Waggle dance is a term used in beekeeping and ethology for a particular figure-eight dance of the honeybee. By performing this dance, successful foragers can share with their hive mates information about the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar or pollen, or both, and to water sources.

See also: Bee learning and communication

Whale song

All Ball was the pet cat of Koko, the famous gorilla living in Woodside, California, who communicates through sign language.

Antarctica is claimed by a bunch of different countries.

Crossing Out, for Emphasis: Interseting NYTimes article traces version control from Dickens to Wikipedia and Subversion.

Awhile back, I wanted to make a digg-style collaborative filter for wikipedia articles. Still haven't done it. But Thoof is basically the inverse of that idea: it's a generalized digg clone with that's also (sort of) a wiki.

Here's the screencast. There are lots of smart features, but so much friction built into the process that I don't think it'll ever take off the wiki aspect is a little cumbersome. You can submit anonymously, though, which makes the process easier. (Bonus: saying the name of the site out loud makes you sound developmentally disabled.)

Barf (soap)

Turritopsis nutricula is a jellyfish with a life cycle in which it reverts back to the polyp stage after becoming sexually mature. It is the only known animal capable of reverting completely to a sexually immature stage after having reached sexual maturity. It does this through the cell development process of transdifferentiation. This cycle then repeats, rendering it effectively immortal.

It's worth paying another visit to Unwiki, which displays recently deleted articles pretty much as they are deleted. It's striking that the articles are no longer pure crap, as they once were, just majority-crap.

Two new search tools:

Woogle bills itself as "Wikipedia search that doesn't suck", which is a fair description. It's pretty much just a Google frontend (and its incredible superiority to w'pedia's intrinsic search underscores how the wikimedia's foundation's commitment to total independence occasionally bites it in the ass).

Mayflower search is a similarly kick-ass search tool for Commons images.

List of United States territories that failed to become states

Astrosociobiology is the speculative scientific study of extraterrestrial civilizations and their possible social characteristics and developmental tendencies.

The article rescue squadron made the Signpost. Cool.

This is not exactly Wikipedia-related, but a zillion people are talking about a plainclothes political protest (formal attire only) and I've started a wiki to organize it. I could use some help making sure there's no vandalism or anything while it finds its legs.

Software developers talk about the "patterns" a particular programming language makes possible. What about Wiki patterns? (Focused mostly on business wikis.)

An individual's Erdős–Bacon number is the sum of one's Erdős number — which measures the "collaborative distance" in authoring mathematical papers between that individual and Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős — and one's Bacon number — which represents the number of links, through roles in films, by which the individual is separated from actor Kevin Bacon.

Congress should use a Wiki to edit bills. Bonus, from the comments:

"Many in Congress wouldn't want version control. But the point [in the long term] is to make it a cultural norm, by making it a technical norm. It's a lot harder to object to something when to object means to deviate from the expected behavior."

And that, kids, is why you should do your math homework.

Interesting discussion about the nature of Wikipedia's hierarchy.

I've started the Article Rescue Squadron to prevent misguided deletions. Sign up if you're interested.

Unthinking deletion is becoming a serious problem. This isn't your run-of-the-mill "should we include individual TV episodes?" stuff; it's deletion of major public figures and important companies.

Andrew Lih: "How did we raise a new generation of folks who want to wipe out so much, who would shoot first, and not ask questions whatsoever?" Lih, by the way, used to be known as a deletionist. His positions haven't changed; the admin mainstream has.

Couple more points:

* It is easier to delete articles than to create them. Even if most admins keep, deleters will have a huge impact. (This bot tells people when an article they've worked on might get deleted. Only functions for a small subset of articles, but it's a step in the right direction. Systemic solution to a systemic problem.)

* If you work hard to write something, and then it's deleted, that really really sucks. It's a terrible user experience, if you want to think of it in business terms, and an asshole move if you want to think of it in social terms. Someone who goes through that experience is less likely to keep contributing.

A day in the life.

"I’m the chairwoman of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit charity that manages Wikipedia. I don’t need much equipment — I have a five-year-old iBook laptop in the sitting room and a phone. The desk in the sitting room is my space. The sun streams in and I can see the Puy-de-Dôme volcano in the distance. Thomas is free to crawl around...It’s possible one day I’ll be more proud of Wikipedia than of the kids. Wikipedia’s become a kind of child to me too."

