Dog monuments

Wikimapia is getting really cool. (Google maps + wiki -- you draw a square around something and tag it with a paragraph of text.) Are you listening, Digital Universe?

Space burial is a burial procedure in which a small sample of the cremated ashes of the deceased in a lipstick-sized capsule are launched into space using a rocket.

A white elephant is a valuable possession whose upkeep is excessively expensive, and may be useless apart from its value to the gifter and giftee. List.

Musical comebacks gone awry

The deadliest conflict since World War II

(Sidenote: I've made a grand total of $3 in the year I've had the google ads up (that's roughly $0.0002 per visitor), so I think I'll take them down. I was going to leave them until I had, at least symbolically, enough to replace the pack of cigs I smoked writing the Wikipedia/Linux article, but I should really quit.)

Text Mode demos are real-time calculated computer animations which make use of the native text graphic mode(s) common on the IBM PC. (See Demoscene)

Deadhead

Spells in Harry Potter (79 KB)

List of youth subcultures

Well. I respect historians more now. One of the them wrote a great article -- the first I've read that's almost uniformly ... right. It gives insight on the usual topics, and manages to ferret out the really important issues, like wikipedia's impact on the 3rd world. (And it succeeds in being porn for wikipedia culture junkies.)

Your freedom both to rewrite Wikipedia entries and to manipulate them for other purposes is thus arguably more profound than your ability to read them “for free.” It is why free-software advocates say that to understand the concept of free software, you should think of “free speech” more than “free beer.”

...

Why are so many of our scholarly journals locked away behind subscription gates? What about American National Biography Online—written by professional historians, sponsored by our scholarly societies, and supported by millions of dollars in foundation and government grants? Why is it available only to libraries that often pay thousands of dollars per year rather than to everyone on the Web as Wikipedia is? Shouldn’t professional historians join in the massive democratization of access to knowledge reflected by Wikipedia and the Web in general? American National Biography Online may be a significantly better historical resource than Wikipedia, but its impact is much smaller because it is available to so few people.

The limited audience for subscription-based historical resources such as American National Biography Online becomes an even larger issue when we move outside the borders of the United States and especially into poorer parts of the world, where such subscription fees pose major problems even for libraries. Moreover, in some of those places, where censorship of textbooks and other historical resources is common, the fact that Wikipedia’s freedom means both “free beer” and “free speech” has profound implications because it allows the circulation of alternative historical voices and narratives.

It also further confirms the gist of that infamous Nature editorial...

I judged 25 Wikipedia biographies against comparable entries in Encarta, Microsoft’s well-regarded online encyclopedia (one of the few commercial encyclopedias that survive from a once-crowded marketplace), and in American National Biography Online, a high-quality specialized reference work published by Oxford University Press for the American Council of Learned Societies, written largely by professional historians, and supported by major grants. The comparison is unfair—both publications have had multimillion-dollar budgets—but it is still illuminating, and it sheds some favorable light on Wikipedia.

...and the purpose of this blog:

One noticeable difference [between Wikipedia and standard historical writing] is the affection for surprising, amusing, or curious details—something that Wikipedia shares with other forms of popular historical writing such as articles in American Heritage magazine. Consider some details that Wikipedians include in their Lincoln biography that do not make their way into McPherson’s profile: Lincoln’s sharing a birthday with Charles Darwin; his nicknames (the Rail Splitter is mentioned twice); his edict making Thanksgiving a national holiday; and the end of his bloodline with the death of Robert Beckwith in 1985. Not surprisingly, Wikipedia devotes five times as much space to Lincoln’s assassination as the longer American National Biography Online profile does. The same predilection for colorful details marks other portraits. We learn from the Harding biography that the socialist Norman Thomas was a paper boy for the Marion Daily Star (which Harding owned), that Harding reached the sublime degree as a Master Mason, and that Al Jolson and Mary Pickford came to Marion, Ohio, during the 1920 campaign for photo ops. It devotes two paragraphs to speculation about whether Harding had “Negro blood” and five paragraphs to his extramarital affairs. Meanwhile, key topics—domestic and foreign policies, the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Act of 1921, immigration restriction, and naval treaties—are ignored or hurried over. We similarly learn that Woodrow Wilson belonged to Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and wrote his initials on the underside of a table in the Johns Hopkins University history department, but not about his law practice or his intellectual development at Princeton University.

