Russian space dogs. In the 1950s and 60s, the Soviet Union launched missions with passenger slots for at least 57 dogs. The actual number of dogs in space is smaller, as some dogs flew more than once.

Anatoli Bugorski is a Russian scientist who was involved in an accident with a particle accelerator in 1978.

Software Personified

Os-tans are software personified as anime girls. There's even a Wikipedia-tan, which is a way cooler mascot than the Wikipede.

Witness the power of this fully armed and operational battle encyclopedia.

Nostalgia.wikipedia.org: wikipedia as it was in 2001.

Ferdinand Cheval was a French postman who spent 33 years of his life building an "Ideal Palace" .

Local-language roundup

Why utcursch doesn't contribute to Wikipedias in Indian languages:

Although I am capable of writing articles in at least two Indian languages (mr, hi), I don’t feel like contributing to these Indian-language Wikipedias, primarily because I believe that very few people read them.

Now-a-days, knowledge of English is becoming synonymous with Education, at least in urban India. More and more literate Indians can read, understand and write English today (In fact, it is widely believed that India has the largest number of English speakers in the World). Almost all of the internet users in India have knowledge of English and they primarily surf English-language sites.

Not that I’ve any dislike towards Indian languages (I’ve been involved with translation of FCKEditor, Moodle and Ubuntu), but when you feel that your efforts will go to vain, you just don’t feel like contributing.

Kelly Martin says the foundation should focus more on languages that are tied to a national identity -- that local-language wikipedias are a losing game in countries where English is associated with education and high status.

I'm not sure I agree. Wikipedias could potentially help revive the status of local languages -- but is that goal too ambitious/revolutionary/optimistic? It's hard to tell when, like me, you're a monoglot. I do remember showing the Farsi Wikipedia to one of my mom's Iranian neighbors, who was completely uninterested (he already know about the English Wikipedia).

Bèrto ëd Sèra writes on a similar topic. (Wow, there's a lot of traffic in the Wikiblogosphere these days. Drop out for a little and you fall behind.)

Payphones

Kongō Gumi Co., Ltd. was the world's oldest continuously-operating company, operating for over 1,400 years. The company fell on hard times and went into liquidation in January, 2006.

Zotero, a firefox extention-slash-research-tool, now meshes with wikipedia. I haven't used it, but by all accounts it makes creating citations within Wikipedia super-easy. (In other gadgetry...)

The insane popes and the gaylords were violent Chicago street gangs with silly names.

In British English, the term mockney has come to be used to describe those who present themselves as Cockneys (or, by extension, other working-class groups) with the intention of gaining popular credibility.

William John Cavendish Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck, 5th Duke of Portland (September 12, 1800–December 6, 1879), was a British aristocratic eccentric who preferred to live in seclusion. He had an underground maze excavated underneath his estate.

Geoff's wikifying Ethiopia.

And about the blogger code of conduct:

The key to Star Wars is that Luke SkyWalker did not defeat Darth Vader by fighting him. Fighting the darkside only gives it power! The lesson for Luke was to appeal to Vader’s better nature. This is how civility works on Wikipedia, and the only way it can work on the internet.

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Wikipedia has the potential to be one of the most contentious places on the internet. And yet it has developed a culture that can mediate any debate.

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Web 2.0 started by reinventing Usenet badly, now they’re reinventing netiquette badly.

Category:Extreme points of the world

List of places blurred out on Google Maps

List of films by gory death scene

Ogg Vorbis -- no future?

All of wikipedia's audio is in the open Ogg Vorbis format, which doesn't play on iPods (or a lot of other players). John Gruber warns that Ogg may never see wide use.

With regard to Ogg Vorbis, or the idea of “free” codecs in general, the consensus seems to be that this is an ugly patent lawsuit waiting to happen. Yes, the creators of Ogg Vorbis have released the format (and source code for encoding and playback) openly, but the holders of the patents behind MP3 (and other patented codecs) very likely consider part of Ogg Vorbis to violate their patents. If Apple, or any other company with a serious amount of money behind it, were to use Ogg Vorbis in a mainstream widely-used product, it could lead to an expensive lawsuit.

Do software patents suck? Yes. Is it possible that Ogg Vorbis does not actually infringe on anyone’s patent, but that some patent holder could sue and win even though they shouldn’t? Yes. The point is, Ogg Vorbis is intended to be free, and it would be great if it were free, but no one with deep pockets has yet tested the water to see whether it really is. Worse, there are some experts who do believe that Ogg violates at least one significant patent.

Planning for a wikipocalypse

Lightsaber Combat via