During World War II, Project Pigeon (or Project Orcon, for "organic control") was American behaviorist B. F. Skinner's attempt to develop a pigeon-guided missile.

The control system involved a lens at the front of the missile projecting an image of the target to a screen inside, while a pigeon trained (by operant conditioning) to recognize the target pecked at it. As long as the pecks remained in the center of the screen, the missile would fly straight, but pecks off-center would cause the screen to tilt, which would then, via a connection to the missile's flight controls, cause the missile to change course. Three pigeons were to control the bomb's direction by majority rule.

Expletive infixation is a process by which an expletive or profanity is inserted into a word, usually for intensification. A simple rule is that the insertion occurs at a syllable boundary, usually just before the primary stressed syllable. Thus, one hears abso-fuckin-lutely rather than *ab-fuckin-solutely.

Once upon a time, you could create a new wikipedia article without even registering. Then, at the beginning of 2006, the clamp went down.

Now Wikipedia's growth seems to be slowing, and Anons will be able to create new articles again, starting Nov. 9. Good news; some fresh air will be nice. But brace yourself for the friends of gays.

Andrew Lih: "I’ve often thought that Wikipedia contains a dynamic similar to evagelical congregations that build on authority by consensus. And I’m glad I’m not the only one that sees it that way." He links to a USA today article.

Oh wow. This is pretty fucking cool.

Live anonymous edits to wikipepdia on a google map in realtime. The map jumps over to the new location every time there's an edit.

Seriously, it's that *singing angels* moment, like having your finger on the beating heart of the world.

Somebody in the United Arab Emirates just added some local history on a town in India. What's going on:

1. A huge proportion of the english-speakers in the world are from India^cite, so their edits will show up in a random sample.

2. Dubai draws most of its construction workforce from india and south asia. It's around 11 a.m. there now, but I have no idea how one of the workers got access to a computer. Maybe someone's helping him out? (Or maybe the edit really came from india and the geolocator was wrong.)

Worth noting:

[This is not] a statistically representative sample of wikipedia edits...There are many biases introduced. We only see anonymous edits. We only see edits from IP addresses that could be located. If the location found is very generic (such as European Union), then it is not visualized at all. Hopefully WikiPediaVision still captures a general sense of what people are thinking about all over the world.

Still, WikiPediaVision helped me rescue an article posted from somewhere in north india.

Cybog Spaz

The idea that "Wikipedia is a brain extension" has been around awhile, and XKCD writes about it all the time—





Now a NYTimes editorialist loves offloading mental tasks onto technology:

Memory? I’ve externalized it. I am one of those baby boomers who are making this the “It’s on the Tip of My Tongue Decade.” But now I no longer need to have a memory, for I have Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia. Now if I need to know some fact about the world, I tap a few keys and reap the blessings of the external mind.

Personal information? I’ve externalized it. I’m no longer clear on where I end and my BlackBerry begins. When I want to look up my passwords or contact my friends I just hit a name on my directory. I read in a piece by Clive Thompson in Wired that a third of the people under 30 can’t remember their own phone number. Their smartphones are smart, so they don’t need to be. Today’s young people are forgoing memory before they even have a chance to lose it.

This is actually a very old trend. In the early roman republic, messages were sent by telling a story to the messenger, who'd remember it and tell it back at his destination: before writing was common, people had crazy powers of memorization—they could put away megabytes of epic poetry without much effort, etc. Tribes on the northern outskirts of the republic warned their students not to learn to write because it would impair their ability to remember—if you store your thoughts on the outside (on paper), you get worse at storing them on the inside.

About a year ago, Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird) said, "Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cellphones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it." I took offense at the time, but she has a point: plugging in is a trade-off, like it's always been.

What if a catastrophe had stranded astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin on the surface of the Moon? In Event of a Moon Disaster was a speech intended to be read by President Nixon if disaster had struck during the Apollo 11 landing.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by the nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.

In ancient days, men looked at the stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man's search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.

For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.

Happy halloween.

The silly AfD is trending almost unanimously toward Keep.

"Wikipedia's role as a brain extention, while a little troubling, is also really cool."

An AI Winter is a collapse in the perception of artificial intelligence research. The term was coined by analogy with the relentless spiral of a nuclear winter: a chain reaction of pessimism in the AI community, followed by pessimism in the press, followed by a severe cutback in funding, followed by the end of serious research.

Fatal hilarity is death as a result of laughter.

I've started a discussion forum about wiki-related matters. For now, anyone can post, even if you're not registered.

Typical breakfasts around the world

via

Mel's Hole is the name given to a geographic anomaly that is said to have been discovered near Ellensburg, Washington, on land belonging to local resident Mel Waters. According to Waters, the hole has paranormal properties, including an infinite depth and the ability to restore dead animals to life.

Like I said, the New York Times is one of a handful of newspapers that get wikipedia right. Now the Times has a blog-style Wikipedia topic page, complete with RSS feed.

This week's WikiWorld comic is really funny.

Good newspapers, bad research, and the failure of market capitalism

Yet another badly researched newspaper article about Wikipedia, this time in The Age.

"Submission of new articles is slowing to a trickle"

Actually, new article creation is up 25% since the beginning of the year. Total editing is down 17% in the same period -- after climbing an exponential curve for several years. Hardly a trickle.