And the election results are ... Oscar is out; Frieda is in. Sounds fine to me.

Winners

1. Eloquence (Erik Möller) 1671 votes
2. Mindspillage (Kathleen Walsh) 1427 votes
3. Frieda (Frieda Brioschi) 1254 votes

Nonwinners

4. Oscar (Oscar van Dillen) 1234 votes
5. Michael Snow 1229 votes
6. Danny (Danny Wool) 1217 votes
7. Yann (Yann Forget) 1153 votes
8. Kim Bruning 1124 votes
9. UninvitedCompany (Steve Dunlop) 1047 votes
10. Kate (River Tarnell) 889 votes
11. Kingboyk (Stephen Kennedy) 864 votes
12. Ausir (Pawel Dembowski) 693 votes
13. ^demon (Michael "Chad" Horohoe) 672 votes
14. WarX (Artur Jan Fijalkowski) 571 votes
15. DragonFire1024 (Jason Safoutin) 495 votes

I think this calls for a chart. Unfortunately, my mac's in the shop; here's the best I can do in Excel (it still kind of sucks).



For those who don't know, this was approval voting -- people can vote for as many candidates as they want.

Eloquence and Mindspillage -- both incumbents -- were the unsurprising standouts; among the other qualified candidates, the race was very close. Which is a good thing. It'll keep the board on its toes.

Godwin's law (the hitler thing) is named after Mike Godwin, who just got hired by the Foundation. Cool.

Voting has ended on the board elections. Results will appear here. I'd meant to offer endorsements, but man ... there were a lot of candidates to evaluate.

I voted for: Eloquence (Erik Möller), Frieda (Frieda Brioschi), Michael Snow, Mindspillage (Kathleen Walsh), Oscar (Oscar van Dillen).

A rather conventional ticket, but I'm of the opinion that the current board is a little like Bush Sr. -- his single greatest asset was not fucking anything up. The first gulf war was a success because the leadership didn't do wrong any of the million things they could have; the same (well, almost) is true for the fall of the USSR. Competent leadership is a tightrope, and the current president demonstrates how far down the ground is.

Make no mistake: the wrong board could completely kill the Wikimedia projects -- well, splinter them, set them back a few years. Danny's plan to dismantle the bottom-up board and replace it with "captains of industry and academia" would go a long way down that path, for example -- no surer ingredients for a board that will inadvertently discourage a healthy wiki community than one that has no idea how wiki editing works. (To be fair, Danny has plenty of other things to say that are pretty smart.)

In other news, I've added a chat widget to the sidebar. Experimental.

Snowclones are a type of formula-based cliché which uses an old idiom in a new context.

Chronologal snowclones. From An X doth not a Y make (A swallow doth not a summer make, 400 B.C.) to im in ur X, Y-ing your Z (im in ur base, killing ur d00dz, 2007).

Happy fourth.

Chess-related deaths

Gregor MacGregor (1786 – 1845) was a Scottish soldier, adventurer and colonizer who fought in the South American struggle for independence. Upon his return to England in 1820, he claimed to be cazique of Poyais. Poyais was a fictional Central American country that MacGregor had invented which, with his help, drew investors and eventually colonists.

9 Cool Things You Didn't Know You Could Do With Wikipedia. Fun list.

Fantastic article by danah boyd. (The discussion at Britannica Blog gets sidetracked early. There's much more light and less heat in boyd's comment section - scroll down).

The contest to kill 100 people using a sword was an incident that occurred in China during the Nanking Massacre.

Lewis Black on Wikipedia and Conservapedia

Greg F. Packer (born December 18, 1963), an American highway maintenance worker from Huntington, New York, has been quoted in more than 100 articles and television broadcasts as a member of the public (that is, a person on the street rather than a newsmaker or expert).

Here's the transcript of the first-ever debate between candidates for the Wikimedia board. It was chatroom-style; hopefully there'll be a voice debate sometime.

Wikimedia board elections start on Thursday, and Kelly Martin is profiling all the candidates. Martin is a reliable firebrand: her writing is always entertaining but frequently off-the-mark. It's also way more compelling than the Foundation's dry-as-PBS self-coverage.

Sèra: "According to these very conservative figures WMF delivers as much as 350 million euro in raw labor per year. THIS is our influence on reality. The simple fact that we can invest in culture much more than any government/company on earth can...That's why we all ARE wmf shareholders and we all have the full right to make questions and get answers, whenever just a leaf moves.

