Rocket mail is the delivery of mail by rocket or missile.

Upon witnessing the missile's landing, Summerfield stated, "This peacetime employment of a guided missile for the important and practical purpose of carrying mail, is the first known official use of missiles by any Post Office Department of any nation." Summerfield proclaimed the event to be "of historic significance to the peoples of the entire world", and predicted that "before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail."

I've created a new category: Famous transit stations.

Also, Pirates. More pirates.

Might as well be polite: I have, for the moment, lost interest in updating this blog. Sorry, to whomever reads or checks regularly. I might post more in the future. Update: Hi. Nevermind.

Wikisnips of the day: List of Titles and Honours of Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom. Elizabeth II is Queen of Australia, Queen of New Zealand, Queen of Canada, an Honorary Brigadier, and a Freeman in the Worshipful Company of Drapers.

Wikisnip of the day: If you ever run into holocaust deniers, the Holocaust Denial Examined page has plenty of well-thought counterarguments.

Wikisnips of the Day

• 'Hachikō, sometimes known in Japanese as 忠犬ハチ公 (chūken hachikō, lit. 'faithful dog Hachiko'), was an Akita dog born in November, 1923, in the city of Odate, Akita Prefecture. In 1924, he was brought to Tokyo by his owner, Eisaburo Ueno, a professor in the agriculture department at the University of Tokyo. During his owner's life, Hachiko saw him off from the front door and greeted him at the end of the day at the nearby Shibuya Station. Even after Ueno's death in May, 1925, Hachiko returned every day to the station to wait for him, and did so for the next eleven years.'


• Like Hachikō, Greyfriars Bobby is a dog with a statue.


• Other famous dogs.


• Fictional dogs.

Good BBC article

Public Domain and Wikipedia is a mini-documentary shot at wikimania.

Wikisnips of the day:

Bigfoot gets 57 Kb and its own 7-article category. But it's only one of innumerable Cryptids. ("Cryptids are animals for whose existence there is no confirmation.")

Other legendary creatures -- Zombies, sea monsters (and lake monsters, like the Loch Ness), etc.

Fictional national animals include the Qilin, Wild Haggis, the Fur-brearing Trout.

Some pictures from Wikimania (and a slideshow) but not much information posted yet.

Usually live-blogging is something you do when the conference has a low signal/noise ratio or has plenty of "dead" time. Wikimania had neither, because everyone knew each other online in some way, and the communal space made it easy to engage in long discussions and for folks to demo things to each other on laptops. It was an amazing experience, and multimedia content will follow.

– Andrew Lih, on the wikipedia mailing list.

Fast Company has a decent roundup of Wikimania events.

The Wikipedia Signpost is shutting down. A damn shame (though I don't blame the editor; it was too much work for one person, and no coincidence that he stopped around wikimania -- how are you supposed to cover something like that properly without an editorial team (and a plane ticket)?). As you may have noticed, this blog hasn't exactly been a paper of record the past few days (what with actually finding a job and all), and there's no other semi-central source for wikipedia news, unless you count the Quarto (and I don't).

No New Rules
There was a widely-covered story that wikipedia was about to tighten rules, freeze a bunch of entries, etc. False. (I'm relieved. Articles are, of course, never "finished' -- the world keeps going.)

Wikisnip of the day: 'Astrochicken, Dyson explained, is a one-kilogram spacecraft that is unlike any other. Astrochicken would be a creation of the intersection of biology, artificial intelligence and modern microelectronics—a symbiosis of plant and animal and electronic components.' (There's also an Astro Chicken from Space Quest.)

Wales: 10 things will be free.

Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales is guest blogging for Lawrence Lessig. Theme: Ten things that will be free. ("...the point of naming the list "will be free" rather than "should be free" or "must be free" is that I am making concrete predictions rather than listing a pie in the sky list of things I wish to see.")

1. The encyclopedia. (Of course.) Wales charts a plan to get wikipedia into the developing world, where the vast majority of people are.

Third, while it is important to provide our work in important global or "colonial" languages, we also think it is extremely important to provide our work in languages that people speak natively, at home. (Swahili, Hindi, etc.)

I will define a reasonable degree of success as follows, while recognizing that it does leave out a handful of people around the world who only speak rare languages: this problem will be solved when Wikipedia versions with at least 250,000 articles exists in every language which has at least 1,000,000 speakers and significant efforts exist for even very small languages. There are many local languages which are spoken by people who also speak a more common international language -- both facts are relevant.

I predict this will be completed in 15 years. With a 250,000-article cutoff, English and German are both past the threshold. Japanese and French will be there in a year. Several other languages will be there in two years.

2. School curricula, from kindergarten to college. "...this is a much bigger job than the encyclopedia, and it will take much longer ... An open project with dozens of professors adapting and refining a textbook on a particular subject will be a very difficult thing for a proprietary publisher to compete with.

(Update: Here's the full list.)

Wikisnip of the day

Quantum suicide is a thought experiment that attempts to distinguish between the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and the many-worlds interpretation (though there are other interpretations, too). The experiment essentially involves participating in the Schrödinger's cat experiment as the cat. (See also: Quantum Immortality.)

Wikimania starts wednesday.

There are presentations on wiki conflict resolution, creativity, getting wikipedia into africa, cool metadata schemes, a timeline with all of human history on it, the intersect of art and science.



Man, I wish I was in Germany.

Analysis of conflicting philosophies about Wikipedia

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.