The mistake wouldn't be such a big deal if it wasn't the keystone of the article (the headline is "Delete generation rips encyclopedia apart"). Tellingly, The Age is owned by Fairfax Media, which is a publicly traded company -- which means that The Age's shareholders demand relentlessly increasing profits -- a 20% margin is a common floor for papers.

The New York Times (and other non-public papers) only needs to make around 5 percent. So the Times can afford to do actual research, while the Age apparently can't.

Note to media owners: cutting so many corners that your journalism becomes detached from reality isn't "smart business" -- it's wringing the name value out of your properties until they stop being relevant.

Q: What do the New York Times, NPR, the BBC, and Wikipedia have in common?

A: They all inspire fanatical loyalty.

A: They've all run stories about Wikipedia that are actually accurate.

A: They all have people on the ground in Iraq. (Unlike the Age, the Telegraph, and -- dare I say it -- Fox News.)

A: None of them has to answer to shareholders.

Geoff has much more.

The newest discussion about Wikimania, Egypt, and LGBT safety is (finally) shedding more light than heat. Highlights:

What I would like to see, however, are some statistics, not anecdotes, on the real risk GLBT visitors* to Egypt will face. If those aren't forthcoming, then I don't think further discussion will be particularly useful
[...]
As a gay man I must be aware of my surroundings and act accordingly; while I'm openly gay to all my friends, family, coworkers, schoolmates and neighbors (and all of you) I feel that walking down the street of a small town in Alabama or Utah while holding my partner's hand would be needlessly asking for trouble. Yep, that's not fair. But that is how things are.

Advancing GLBT rights by provoking bigots is not why I travel to places. So yeah, I compromise in certain situations in order to reduce my chances of getting harassed or bashed. Looks like the same will be true for Alexandria. I'm not going to lose sleep over that or cancel my plans to attend Wikimania 2008 with my partner. Like traveling anywhere, certain precautions will need to be followed and some knowledge (dare I say respect with a small 'r') of local social norms is needed.

[...]

The point of this discussion isn't to determine whether Egypt has a good human rights record or not. It doesn't have a good human rights record and that shouldn't stop us going there (we should not punish Egyptians for their government).

What some of us seem to be concerned about is whether non-Egyptians visiting Alexandria for the conference are in any danger. From everything I've read (imprisonment of non-Egyptian homosexuals, use of entrapment by the police, torturing homosexuals in custody and trying homosexuals using tribunals set up to combat terrorism), we cannot say with certainty that Wikimedians will be safe in Egypt.

[...]

What you express makes sense, and there is a huge difference between simply being gay and involving oneself in gay activism, and I suspect thay no small amount of activism is involved in the example prosecutions. If you believes that the citizens of a country that you are visiting do not have all the rights that they should have it is grossly irresponsible to spend a one-week visit there agitating for those rights. After the week you may fly away home without problems, and even with the blessing and the thanks of the authorities for whom you have exposed someone that they were watching. The people you wanted to help are put in greater danger. I have no basis for saying that this would in fact happen in Egypt; it's one's beliefs that it could happen that should guide one's behaviour.

Building the World, Piece By Piece

There's a reason the logo is a globe:



Wikipedia is a worldwide project with a bajillion language versions and members everywhere. But the English wikipedia is the flagship (partly because it was first, partly because half the world speaks English as a second language), which means most of the contributors are in the former British Empire -- the U.S., India, etc.

Next summer's Wikimania conference will be in Alexandria -- yes, that Alexandria; think "great library" (and questionable political regime).

This Egypt choice is part of wikipedia's most important goal: uniting the world under a benevolent dogma of free knowledge. If "anyone can edit" is a radical thought in Washington, imagine what it sounds like in Beijing. (Well, you don't have to imagine; Wikipedia lost a protracted fight to seep through the Great Firewall.)

The globalist approach raises social issues, too -- for example, LGBT wikipedians (there are a lot of us) can't share Egyptian hotel rooms* (and will have to stomach a government that's friendly to all tourists, but routinely imprisons its own gay population). Jimmy Wales stemmed the outcry by promising a keynote about "free knowledge and human rights".

Andrew Lih says:

The choice of whether to boycott or engage has been a tough one. It happens with the Olympics, on trade, on technology transfer, and choosing conference venues. Given the international makeup of the Wikipedia community you’re not going to get consensus. When we chose Boston two years ago, there were folks who were upset because of the US’s foray into Iraq and the harsh requirements for visas.

Jimmy Wales has noted this, and has chosen “engagement” as his stance.

For those who can't make it to Alexandria, there's going to be a springtime wikimedia conference in Atlanta, and other satellite conferences in places like the Netherlands.

* Update: Oops -- they can share hotel rooms, just not singles.

FYI: Wikipedia's growth is slowing down: "since the beginning of the year the rate of editing articles has declined 17% and new account registrations are down 25%".

Specimens of the gray rabbitbrush shrub growing in Bayo Canyon, near Los Alamos, New Mexico, exhibit a concentration of radioactive strontium-90 three hundred thousand times higher than a normal plant. Their roots reach into a closed nuclear waste treatment area, mistaking strontium for calcium due to its similar chemical properties. The radioactive shrubs are "indistinguishable from other shrubs without a Geiger counter."