In published compilations of their materials, numerous historical figures have left behind doodles.

Erasmus drew comical faces in the margins of his manuscripts and John Keats drew flowers in his medical note-books during lectures. Ralph Waldo Emerson , as a student at Harvard, decorated his composition books with somber, classical doodles, such as ornamental scrolls. In one place, he sketched a man whose feet have been bitten off by a great fish swimming nearby and added the caption, “My feet are gone. I am a fish. Yes, I am a fish!”

The Dunning-Kruger effect is the phenomenon whereby people who have little knowledge systematically think that they know more than others who have much more knowledge.

See also: Lake Wobegon effect

List of oldest continuously inhabited cities My favorite: Crocodilopolis

Deep-fried Mars Bar. Surprisingly detailed.

Longest articles on Wikipedia. Also known as: The Museum of Misguided Merges.

The most familiar examples of states of matter are solids, liquids, and gases; the most common state of matter in the universe is plasma. Less familiar states of matter include: quark-gluon plasma, Bose-Einstein condensates, strange matter, and superfluids.

List of states of matter.

The death of Edgar Allan Poe on October 7, 1849 has some element of mystery to it. The circumstances behind his being found semi-conscious in a Baltimore gutter are uncertain, as are his final days leading up to his death; some questions even exist surrounding his burial.

The Poe Toaster is the unofficial nickname given to a mysterious figure who pays an annual tribute to American author Edgar Allan Poe by visiting the author's original grave marker on his birthday. The unexplained tradition began in 1949 and has occurred on the author's birthday (January 19) of every year since

"All your base are belong to us" was actually pretty interesting writing in the original Japanese.

Wikigroaning: A nondestructive Wikipedia game.

The premise is quite simple. First, find a useful Wikipedia article that normal people might read. For example, the article called "Knight." Then, find a somehow similar article that is longer, but at the same time, useless to a very large fraction of the population. In this case, we'll go with "Jedi Knight." Open both of the links and compare the lengths of the two articles. Compare not only that, but how well concepts are explored, and the greater professionalism with which the longer article was likely created. Are you looking yet? Get a good, long look. Yeah.

There are a bunch of article pairs at that link -- it's pretty hilarious, actually, and I don't often say that about somethingawful.

List of (modern) proposals for succession of U.S. states

Typowiki is a wiki devoted to typography. It is, of course, in German. But the list of fonts used in corporate logos is pretty great, and comprehensible even to anglophone monoglots like me.

Litesum: instant Wikipedia summaries. It's just an ajaxy tool that retrieves the first paragraph of any article, but it's got that relaxing minimalist ethos going.

The best part is that you can type a word, then keep deleting characters from the end and see each article in turn. For example, Food → Foo → FO (disamguation page) → F (the letter).

I think j.w. missed an opportunity to counter some of Colbert's points (though the Report is treacherous waters -- it's possible Wales was desperately pulling on the rigging, trying to steer away from a mock confrontation that would launch hundreds of revert wars).

"Colbert" is, of course, a character, but sometimes the real Colbert uses him as a mouthpiece for his actual ideas -- the last time he mentioned wikipedia, he was genuinely critical of it (for, among other things, not having enough of a sense of humor).

It's been a bit morbid around here the past few posts, but still -- you should really read about the Emerald cockroach wasp, which reproduces by controlling the behavior of a cockroach.

One of George Lawrence's world renowned photographs is of the ruins of San Francisco, California after the 1906 earthquake. It is a 160 degree panorama from a kite taken 2000 feet (600 m) in the air above the San Francisco Bay that showed the entire city on a single 17 by 48 inch contact print made from a single piece of film (Click through to the picture -- it's utterly stunning and about 100 times as large as you expect.)

Also, William Huskisson was the first person in world history to be killed by a railway accident, but not the first person to be killed by a train. In 1815, sixteen people died after a train's boiler exploded.

Crush, Texas was a temporary "city" established as a one-day publicity stunt in 1896. That year, William G. Crush, general passenger agent of the Katy Railroad, conceived the idea to demonstrate a train wreck as a spectacle. No admission was charged, and train fares to the crash site were at the reduced rate of $5 from any location in Texas. As a result between 30,000 and 50,000 people showed up on September 15, 1896 making the new town of Crush, Texas the second largest city in the state.

