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.