The AccordionGuy points at Eric S. Raymond‘s proposal of a Hacker Emblem (Thanks, Joey!). Here it is:

Eric’s also provided a FAQ and a link to his article How To Become a Hacker (recommended reading). Notice: “hacker” not “cracker”.

This is a great idea. Every older programmer probably recognizes this immediately as the “glider” from John Horton Conway‘s Game of Life. This was first published in Scientific American in 1970 and caused great interest in the formerly abstruse field of celullar automata. Hackers immediately became interested in the game, notably Bill Gosper at MIT, who soon published a small newsletter where he and other enthusiasts wrote about new patterns. The glider (and soon after, the “glider gun”) were built by Gosper.

I subscribed to the newsletter and tried to implement the game on the computers I had available; it would be 7 years before I had access to a computer with a graphic display (an Apple II) and printing out hundreds of meters of nearly completely blank paper occasionally peppered with asterisks was frowned upon the administrators of my university mainframe. Still, occasionally I return to the game… LifeLab seems to be a nice implementation for Mac OS X. It’s at version 4.2 at this writing.