Origin of water on Earth

I was wondering why Clay Shirky's talk about Wikipedia -- among other things -- has been blowing up the blogosphere. (Because it's fucking brilliant, that's why. Though I don't buy all of it.)

Not wikipedia-related:

If you're curious about the controversies surrounding China -- if you're chinese and think the western public is gullible and uninformed, or vice versa, here's a good article.

Wikipedia takes manhattan: a photographic scavenger hunt for places around our city needing photos for their Wikipedia articles. Looks like it went pretty well.

Autocompletion

Is anyone else seeing predictive autocompletion in the Wikipedia search field?



Update: head techie Brion Vibber has the scoop. This is pretty big news -- most people have no idea how vast wikipedia is, and now the dropdown is a little window into that.

So, what are we going to do tonight, Brain?

Warning: not Wikipedia-related.

My band, the Afternoon Round, at one of our first shows.

The recording levels are way off, but I think it rocks pretty hard. We're playing at the Heidelburg in Ann Arbor on thursday. There's some more melodic stuff on the myspace.

WikiXMLDB provides a way of querying Wikipedia with XQuery.

With all the benefits that Wikipedia promises, it is not easy to use it off-the-shelf in applications. While Wikipedia is available for download in an XML format, individual articles are formatted in a proprietary wiki format. So the most interesting uses of Wikipedia in applications are still locked behind the access troubles.

Here is where WikiXMLDB comes to the rescue. We have parsed the entire English Wikipedia content into XML representation (its total size is about 21GB), loaded it into Sedna and provided a query interface to it. Now you can dissect individual articles, rip out abstracts, sections, links, infoboxes and other components. Or you can combine pieces of existing documents into new XML documents and convert them to web pages with XSLT for example. And you can do it all using the standard W3C XQuery Language. So finally you can start enriching your content with data from Wikipedia and unlock its power for your applications.

Cool.

Was Tolkien's wizard Gandalf based on Gundulf of Rochester? "In 1078 King William used Gundulf's skill in the construction of the White Tower: the keep of the Tower of London."

Tea culture is defined by the way tea is made and consumed, by the way the people interact with tea, and by the aesthetics surrounding tea drinking.

List of ethnic groups in China. (Don't miss the map.)

English America* has "John Doe". What are informal names for unknown or unspecified persons in other countries/regions?

* You pedants

Lieutenant-General Sir Manley Power (1773 – July 7, 1826)

Wiki FM Lets You Listen to Bands on Last.fm While Reading their Bios on Wikipedia

Hey, now there's an official wikipedia-related blog -- the Wikimedia blog, run by the foundation itself (and not affiliated with this blog, which is unofficial).

Unsheathing the sword revealed an untarnished blade, despite the tomb being soaked in underground water for over two thousand years. A simple test conducted by the archaeologists showed that the blade could still easily cut a stack of twenty pieces of paper.

The bathing machine was a device, popular in the 19th century, which was intended to allow people to wade in the ocean at beaches without violating Victorian notions of modesty. Bathing machines were in the form of roofed and walled wooden carts which would be rolled into the sea. Some had solid wooden walls; others had canvas walls over a wooden frame.

via reddit

Wikimedia receives 3-year, $3,000,000 grant. That's a large fraction of the budget (and it's from the alfred p sloan foundation, in case you're worried).

Some tech kids from the university of edinburgh sent me a link to wiki-answers, their wikipedia search engine.

There's a lot of exciting stuff going down at open wikiblogplanet (an aggregator for blogs about wikipedia).