Type I - A civilization that is able to harness all of the power available on a single planet.

1. Yet another reference to Wikipedia that calls it simply "Wiki". This is why Wetpaint didn't put the word 'Wiki' in their name: the battle for wikipedia != wiki is probably lost.

2. And yet another blogger (Fred Wilson, who coined the term "red hat wikipedia" 6 months ago) is nonplussed: "If I am not notable enough for inclusion in Wikipedia, so be it. But I do think that the one Fred Wilson they include is hardly notable, particularly when compared to the artist, the chessmaster, the rockband, and me (probably in that order)."

Lukasz (a Seattle-ite) sent me an interesting email about why he's starting his own wiki about hiking trails (Hikipedia) -- and why he spent late nights rolling his own wiki software, using Python/Zope: Hikipedia has all sorts of metadata (stuff that only applies to hiking, like the length of the hiking season at a particular trail, or the ranger station address) built right into the editing interface.

I'm reminded of Clay Shirky's old point: making something completely generalized can be limiting. (But the difference between wikis and other web apps (discussion forums, say) is that all users of a wiki share the same collective space, and content in that space endures; it never gets pushed off the page simply for being old. So having a large userbase can enrich the collective space -- all of it. Trade-offs.)

A sixth sense (and a 7th).

Jimbo sums up the NYTimes thing.

(o_O)

Techcrunch article: Wetpaint just launched (so that's why I hadn't heard of it). It's a wiki host and wiki framework rolled into one.

The interface battle is on: check out the awesome functionality on this history page -- each edit is programmatically summarized, for example ("4 words added, 2 words deleted"). (I'm jealous. Someone make me an OS X wikipedia client.)

Wetpaint is going to be pretty big. Bigger than Wikia, I think.

It's hard to overstate the importance of usability testing, which Wetpaint has obviously been through and wikipedia/mediawiki obviously hasn't. Not that the Wetpaint interface is ideal -- it's apparent the let's-maximize-revenue folks won out over the let's-make-the-perfect-zen-website folks -- but Wetpaint gets an important part right: in one fell swoop, thanks to ajax-powered editing, the mechancs of the site are manifest in its appearence: This Page Is Put Together By A Bunch Of People Like You. And a bunch of smaller confusions are nipped in the bud (users are called writers, not editors, for exmaple). (Meanwhile, I've watched web-designer friends click on the wrong edit-this-section link on wikipedia. A few developer-hours improving the link placement could save thousands of community-hours reverting edits by confused newbies.)

We geeks don't realize it, but wikis, unless specifically designed, are hard for most people (excluding teenagers, tech writers, etc.).

Sidenote: the story brought out a great comment -- on Digg, of all places -- analyzing why established wikis are less vulnerable:

I believe (and see it since I spend a lot of time on wikipedia for school) that most articles are "crystalized out" on wikipedia. I'm not saying wiki has stopped growing, but most pages on significant articles are finished, and remain untouched by ídiots [vandals] because there is no reason to edit it. You can expect that an article about Bush will be incorrectly edited a lot of course.

I think you can compare it to graffititags: people spray their logos only on walls, almost never on windows, doors, or higways. Why not? because they have a "usable" function.

That is why Wiki[pedia] works. it has its weaknesses, but it still is one of the strongest inventions on the web.

Wetpaint is a wiki hosting service that provides a dead-simple ajax-y WYSIWYG interface. (I wish wikipedia/mediawiki had something similar.) Sandbox.

The List of World's Largest Roadside Attractions needs more pictures.

