The contest to kill 100 people using a sword was an incident that occurred in China during the Nanking Massacre.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Friday, June 29, 2007
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Greg F. Packer (born December 18, 1963), an American highway maintenance worker from Huntington, New York, has been quoted in more than 100 articles and television broadcasts as a member of the public (that is, a person on the street rather than a newsmaker or expert).
Here's the transcript of the first-ever debate between candidates for the Wikimedia board. It was chatroom-style; hopefully there'll be a voice debate sometime.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Wikimedia board elections start on Thursday, and Kelly Martin is profiling all the candidates. Martin is a reliable firebrand: her writing is always entertaining but frequently off-the-mark. It's also way more compelling than the Foundation's dry-as-PBS self-coverage.
Sèra: "According to these very conservative figures WMF delivers as much as 350 million euro in raw labor per year. THIS is our influence on reality. The simple fact that we can invest in culture much more than any government/company on earth can...That's why we all ARE wmf shareholders and we all have the full right to make questions and get answers, whenever just a leaf moves.
In published compilations of their materials, numerous historical figures have left behind doodles.
Erasmus drew comical faces in the margins of his manuscripts and John Keats drew flowers in his medical note-books during lectures. Ralph Waldo Emerson , as a student at Harvard, decorated his composition books with somber, classical doodles, such as ornamental scrolls. In one place, he sketched a man whose feet have been bitten off by a great fish swimming nearby and added the caption, “My feet are gone. I am a fish. Yes, I am a fish!”
Thursday, June 21, 2007
The Dunning-Kruger effect is the phenomenon whereby people who have little knowledge systematically think that they know more than others who have much more knowledge.
See also: Lake Wobegon effect
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Longest articles on Wikipedia. Also known as: The Museum of Misguided Merges.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
The most familiar examples of states of matter are solids, liquids, and gases; the most common state of matter in the universe is plasma. Less familiar states of matter include: quark-gluon plasma, Bose-Einstein condensates, strange matter, and superfluids.
List of states of matter.
Friday, June 08, 2007
The death of Edgar Allan Poe on October 7, 1849 has some element of mystery to it. The circumstances behind his being found semi-conscious in a Baltimore gutter are uncertain, as are his final days leading up to his death; some questions even exist surrounding his burial.
The Poe Toaster is the unofficial nickname given to a mysterious figure who pays an annual tribute to American author Edgar Allan Poe by visiting the author's original grave marker on his birthday. The unexplained tradition began in 1949 and has occurred on the author's birthday (January 19) of every year since
Wikigroaning: A nondestructive Wikipedia game.
The premise is quite simple. First, find a useful Wikipedia article that normal people might read. For example, the article called "Knight." Then, find a somehow similar article that is longer, but at the same time, useless to a very large fraction of the population. In this case, we'll go with "Jedi Knight." Open both of the links and compare the lengths of the two articles. Compare not only that, but how well concepts are explored, and the greater professionalism with which the longer article was likely created. Are you looking yet? Get a good, long look. Yeah.
There are a bunch of article pairs at that link -- it's pretty hilarious, actually, and I don't often say that about somethingawful.
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Typowiki is a wiki devoted to typography. It is, of course, in German. But the list of fonts used in corporate logos is pretty great, and comprehensible even to anglophone monoglots like me.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Litesum: instant Wikipedia summaries. It's just an ajaxy tool that retrieves the first paragraph of any article, but it's got that relaxing minimalist ethos going.
The best part is that you can type a word, then keep deleting characters from the end and see each article in turn. For example, Food → Foo → FO (disamguation page) → F (the letter).
