“I have spent enough time in jackrabbit country to know that...some of them drift over the line into cheap thrills once in a while; there has to be a powerful adrenalin rush in crouching by the side of a road, waiting for the next set of headlights to come along, then streaking out of the bushes with split-second timing and making it across to the other side just inches in front of the speeding front wheels.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

Jack, the OEDA Mascot


The jackrabbit: lean, fast, agile, always alert. Adaptable to harsh conditions, able to change directions in a heartbeat.

Jack is the mascot of the OECD, the equivalent of Tux-the-Penguin. In his younger days, racing across highways in front of 18-wheelers to impress other rabbits, he was known as "El Diablo," but having matured, he merely does the equivalent in software development projects.

In contrast to Tux, there is no definitive represention of Jack: all manifestations of Jack are mere representations of the true, primeval spirit of Jack, and thus equally adequate, and inadequate.

To the noblest of rabbits, Jack,
Who gave event data for the generation of forecasting models:
Actor ontologies for the discernment of "who",
Event ontologies for the discernment of "what"
Upon whose every heartbeat a million machine cycles parse and code.

Whose ears are ever alert,
Whose paws hold the scripts of R and Linux,
Who is crowned by a thousand gigabytes of source text.
The incarnation of the spirit of the Ur-coder,
My salutations to thee.

OEDA logo: Jack and computer