"Student, justify why you have come to class wearing pants of our most probable military opponent!" (here the teacher means jeans made in USA) The right answer, as mentioned sometimes, is: "Because they are a probable war trophy."

As the faulty New York Times article trickles into dozens of smaller outlets, a few news sources get it right.

Deleted Articles with Freaky Titles

The List of problems solved by MacGyver has grown to immense proportions.

Lifehacker: How to contribute to wikipedia

Black ski masks and puppies. (I have no love for the ALF, but occasionally they're understandable.)

Mark Pilgrim has a great essay about why he's leaving Apple -- specifically, on the advantages free software has over proprietary software: in this case, the short-term profit drive of private companies created problems with data migration that linux doesn't have.

Is there an analogy to free vs. proprietary content?

Forlorn hope is a military term that comes from the Dutch verloren hoop, which should be translated as "lost troop" although in Dutch it can also mean "lost hope". In the days of muzzle-loading muskets it was most frequently used to refer to the first wave of soldiers attacking a breach in defences during a siege. (See Cannon Fodder.)

In The Oregon Trail, characters with more money are generally considered easier to play. This can be considered historically unrealistic, as many professionals (like those in the Donner party) could not aptly adapt to the wilderness surroundings.

Orange County, China

"Dashanzi Art District" is the informal name of a part of Beijing that houses a thriving artist community, among 50-year old decomissioned military factory buildings of unique architectural style. It is often compared with New York's Greenwich Village or SoHo, but faces impending destruction from the forces driving Beijing's urban sprawl.

"Oversight" -- a new user class with only a handful of members -- allows page revisions to be erased without a developer having to dig around in the metaphorical wires.

It's probably necessary (for legal reasons and to protect admins from real-world nuisances), which is a shame; I'm a little worried about the long-term effects of giving anyone that much power. (Short-term, no worries: even assuming the 16 users with oversight were inclined to abuse their power -- a strange assumption -- they're swamped with more minute issues.)

Nonsense verse is a form of poetry, normally composed for humorous effect, which is intentionally and overtly paradoxical, silly, witty, whimsical or just plain strange.

(Bonus: How do you translate the Jabberwocky poem?

List of leading shopping streets and districts by city. (Check out the pictures.)

Responses to Lanier's "Digital Maoism" critique.

Neither proponents nor detractors of hive mind rhetoric have much interesting to say about Wikipedia itself, because both groups ignore the details. As Fernanda Viegas's work shows, Wikipedia isn't an experiment in anonymous collectivist creation; it is a specific form of production, with its own bureaucratic logic and processes for maintaining editorial control.

--Clay Shirky

There's no doubt that online aggregators such as Digg, Reddit, and popurls can seem faceless to the point of being soulless. However, the irony of his critique is that Wikipedia is very much the opposite of these aggregator sites. Instead of algorithmically aggregating content, Wikipedia depends on writers settling their differences on an individual level. Nothing is created or posted automatically — and it shows...Take the talk page for "denotational semantics". In a textbook this recondite computer science concept may sound set in stone, but it comes to life when you read a sharp argument between an MIT professor and other experts over exactly what should be in the article.

--Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg

Making a million-entry encyclopedia out of photons, philosophy and peer-pressure would be impossible before the Internet's "collectivism." Wikipedia is a noble experiment in defining a protocol for organizing the individual efforts of disparate authors with conflicting agendas. Even better, it has a meta-framework — its GNU copyright license — that allows anyone else to take all that stuff and use part or all of Wikipedia to seed different approaches to the problem.

Wikipedia's voice is by no means bland, either. If you suffice yourself with the actual Wikipedia entries, they can be a little papery, sure. But that's like reading a mailing-list by examining nothing but the headers. Wikipedia entries are nothing but the emergent effect of all the angry thrashing going on below the surface.

No, if you want to really navigate the truth via Wikipedia, you have to dig into those "history" and "discuss" pages hanging off of every entry.

...

True, reading Wikipedia is a media literacy exercise. You need to acquire new skill-sets to parse out the palimpsest. That's what makes is genuinely novel.

