The chicken or the egg?

It's wikipedia week at PBS's Mediashift.

More Cowbell.

A webcomic's hilarious Wiki storyline. Start here.

Wired News cribs from Wikitruth.

Wikipedia is mostly peaceful.

Rogers Cadenhead noted 156 articles proposed for deletion on December 21. By the end of the day, it reached 225 — but that’s out of 877,600 articles. You’re left with 877,375 articles where the editing is much more egalitarian ...Someone once described Wikipedia as the wild west: you hear stories of shootouts and Indian wars but most people are quietly herding cattle and plowing fields in the background.

–Sam Wong

"Adherents of evolutionary psychology have suggested that the humorous effect of cartoon physics is due to the interplay of intuitions between physics (objective) and psychology (self-perception). The physics module predicts that the cartoon character will fall over the cliff immediately, while the psychology module anthropomorphizes the force of gravity and thus see it as vulnerable to deception, as long as the actor is self-deceived"

Beep-beep

Wile E. Coyote is an evil genius.

An illegal prime is a prime number which contains information forbidden by law to possess or distribute.

On being notable in Wikipedia.

Wales speech at the Long Now Foundation: ( ogg | mp3 ). Runs the gamut. Points, off the top of my sleep-deprived head:

• Wikipedia (and its volunteer network) is doing cool and interesting things in the third world.


• Structural changes take a long time to happen, but that's good for stability.


• Candidates for deletion should be routed to members of the relevant wikipedia projects.

Less Stephensonesque than Jason Scott's speech, of course, and therefore less exciting, but more believable.

In other news, Wikitruth is one of a relatively small number of anti-wikipedia (or criticising-wikipedia) websites that has a sense of humor. (Update. Ok, it's uneven.)

There are plently of Supertall designs out there, but none so cool-looking as The Illinois.

Blog post that frames wikipedia's success interestingly, touches on social science and the future of web browsing, with some wiki business analysis in between.

David Hahn (born October 1976) attempted to build a nuclear breeder reactor in 1994 in his backyard shed in Clinton Township, Michigan, at the age of 17.

Wiki gangsign

Wikipedia is highly trusted in Japan. It's not clear whether the respondents were thinking of the English or Japanese wikipedias, or both. Maybe the Japanese version has fewer mistakes than others because of cultural factors; I'd be interested to see similar surveys in other countries.

(Thanks to Ken for the link.)

"One of the main difficulties of the San Francisco burrito is the issue of structural integrity...During this time, some elements of the San Francisco burrito experience became politicized...These comments likely reflect a larger anxiety among San Francisco burrito fans of all ethnicities that economic and cultural changes in the Mission could destroy the soul not only of the neighborhood but of the burrito."

Absurdly large apartment building.

If you want to stow away on a train, Freighthopping offers the following advice: "while railroads have shifted away from boxcars as a means of transport, there are still many places to ride, such as gondolas, grainers, and unoccupied engines at the front or rear of the train."

Human mail is the transportation of a person through the postal system, usually as a stowaway.

The meaning of life (not to be confused with The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything)

Examples of hyperreality

• a sports drink of a flavour that doesn't exist ("wild ice zest berry")
  
• a plastic Christmas tree that looks better than a real Christmas tree ever could
  
• a magazine photo of a model that has been touched up with a computer
  
• a well manicured garden (nature as hyperreal)
  
• Disney World, Las Vegas and Dubai (the first e.g. discussed by Boje, 1995)
  
• pornography ("sexier than sex itself")
  
• entertainment news programming and supermarket tabloids

The short, strange story of Burned Fur.

Cool maps showing laws on Abortion, Homosexuality, and the Death Penalty.

Britannica vs. Nature, round III

First, a recap.

1. Nature said: Wikipedia's science articles are surprisingly accurate -- only slightly less so than Britannica's. (And here are some errors in each; etc.)


2. All the Wikipedia errors were corrected within a month or two.


3. Britannica issued a salvo against the Nature article demanding a retraction.


4. Nature defended the article, saying that because the study was conducted blind, any problems with its criticisms of Britannica entries also apply to its criticisms of Wikipedia entries.

Now Britannica has taken out large ads in the New York Times and Times of London reiterating their previous arguments. Ars has a good summary. (The degree of Britannica's insultedness about being compared to Wikipedia is itself a little insulting to this Wikipedia editor.)

Onomatopoeia

Lists of people by cause of death

Shī Shì shí shī shǐ
Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.

List of tongue-twisters

The spacecraft experienced a remarkable and near-catastrophic return to Earth.

