Wikisnips of the Day:

• A List of Subcultures. From Aristasia to Mod to Zazou.


• 59-kilobyte list of sexual slang.

Fortune Magazine: '"Wikipedia clearly makes the world better off," says Cook, an enthusiast of this new tendency towards volunteerism. "But economists measure dollars. People generally assume that GDP and quality of life go up together. Maybe a chunk of the economy is going underground."'

Wikisnip of the day: "The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State. ... The collection of hands became an end in itself. ''Force Publique'' soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went out to harvest them instead of rubber... They became a sort of currency."

(Those years were the subject of Heart of Darkness (full text at wikisource), which inspired Apocalypse Now.)

WikiSign lets you send MySQL queries to Wikipedia. Simon Willison has (unrelatedly) fallen in WikiLove.

Wikisnips of the day:

• "A common breaching experiment is to stand, in an elevator, facing the wall rather than door."
• "In humans, it is usual to have five digits (four fingers and one thumb) on each hand, and five digits (toes) on each foot. Polydactyls have six or maybe even more digits on either their hands or feet, or both."

(Ego dept.: I got a mention in the Signpost's roundup of theoretical wikipedia discussion.)

Wikisnips of the day: Hypothetical planets, Obsolete scientific theories, and Discredited substances.