Towel Day is celebrated every May 25 as a tribute by fans of the late author Douglas Adams. Update: fixed the link. Argh.

Cool wikipedia visualization

Gliese 581 c is a newly discovered extrasolar planet orbiting the red dwarf star Gliese 581. It appears to be the first extrasolar planet discovered in the hypothetical habitable zone surrounding its star, where surface temperatures might maintain liquid water and therefore be suitable for life as known on Earth.

Lolcat

The founder of Metafilter has some tips for building a healthy online community. Of relevance to Wikipedians:

When making moderation decisions, don't quote Terms of Service verbatim or legal code. Be honest and phrase things exactly like you would if you were talking to someone standing in front of you. "Hey man, we appreciate your enthusiasm, but what you're doing is uncool because..." is a lot better than "As per the user agreement, you must cease harrassment of other members per Section 10.9.a..."

Two plus two makes five

Disumbrationism was a hoax masquerading as an artistic school that was launched in 1924 by Paul Jordan-Smith, a novelist, Latin scholar, and authority on Robert Burton from Los Angeles, California.

(I'm taking a bit of a blogging hiatus -- working on some other projects, some wikipedia related, some not. Posts might be a bit less frequent for a week or two.)

Cool photo of chinese landscape -- looks almost like a vector illustration. Half of the links in the past few days are via reddit, by the way.

Wikitravel seems to be coming into its own. It just won a webby award and it's developing cool articles like Hitchhiking in Japan.

A fainting goat is a breed of domestic goat whose external muscles freeze for roughly 10 seconds when the goat is startled. Though painless, this generally results in the animal collapsing on its side.

The commons picture of the day is available via email and rss, too.

Awesome map depicting online communities by membership size and tenor. Serisouly, it's awesome. North is "practicals", South is "intellectuals", West is "focus on real life", East is "focus on the web".

Wikipedia's in the southeast. Good chance to brag about the disproportional readership our relatively small membership draws.

The City of a Thousand Pillars (Arabic: إرَم ذات العماد, Iramu ḏāt al-`imād) is a lost city on the Arabian Peninsula.

A gaikokujin tarento (外国人タレント) is a foreign celebrity active exclusively or almost exclusively in Japan.

"And why, you might ask, is it even important to understand such an obscure, silly phenomenon? Why is it important to understand gaming culture, furries, or TV fandom? Should we not dismiss such embarrassing cultural idiocy, and lead humanity towards a golden age of a new enlightenment? I believe in the latter, but not in the former. If we want to advance as a species, we must understand what makes us tick. We must develop models that help us to explain why people form online communities around the idea of hunting menacing citrus fruits." via geoff

Category:Famous man-eating animals is up for deletion! I vote keep.

Russian space dogs. In the 1950s and 60s, the Soviet Union launched missions with passenger slots for at least 57 dogs. The actual number of dogs in space is smaller, as some dogs flew more than once.

Anatoli Bugorski is a Russian scientist who was involved in an accident with a particle accelerator in 1978.

Software Personified

Os-tans are software personified as anime girls. There's even a Wikipedia-tan, which is a way cooler mascot than the Wikipede.

Witness the power of this fully armed and operational battle encyclopedia.

Nostalgia.wikipedia.org: wikipedia as it was in 2001.

Ferdinand Cheval was a French postman who spent 33 years of his life building an "Ideal Palace" .

Local-language roundup

Why utcursch doesn't contribute to Wikipedias in Indian languages:

Although I am capable of writing articles in at least two Indian languages (mr, hi), I don’t feel like contributing to these Indian-language Wikipedias, primarily because I believe that very few people read them.

Now-a-days, knowledge of English is becoming synonymous with Education, at least in urban India. More and more literate Indians can read, understand and write English today (In fact, it is widely believed that India has the largest number of English speakers in the World). Almost all of the internet users in India have knowledge of English and they primarily surf English-language sites.

Not that I’ve any dislike towards Indian languages (I’ve been involved with translation of FCKEditor, Moodle and Ubuntu), but when you feel that your efforts will go to vain, you just don’t feel like contributing.

Kelly Martin says the foundation should focus more on languages that are tied to a national identity -- that local-language wikipedias are a losing game in countries where English is associated with education and high status.

I'm not sure I agree. Wikipedias could potentially help revive the status of local languages -- but is that goal too ambitious/revolutionary/optimistic? It's hard to tell when, like me, you're a monoglot. I do remember showing the Farsi Wikipedia to one of my mom's Iranian neighbors, who was completely uninterested (he already know about the English Wikipedia).