-- Cory Doctorow

Alternative spellings of "the"

Wikipedia gets a new interface. (Sort of.)

Googlepedia is a firefox extention that displays wikipedia articles on google search result pages.

I know -- been there, done that. But googlepedia is both a useful tool and a herald of exciting stuff to come. It's a new animal -- a true mashup -- for two reasons:

1. It gracefully resolves the differences between wikipedia and google queries (for example, "pictures of trees" returns google results, but not wikipedia results) by using the "feeling lucky" function (and some code that I haven't looked into).

2. It doesn't just display a wikipedia article on the google search results page -- it changes the links in that sidebar article so that instead of pointing to "wikipedia proper" (that is, the frame for Wikipedia content that is en.wikipedia.org), those links now create new google searches (which, of course, display new wikipedia articles).

A point so important I'll say it again: wikipedia.org, the page with arial text and a white background, is just a frame, a container, an interface. What's important are the words that make up the encyclopedia, and because the project is open source*, those words are Libre in the old cool cyberhacker "information wants to be free!" sense: they can be filtered, tweaked, nudged through various contexts, used in uncountable ways.

Googlepedia was concieved as an addon to google, but -- the way it really works -- it's also a completely new interface to wikipedia, adding (as the 2.0 cats say) rich new functionality.

Wishlist

Some stuff I want to see in the next couple years:

1. A similarly well-implemented mashup of Wikipedia and Everything2, with some version of softlinks built in (add new softlinks the the bottom of the wikipedia article?). It would be great to, alongside a detailed WPedia subway summary, see some off-the-cuff Subway wit, or to find Eating something other than the Sun's energy for the first time affixed below the Nuclear power article. (Might revive E2, too.)

2. An independently-run flash WPedia interface (with the works -- color-coding to indicate stable and unstable phrases; animations; etc.). But that's for another post.


* More specifically, because the purpose of the wikimedia foundation isn't to increase pageviews/ad revenue at wikipedia.org.

Really interesting comparison of the cultural differences between the English and German wikipedias.

New Scientist on the Semantic Mediawiki.

(I've been on a bit of a break from blogging; I'll be sporadic for the next week or so.)

User:Citynoise has done a cool series of maps. (Boswash, for example.) (Citynoise runs Radicalcartography.net)

Compare the Bill Clinton articles at Wikipedia and the new Congresspedia.

Congresspedia's is mediocre -- and will likely continue to be, because the site's allowed only logged-in users to edit pages. That might work once the site's past a certain level of quality, but it won't get there under this system becauase (and the circle is complete) nobody wants to register for a mediocre site. (Update, June 9th: I'm not so sure about this anymore: Clinton is not, after all, a congressman, so he's outside congresspedia's mission. The site might fill a useful niche. I still stand by the following paragraph, though.)

There needs to be more innovation in the wikipedia-clone area -- don't just start a parallel project: instead, code some greasemonkey, snatch a database mirror, and build a plugin that makes wikipedia itself more dynamic.

Pundling is an activity common to all domestic cats whereby, when in a state of contentment, they knead the surface on which they reside with their front paws. This may have an origin going back to their wild ancestors who would have had to tread down grass or foliage to make a temporary nest in which to rest.Wikisnips_

In "Digital Maosim", at Edge (a really good website, by the way), Jason Lanier writes:

In the real world it is easy to not direct films. I have attempted to retire from directing films in the alternative universe that is the Wikipedia a number of times, but somebody always overrules me. Every time my Wikipedia entry is corrected, within a day I'm turned into a film director again. I can think of no more suitable punishment than making these determined Wikipedia goblins actually watch my one small old movie.

Twice in the past several weeks, reporters have asked me about my filmmaking career. The fantasies of the goblins have entered that portion of the world that is attempting to remain real. I know I've gotten off easy. The errors in my Wikipedia bio have been (at least prior to the publication of this article) charming and even flattering.

