24 liters of blood

TorgoX on 2002-05-24T18:59:26

Dear Log,

«One of the most remarkable links with Saddam can be found inside the mosque, where 605 pages of the Koran are laid out in glass cases.
The custodian said the entire text was written in Saddam's blood, which had been mixed with ink and preservatives, producing a red and brown colour with a tinge of blue. "He dedicated 24 litres of blood over three years," Mr Alani said.»

--"Mosque that thinks it's a missile site: Building programme shores up Saddam's power against rising Islamism and US threat"

I find the idea of a religious scripture (particularly that insufferable Rant of Rants, the Koran) being written in human blood to be quite fitting -- but probably not in the way that President-For-Life Hussein has in mind.

On a related topic, I speculate that if technical standards were to be written in their authors' blood, that this might actually improve things. Ideally it would keep the document, and therefore the protocol simple. On the one hand, this would discourage RFC/ISO authors from adding more examples. On the other hand, they rarely do that enough anyway.

---

Seconded

jhi on 2002-05-25T16:05:39

I really think that the the X* (XML, XSLT, XPath, ...) authors should be brought under this "only using your own blood" rule.

Committees

koschei on 2002-05-25T18:36:42

Unfortunately, many of these documents are written by committee. Committees tend to have more blood to spare than individuals. It might take me quite some time to write a spec in my own blood (since I can only use so much per week before I keel over). In that time the committee could have theirs all done.

Of course, committees being committees would take much longer at writing the document so they could probably get by using just one person's blood.