Bèrto ëd Sèra writes on a similar topic. (Wow, there's a lot of traffic in the Wikiblogosphere these days. Drop out for a little and you fall behind.)

Payphones

Kongō Gumi Co., Ltd. was the world's oldest continuously-operating company, operating for over 1,400 years. The company fell on hard times and went into liquidation in January, 2006.

Zotero, a firefox extention-slash-research-tool, now meshes with wikipedia. I haven't used it, but by all accounts it makes creating citations within Wikipedia super-easy. (In other gadgetry...)

The insane popes and the gaylords were violent Chicago street gangs with silly names.

In British English, the term mockney has come to be used to describe those who present themselves as Cockneys (or, by extension, other working-class groups) with the intention of gaining popular credibility.

William John Cavendish Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck, 5th Duke of Portland (September 12, 1800–December 6, 1879), was a British aristocratic eccentric who preferred to live in seclusion. He had an underground maze excavated underneath his estate.

Geoff's wikifying Ethiopia.

And about the blogger code of conduct:

The key to Star Wars is that Luke SkyWalker did not defeat Darth Vader by fighting him. Fighting the darkside only gives it power! The lesson for Luke was to appeal to Vader’s better nature. This is how civility works on Wikipedia, and the only way it can work on the internet.

...

Wikipedia has the potential to be one of the most contentious places on the internet. And yet it has developed a culture that can mediate any debate.

...

Web 2.0 started by reinventing Usenet badly, now they’re reinventing netiquette badly.

Category:Extreme points of the world

List of places blurred out on Google Maps

List of films by gory death scene

Ogg Vorbis -- no future?

All of wikipedia's audio is in the open Ogg Vorbis format, which doesn't play on iPods (or a lot of other players). John Gruber warns that Ogg may never see wide use.

With regard to Ogg Vorbis, or the idea of “free” codecs in general, the consensus seems to be that this is an ugly patent lawsuit waiting to happen. Yes, the creators of Ogg Vorbis have released the format (and source code for encoding and playback) openly, but the holders of the patents behind MP3 (and other patented codecs) very likely consider part of Ogg Vorbis to violate their patents. If Apple, or any other company with a serious amount of money behind it, were to use Ogg Vorbis in a mainstream widely-used product, it could lead to an expensive lawsuit.

Do software patents suck? Yes. Is it possible that Ogg Vorbis does not actually infringe on anyone’s patent, but that some patent holder could sue and win even though they shouldn’t? Yes. The point is, Ogg Vorbis is intended to be free, and it would be great if it were free, but no one with deep pockets has yet tested the water to see whether it really is. Worse, there are some experts who do believe that Ogg violates at least one significant patent.

Planning for a wikipocalypse

Lightsaber Combat via

Amazon's Mechanical Turk is failing for the same reason that Wikipedia is succeeding.

The Feynman Point is the sequence of six 9s which begins at the 762nd decimal place of π. It is named after physicist Richard Feynman, who once stated during a lecture he would like to memorize the digits of π until that point, so he could recite them and quip "nine nine nine nine nine nine and so on."

Wikifuturology

"I write these words in April 2007. If my prediction holds true then by the end of next year major news organizations will have research staffers who spend their working days reading Wikipedia edit histories. In a couple of years ordinary people won't just peruse your biography or your company's current Wikipedia entry when they decide whether to do business with you, they'll be clicking on alternate Google returns to see whether you've been in an arbitration case. Blogs and forking sites will chronicle ideological and corporate attempts to manipulate Wikipedia."

Light rail can carry as many passengers as a 16-lane freeway in the space of a two lane roadway. (Check out the pictures.)

If you want to know how to drive a streetcar ...

Also, a trolleybus is an electric bus powered by two overhead wires. And this is a cool picture.

The origin of the finger (gesture) is highly speculative, but is quite possibly thousands of years old. It is identified as the digitus impudicus ("impudent finger") in Ancient Roman writings[1] and reference is made to using the finger in the Ancient Greek comedy The Clouds by Aristophanes.

Humor roundup

Wikipedia vs. Google

A rough guide to the state of the internet

Why wiki works (because it's a MMORPG?)

What Wikiepdia is not (outtakes)

And finally, the Encyclopedia of Stupid joins what is fast becoming a crowded field.