It took Pat Acton more than two years and 602,000 matchsticks to build his latest masterpiece, a detailed scale model of Harry Potter's Hogwarts school. The model features all the turrets, walkways and towers seen in the films. He is currently working on scale model of the Minas Tirith fortified city from The Lord of the Rings movies. Pat says,"The Minas Tirith model will contain hundreds of city buildings. It will also be topped with the Tree of Gondor and the White Tower of Etchelion. The dimensions on it will be roughly 10 feet long and about nine feet wide. The great tower is seven feet tall." Imagine what this guy could do if he harnessed the power of Lego.

danielstoner writes "The article '13 reasons why Ruby, Python and the gang will push Java to die... of old age' makes an interesting analysis of the programming languages battling for a place in programmers' minds. What really makes a language popular? What really makes a language 'good'? What is success for a programming language? Can we say COBOL is a successful language? What about Ruby, Python, etc?"