MSNBC Poll: Is it ok to pay people to post or edit Wikipedia content?

S. A. Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition of 1897.

I just recorded a spoken version.

Chikyu Hakken, Japanese for "Earth Discovery", is a half-billion dollar project that aims to be the first to drill seven kilometers beneath the seabed and into the Earth's mantle, three times deeper than ever drilled before.

There's a new policy: outgoing links from Wikipedia will be marked as "nofollow" for search engines. Kottke has some interesting commentary.

Microsoft tried to pay people to slant Wikipedia articles in their favor. (This story speaks more to MS's keystone cops style marketing than their evilness. Any truly evil corporation would be competent enough to make sure the story didn't leak.)

Dude. That bee is soooo wasted.

Category:Fictional barbers and hairdressers

Eponymous hairstyles

Q: How many members of a (given demographic group) does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: 'N+1 (where N is a positive whole number)' — one to hold the lightbulb and N to behave in a fashion generally associated with a negative stereotype of that group.

Current scientific theories about nutrition and generally accepted common sense both indicate that a person who follows Breatharianism in the long term would die of starvation or dehydration.

New Rome

So I haven't updated in awhile. I'm working on the whole financial independence thing.

I'm also doing a lot of stuff for the foundation -- trying to revamp the cafepress store. And I've realized Blog may not be the best medium for wikisnips, so there's something developing on that front, too.

In the meantime, check out the Think Free campaign:

In one California case, a pizza delivery was used as a ploy to lure a murder victim out of her house. Tanya Holzmayer was then murdered by a man she had fired recently, scientist Guyang Matthew Huang, who had been lying in wait. Huang then shot himself. Domino's promptly sent another driver to retrieve and deliver the remaining pizzas.

Harriet (c. 1830–June 23, 2006).
Tu'i Malila (c. 1777–May 19, 1965).
Adwaita.

A cool alternative to Wikipedia's front page.

Interesting NYTimes article about the culture of the Chinese-language Wikipedia (though frustratingly little is said about the actual construction of the articles -- did the reporter wade through the history or just skim the top layer of the onion? Underscores the need for a good wikipedia client that makes history-swimming easy.)

Talk: Rock, Paper, Scissors (via reddit)

Wikipedia just got its 1,500,000th article, which is about an endangered species of snail. (The 1,000,000th was about a Scottish railway station and the 500,000ths was about Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union.)

Wikipedia "is producing the world’s least biased accounts of the world’s most polarizing conflict...Two peoples at war can learn to live in peace with the help of what historians have called a “bridging narrative,” a shared understanding of history that takes into account the grievances of both sides. After five regional wars, two intifadas, and endless skirmishes and political confrontations, if any two groups of people on Earth need such a narrative, it’s Israelis and Arabs. By creating an editing environment in which political partisans from the different sides are induced to hash out their disagreements, Wikipedia is showing how a bridging narrative might be created, and what it might look like."

Wikipedia Brown and the Case of the Captured Koala. Trust me, it's good.