Reading a Wikipedia entry is like reading the bible closely. There are faint traces of the voices of various anonymous authors and editors, though it is impossible to be sure. In my particular case, it appears that the goblins are probably members or descendants of the rather sweet old Mondo 2000 culture linking psychedelic experimentation with computers. They seem to place great importance on relating my ideas to those of the psychedelic luminaries of old (and in ways that I happen to find sloppy and incorrect.) Edits deviating from this set of odd ideas that are important to this one particular small subculture are immediately removed. This makes sense. Who else would volunteer to pay that much attention and do all that work?

The problem I am concerned with here is not the Wikipedia in itself. It's been criticized quite a lot, especially in the last year, but the Wikipedia is just one experiment that still has room to change and grow. At the very least it's a success at revealing what the online people with the most determination and time on their hands are thinking, and that's actually interesting information.

No, the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous.

. . .

The collective isn't always stupid. In some special cases the collective can be brilliant. For instance, there's a demonstrative ritual often presented to incoming students at business schools. In one version of the ritual, a large jar of jellybeans is placed in the front of a classroom. Each student guesses how many beans there are. While the guesses vary widely, the average is usually accurate to an uncanny degree.

This is an example of the special kind of intelligence offered by a collective. It is that peculiar trait that has been celebrated as the "Wisdom of Crowds," though I think the word "wisdom" is misleading. It is part of what makes Adam Smith's Invisible Hand clever, and is connected to the reasons Google's page rank algorithms work. It was long ago adapted to futurism, where it was known as the Delphi technique. The phenomenon is real, and immensely useful.

But it is not infinitely useful. The collective can be stupid, too. Witness tulip crazes and stock bubbles. Hysteria over fictitious satanic cult child abductions. Y2K mania.

The reason the collective can be valuable is precisely that its peaks of intelligence and stupidity are not the same as the ones usually displayed by individuals. Both kinds of intelligence are essential.

I disagree with Lanier — in particular, he treats the concepts of "individual" and "collective" as binary and opposite, when the reality's much more complex — but ... er ... who doesn't disagree with him? He's still worth reading.

Paul Xavier Gleason (May 4, 1944 - May 27, 2006) was an American actor. Gleason is perhaps best remembered for his role as the gruff disciplinary principal named Richard Vernon in the 1985 movie The Breakfast Club. He reprised that character several times, including in an A*Teens music video, on the television show Boy Meets World (although he was a dean on BMW) and in the Not Another Teen Movie film.

Some outside attention for Wikiproject: Countering Systemic Bias

List of North American cities by year of foundation

Physics has experimental and theoretical wings. "Social software is the experimental wing of political philsophy, a discipline that doesn't realize it has an experimental wing."

The Motherfuckers were never part of the Situationist International.

Nick Carr says Wikipedia is dead because these articles can only be edited by logged-in users. (Man, if I could troll like Carr this blog would be so popular...)

Corante has a good response.

The Nain Rouge (French for "red dwarf" or "red gnome") is a mythical creature that haunts Detroit.

A moonbow (also known as a lunar rainbow or white rainbow) is a rainbow that occurs at night.

One aspect that is usually unknown by visitors to Brasília is that it has attracted many members of offbeat religious sects and esoteric cults — sects that embrace reincarnation and universal oneness, academics and sci-fi enthusiasts who associate Brasília with ancient Egypt or the lost city of Atlantis. Land was given to almost any religous group that was legally constituted so many non-mainstream groups were able to built their temples or churches at low cost and exempt of taxes. Their dreams are fed by an alien-looking cityscape, a showcase for Modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer.

Wikipedia needs designers! (It won't necessarily be on spec -- see talk.)

Conventionally, time is divided into three distinct regions; the "past", the "present", and the "future". This model presents a number of difficult philosophical problems, and is difficult to reconcile with current accepted scientific theories. Block time.

