least exciting SFE Easter egg is a small panel on an information page that, mainly as a reminder to David Langford, reports the current version of PHP that we’re using. PHP is the web scripting language in which this site is written, and was the subject of scare headlines in October about revealed security flaws. Several sf Convention websites were taken down for fear that members’ personal information might be compromised. Happily SFE stores no such information about visitors. Our web hosting service, IONOS, reassuringly reported they’d installed the necessary PHP fixes immediately after their release. But it’s a big bad world out there.

• SFE Easter Eggs