April 1, 2006

This Slate article's throwaway line about designers exstatic to be "in the same room with the guy who made Marble Madness" made me wonder: who did make Marble Madness? Turns out it was Mark Cerny (who also worked on Sonic the Hedgehog 2 -- which is actually a kind of similar game).

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

Nature responds to britannica (with a PDF, unfortunately).

In one instance Britannica alleges that we provided a reviewer with material that was not from the Britannica website. We have checked and are confident that this was not the case.

Britannica objects that Nature did not check the assertions of its reviewers. This is true; nor did we claim to. We realised that in some cases our reviewers’ criticisms would be open to debate, and in some cases might be wrong. But this applied as much to criticisms of Wikipedia as of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Because the reviewers were blind to the source of the material they were evaluating, and material from both sources was treated the same way, there is absolutely no reason to think that any errors they made would have systematically altered the results of our inquiry.

We note that Britannica has taken issue with less than half the points our reviewers raised. Both encyclopaedias have made corrections to some of the relevant entries since our article was published.

We do not intend to retract our article.

The Erdős number, honouring the late Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, one of the most prolific writers of mathematical papers, is a way of describing the "collaborative distance", in regard to mathematical papers, between an author and Erdős.

Britannica's pissed at Nature. Most of the meat of the issue is here. Nature probably messed up (I'll be interested in hearing their counter), but a few of Britannica's arguments are silly.

"...it's a big responsibility being the definition of gay."

Micronations and Pirate utopias.

Abramović had had placed upon a table 72 objects that people were allowed to use (a sign infomed them) in any way that they chose. Among them were scissors, a knife, a whip, and, most notoriously, a gun loaded with a single bullet. For six hours the artist sat immobile, allowing the audience members to entirely direct the action.

The Economist: "the “open-source” label can now apply more broadly to all sorts of endeavour that amalgamate the contributions of private individuals to create something that, in effect, becomes freely available to all. However, it is unclear how innovative and sustainable open source can ultimately be."

The best and worst U.S. presidents. (Though that survey is a couple years old...)

Conveyor belt sushi is a sushi restaurant where the plates with the sushi are placed on a rotating conveyor belt that winds through the restaurant and moves past every table and counter seat.

The Luther Burger is a bacon cheeseburger which employs a glazed donut (such as a Krispy Kreme) in place of a bun.

"This is unexposed film of Greenwich Village because nothing ever happens there ... "

-- Weegee's caption for a completely black photograph in 'Naked City'.

Chandigarh is regarded as one of the most beautiful cities in India.

List of idioms in the English language

Simple brain-computer interfaces already exist in the form of Neuroprosthetics

Sleepy lions

I voted against the proposed redesign of the main page. Clutter is what drives people to Gollum.

Sparse rumors: Google/Wikipedia partnership?

The story of a glowing rod and its travels (and how it killed 1980s Brazillians who didn't know better). (Category:Radioactive waste)

Unwiki displays recently deleted wikipedia articles.

List of people known as father or mother of something

List of paradoxes

Simpsons obsession can sometimes be taken too far, but this isn't one of those times.

A protologism is a word that is created and used in the hope that it will become widely used and an accepted part of the language. (Check out the wiktionary list.)

Grok. Spime. Goomba. Björk.

Any key. (Category: Computer keys.)

An alternate reality game deliberately blurs the line between the in-game and out-of-game experiences, often being used as a marketing tool for a product or service.

Gadsby is a novel by Ernest Vincent Wright, written around 1939. It is famous for not containing the letter 'e'.

List of problems solved by MacGyver

Mono no aware (物の哀れ) makes me wonder whether Closing Time was a hit in Japan.
(Category:Time)

Religious absolutism vs. wiki pragmatism. (Or: Al-Jazeerah writer vs. wikipedia admin. Skim to the bottom for the reply, unless you're interested in theology.)

One million articles. It's a bit of a silly metric, and there was some talk in the mailing list about noting that in the press release, but PR won out.

The 1000000th article itself. People got excited and took pictures. =)

(Hola to everyone from Microservios. Thanks for the link!)

Scientology really does seem like an RPG.

Wikipedia on your iPod. (Wow; text is really small, bytewise.) Mine's broken, so I can't report on the user interface; it seems like searching for articles might be cumbersome.

Compentant but unspectacular USA Today article about Wikipedia. (The focus is on the wiki-addicted editors at the top of the distribution curve. Wikipedia must be climbing a distribution curve of its own to have gotten noticed by the paper.)
Decent but unspectacular Wikipedia article about USA Today.

Speaking of newspapers. Remember the Muhammad cartoons? The article on the newspaper that first published them is now a brilliant and incredibly detailed history stretching back 120 years. (I wonder what the Danish spelling reform of 1948 was. Ah.) Sunlight is the best disinfectant; controversy creates great wikipedia articles (usually. And if you give it some time.).

