Spurius Carvilius Ruga (fl. 230 BCE) was a freedman living in Rome who allegedly invented the letter G.

The petition about removing the pictures of Muhammad? It's up to 160 thousand signatures. That's not a significant proportion of the total population, but the worry is that the muslim street could flare up unpredictably due to network effects.

Here's a moderate muslim response (filled with useful links, too). "Wikipedia has refused to delete the pictures and has released a statement as to why they are not removing the pictures. This statement seems perfectly reasonable to me as a Muslim."

The guy who started the petition has opened an official petition blog.

Here's a list of his Wikipedia edits. On another blog, he writes: "I am proud to call myself a fundamentalist and even your government preach fundamentalism by opposing the gays in few of the states in US." (Update: that's not really a representative quote.)

Former foundation insider Danny Wool talks about the audit. Wool's new blog is worth reading if you're interested in internal goings-on -- he knows where his towel is.

The Bloop is the name given to an ultra-low frequency underwater sound detected by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration several times during the summer of 1997. The source of the sound remains unknown.

The long-awaited financial audit is finally released.

The Talking Statues of Rome were a form of anonymous political expression in Rome begun in the 15th century and continuing until the advent of the modern media.

NYTimes on the muslim protest thing. Wikipedia comes off really well -- "polite but firm".

Also: "The site considered but rejected a compromise that would allow visitors to choose whether to view the page with images." When was this?

About 80,000 people have petitioned Wikipedia to remove its images of Muhammad. These run the gamut from polite, respectful requests to (a very small minority) crazy threats of violence.

It's possible it could have been nipped in the bud if the top of the Muhammad article linked to a version without images (instead of to a page telling people to edit their custom server-side javascript file. sigh.).

Also, here's the on-wiki censorship request page.

If you're going out to vote tomorrow, please support Obama. Choose the future.

Quick list of reasons:

• Obama's detailed technology platform is pretty much perfect.
• He is much stronger than Clinton against any republican challenger.
• His policies are phrased so that they don't terrify republicans but still provide the same benefits as Clinton's.
• He is capable of convincing people of things, not just tacking effectively toward the polls.
• He is capable of disarming powerful interests (in all senses of the word), not just warring with them.
• He is endorsed by Lessig, XKCD, and danah boyd.

Boyd:

When I was [at the World Economic Forum] in Davos, I expected everyone to be pro-Hillary and anti-Barack because of the whole "experience" thing. I was shocked to find that this was not the case at all.

Most foreign diplomats and companies thought that Barack would be much better at negotiating with foreign powers than Hillary. They all knew that the candidates would have huge advisory teams that would help them understand what was going on. Even though Hillary knew more people already, they felt as though Barack would be more effective. (And most were extremely worried about how Bill would overshadow anything with Hillary... another sad reality.)

Before Bush II, the U.S. had only once -- in its entire history -- seen the son of a former president elected himself: John Quincy Adams, in 1824, and there were 3 intervening presidents between him and his father.

Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton would be without any precedent at all, and you can rest assured that the dynastic pattern is not a coincidence. Looking objectively at other countries, a dynastic government seems -- even when democratically elected -- to indicate weak institutions, unsophisticated voters, and a cloistered and ossifying inner circle.

The people who brought you the 10,000-year clock are excited about Wikipedia's potential as a canonical "Futurepedia".

Think about articles like 2020 -- "If expanded greatly the official future timeline might prove to be a useful document of what we expect."

I hate to be the one to break it to them, but there's no way that's going to happen within Wikipedia proper. It's not verifiable. It doesn't cite authoritative sources. It's not encyclopedic. Basically, it breaks all the rules, and it'll get slapped down before it gains any steam. Wikipedia's incredible realized potential lives side by side with a lot of squandered potential.

You're not going to win this one by fighting it out in the AfD trenches -- anyway, 1head-to-head combat isn't the wiki way. Wikipedia desperately needs to be nested inside some broader, more permissive architecture.

Florence: Wikipedia will have stable versions, wiki-to-print, and collaborative video editing.

F.D.: First of all, improvements to the software. This is something that's been under discussion for two and a half years: stable versions. The idea is to be able to identify which versions have been validated, and to enable users to see both the current version and the last version that was accepted as being more or less correct.

The second innovation, which I hope will become available in spring, is to give people the chance to put together a small personalised pdf file or paper version containing a selection of articles. Suppose, for example, that I want to know all about the Davos forum. I put things in a basket, just as on Amazon: the article on Davos, articles about the various personalities attending, global warming or the economic crisis. I compile my own little book which I can buy and have sent to me. That is Wiki to Print.

The third innovation, probably in autumn 2008 will be the possibility of adding videos to Wikipedia and editing them collaboratively, like a wiki text. That should be really, really good!

Wiki-to-print has been around for awhile as pediapress, but there were all sorts of problems with the implementation. Now that I check their site, it looks like they've "entered a long term partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation". Sweet. Here's the press release from a month ago; it looks like this slipped completely under the radar.

"Project Chanology" began as an Internet-based protest against the controversial Church of Scientology by "Anonymous", a group described as "a disparate collection of hackers and activists".

Picture of the year. (Damn, I liked the others better.)

The worst usability disaster you've ever heard about. (It involves mediawiki.)

It's the last day to vote for commons picture of the year.

Here are the finalists -- they all have that super-clear naturalistic wikipedian quality.

Shipping container architecture is an uncommon form of architecture that involves the use of steel shipping containers as the basis for housing and other functional buildings.

By the way, let me know if the new layout has problems or if the ads piss you off.

Hundreds and hundreds of coats of arms, vectorized.

Check this one out (SVG link). This too, actually. And this.

(Thanks, adam.)

The Great Hacker War was a 1990–1991 conflict between the Masters of Deception (MOD) and a faction of the older guard hacker group Legion of Doom (LOD).

Wikipedia on the iPhone

Wikipedia:ZEN