Classification of demons

Baidu Baike (aka Baidupedia) just launched -- it's billed as a "Chinese Wikipedia" (though it's not actually a wiki -- users submit content and administrators must approve it). Censorship, of course, since it's a Chinese endevour: no mentions allowed of Tianammen Square, democracy, human rights, etc. The launch coincided with a crackdown on attempts to access Wikipedia from the Chinese mainland.

It's not all bad. Baidu Baike could act as an interesting testing ground: a highly publicized, widely used system somewhere (structurally) between Wikipedia and Everything2.

Wikipedia is more popular than Jesus (who is himself more popular than the Beatles).

Bōsōzoku were first seen in the 1950s as Japanese youth began to see more products of industry, such as cars and bikes. The first bōsozōku were known as kaminari-zoku or "Lightning Tribes".

Tame Silver Foxes are the results of an experiment to domesticate the silver fox, started many years ago in Russia. Notably, the foxes did not only became more tame, but more dog-like as well.

A 1997 conference of musicians and philosophers discussed the implications of his instruction to play the piece "as slow as possible", given that an organ imposes virtually no time limits. A project emerged to perform the piece so that it would take a total of 639 years to play. (There's a note change tomorrow.)

List of snowclones. (A snowclone is a a type of formula-based cliché that uses an old idiom in a new context.)

The Korean wave refers to the popularity of South Korean popular culture in other Asian countries; it has been likened to the British Invasion.

In the Soviet Union, three Winnie the Pooh stories were made into celebrated cartoons by Soyuzmultfilm. Quotes and songs from the films are still a staple of Russian society.


Vinni Pukh (1969)

The Führerbunker is a common name for a complex of subterranean rooms in Berlin, Germany where Adolf Hitler committed suicide...

In 2005 the location of the bunker was not marked in any way. The immediate area was occupied by a small Chinese restaurant and mini mall while the emergency exit point for the bunker (which had been in the Reichskanzlei gardens) was occupied by a car park.

Good email debate between Wales and a conservative commentator about neutrality, etc.

ROBERT COX [after arguing that people like his son could trust wikipedia too much]: I did ask my son whether he was aware of the editing feature of Wikipedia and, to my surprise, he said yes.

A lot of the angst about Wikipedia involves the expectation that people (especially students, who rely on it heavily) will take it as gospel. But as Cox found out, young people are more likely to understand how wikipedia works, not less, because they haven't spent decades with older editorial structures. (Third-worlders are another group who will likely rely on wikipedia disproportionately. They're used to distrusting what they hear from authorities.)

Worrying Slashdot comment:

As someone who runs a City Wiki, I always felt that what makes a reference wikis work is that there are more people interested in having a NPOV article than people who have a financial interest at stake. However as companies and politicians become more familiar with the wiki movement and the whole anonyminity of it, they are more likely to see how easily you can edit articles as another PR platform and seek to control it. With the resources and ability to dedicate even a full time team to making sure the Wikipedia article keeps them in a good light, I fear we're entering the age where people who are interested in a NPOV are outmanned by those with a profit interest. After all, for years spammers have nearly outmanned those whole try to filter it.

‽

¡Ay, caramba! Dig the ¡.

Shanawdithit (1801 – June 6, 1829) is believed to have been the last surviving member of the Beothuk people.

As the Beothuk are extinct and few written accounts of their language exist, little is known about it.

We Didn't Start the Fire, wikified.

Bonus: 'Although the song ranked #1 in the US, and #7 in the UK, Blender magazine ranked "We Didn't Start the Fire" on its list of the "50 Worst Songs Ever". "We Didn't Start the Fire" also appeared on VH1's 50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs Ever, a collaboration with Blender.'

Bah. It's a good history lesson, at least, because it juxtaposees pop and high culture, letting you get the gestalt.

Exhaustive article on bicycling as transportation.

Pickpocketing used to be punished by death, but the public hangings were considered prime targets for pickpockets.

Aristasia is a largely imaginary all-female society existing primarily in England. (via)

I'm playing around with a MicroKorg (someone else's). The best part is the vocoder.

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.