As Dr. Westen said, "None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged... Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want... Everyone... may reason to emotionally biased judgments when they have a vested interest in how to interpret 'the facts.'"

Americans use pauses such as "um" or "uh," the British say "er," Mandarin speakers use something like "er," the French use something like "euh," the German say "äh" (pronounced eh or er), Japanese use "ahh", and Hebrew, Spanish speakers use something like "ehhh", and "este" in Mexico. Other languages have their own syllables for these pauses.

Unsolved Problems.

Japanese toilet

Anti-patterns are classes of commonly-reinvented bad solutions to problems.

The comedian who created the "In Soviet Russia" joke structure. (Surprisingly interesting article.)

Fan Death (S. Korea). The legend states that an electric fan, if left running overnight in a closed room, can result in the death of those inside. This belief also extends to air conditioners and the fans in cars...Fans manufactured and sold in Korea are equipped with a timer switch that turns them off after a set number of minutes, which users are frequently urged to set when going to sleep with a fan on...The legend is remarkably resilient, and is accepted even by many Korean medical professionals.

The Clock of the Long Now is a mechanical clock designed to keep time for 10,000 years.

List of strange units of measurement

Yahoo is cool. (Apart from that whole jailing political activists thing.)

Louis Wain drew lots of cats, and eventually became schizophrenic.

The article on Charles Ponzi is listed in three categories: Pyramid and Ponzi schemes, Fraudsters, and Italian criminals.

Signpost interview with Jimbo. Plenty of new information.

Interesting project for making Wikipedia more machine-readable. (PDF, abstract in HTML)

A $100 Hamburger is aviation slang for a private general aviation flight for the sole purpose of dining at a non-local airport.

(Speaking of which, I'm hungry.)

How was the japanese/european/american economy doing in 1 A.D.?

Free classical music
Spoken Articles (Wikipedia audiobooks, as it were)

It's in Ogg Vorbis format, which can be annoying if you use iTunes or have an iPod. If the former, get thee to Xiph and install the quicktime components: you'll be able to play Ogg files in iTunes, but not yet on your iPod. For that, you'll have use iTunes's converter to make the Oggs into mp3s or AACs, which is a shame because converting lossy to lossy really cuts down the sound quality. (Sign the petition to Apple.)

Plain language is good. The Transportation section of the "Gaza Strip" article gives a better gestalt of the situation there, and the wider conflict, than many other things I've read.

Wikipedize any text. (Capitalize words or phrase that you want made into links.)

The Smurfs and Communism

WACK-a-Pedia! is a blog very similar to this one. (I should figure out how to add tags.)

Numbers stations are shortwave radio stations of uncertain origin. They generally broadcast people reading streams of numbers, words, or letters (often using a phonetic alphabet). It is not known where these signals originate or what purpose they serve.

Birthday attack

The smallest park in the world.

Indie music (from independent) is any of a number of genres, scenes, subcultures and stylistic and cultural attributes, characterised by (real or perceived) independence from commercial pop music and mainstream culture

A proverb says that "all roads lead to Rome". Roman roads were designed that way to prevent provinces from organising resistance against the Empire.

Muhammad cartoons controversy (with interesting talkpage digression)

Euphemisms can eventually become taboo words themselves through a process called the euphemism treadmill

Hundertwasserhaus was built between 1983 and 1986 by architect Univ.-Prof. Joseph Krawina. It features undulating floors ("an uneven floor is a melody to the feet"), a roof covered with earth and grass, and large trees growing from inside the rooms, with limbs extending from windows.

Michael Malloy was a New York City vagrant in the early 20th century. He is known solely for his constitution, rivalled only by that of Rasputin. It is said that 30 attempts were made to murder him, all unsuccessful but the final one.

Check out this picture of Brazil. (It's amazing how much it looks like Simcity.)

An eponym is a person whose name has (or is thought to have) given rise to the name of a particular place, tribe, discovery or other item. (Scroll down for the list of lists. Eponymous adages is especially cool, despite being only a mediocre band name.)

"This IP has been blocked. It belongs to Information Systems, U.S. House of Representatives and is responsible for a large amount of vandalism."

Spark that lit the news story. Digging through Congress's sorry edit history.

A slashdot poster puts it well: "What a funny reflection of the world (or at least the US) today; politicians meddle with something that belongs to the public, making it worse, using it to their own advantage, and the public has to kick them out."

Silver lining: the fact that it's news at all, that service providers will be contacted and, I hope, staffers fired or bitched out. Transparency breeding accountability. We'll see what happens as the election season draws closer.