The Ulam Spiral is a simple method of graphing the prime numbers that reveals a pattern which has never been fully explained. It was discovered by the mathematician Stanisław Ulam in 1963, while doodling on scratch paper at a scientific meeting.

The NYTimes seems to be making a leap into blogging. Here's their Wikipedia-tagged posts, for future reference.

Nick has posted some more wikimania summaries

Why wikipedia should bother with the semantic web (pdf)

Yet another NYTimes piece from wikimania. (These are all by columnist Noam Cohen.)

NYTimes on Wikimania, Chinese censorship, and other things. The collapse of mainland chinese wikipedia participation is pretty depressing. At Boston wikimania, there was nobody more enthusiastic than the handful of mainland chinese people; they were absolutely thrilled to be there.

Ancient world maps.

The De Virga world map was made around 1411. (And re-discovered in a second-hand bookshop in 1911. And stolen during an auction in 1932, and never recovered.)

It gives a fairly accurate shape of Africa, at a time when the continent had not yet been rounded by European explorers. The source of such cartographic information is unknown, although it could be Muslim traders, or possibly Chinese cartographers under Admiral Zheng He.

Zheng He was a Chinese mariner, explorer, diplomat, fleet admiral, and eunuch who from 1405 to 1433 made voyages across the Indian ocean and to the coast of Africa. His voyages and the subsequent possible abandonment (as some have argued) of maritime exploration by the Chinese emperors have become symbolic in the space advocacy community of the success and cancellation of the Apollo Program.

Chinese exploration.

llywrch: "Keep in mind that one goal of every committed Wikipedian is the desire to recruit more knowledgable and productive members. I believe that lot of the apparently minor edits Admins make are to further this goal."

Another wikimania dispatch from the NYTimes. When is the times going to start tagging its articles, not just its "blog posts"?

Dunbar's number, which is 150, represents a theoretical maximum number of individuals with whom a set of people can maintain a social relationship.

The Great Stink was a time in the summer of 1858 during which the smell of untreated sewage almost overwhelmed people in central London.

Wikipedia needs a better API. If there's one reason you should give the foundation your money, this is it.

Who adds real content to Wikipedia, not just correcting typos and wikification?

Answer:

Only 12% of edits create fresh content. Of these 12%...

• 0% were made by admins


• 69% were registered users.


• 31% were created by anon users, or non-logged in users.

...and only 52% were by people who had a user page.

For great wikimania coverage, get thee to Wikipedia Weekly.

NYTimes dispatch from Wikimania

The Taipei Times is pumping out wiki coverage. Here's something interesting:

The sharp divide between producers and consumers of knowledge began only about 300 years ago, when book printers secured royal protection for their trade in the face of piracy in a rapidly expanding literary market. The legacy of their success, copyright law, continues to impede attempts to render cyberspace a free marketplace of ideas. Before, there were fewer readers and writers, but they were the same people, and had relatively direct access to each other's work.

Indeed, a much smaller, slower and more fragmented version of the Wikipedia community came into existence with the rise of universities in 12th and 13th century Europe.

The large ornamental codices of the early Middle Ages gave way to portable "handbooks" designed for the lighter touch of a quill pen. However, the pages of these books continued to be made of animal hide, which could easily be written over. This often made it difficult to attribute authorship, because a text might consist of a copied lecture in which the copyist's comments were inserted and then perhaps altered as the book passed to other hands.

Wikipedia has remedied many of those technical problems. Any change to an entry automatically generates a historical trace, so entries can be read as what medieval scholars call a "palimpsest," a text that has been successively overwritten. Moreover, "talk pages" provide ample opportunity to discuss actual and possible changes. While Wikipedians do not need to pass around copies of their text -- everyone owns a virtual copy -- Wikipedia 's content policy remains deeply medieval in spirit.

Wikimania (the yearly wiki conference) is starting today in Taiwan. Google it for the main page -- but for the flavor of what it's really like, try the photos. (Wikipedia weekly has good audio coverage, too.)

So there's England. And Britain, and Great Britain, and the United Kingdom. And the British Isles. And what's the difference between all these, again?

When the Going turns Surreal, only Criminals will own Librarians

When I had encountered this story long ago, the allegation was far less exotic: that "Slim Virgin" was the screen name of one Linda Mack, an eccentric college student who lost someone close to her (either a family member or a friend) on the Lockaby air plane crash, and volunteered a lot of her time and energy into finding the people responsible.

If that is in fact true, then it explains a lot about why she wants to remain anonymous, and why other people are willing to stifle discussion on the topic: she's been put through more than enough shit already.

Besides, so what if she is a female version of James Bond? As long as she doesn't resort to some black ops tactics to resolve disputes (even if that is the only way to settle them), is it a problem? Maybe she can draw on that experience to improve some articles.

However, as Kelly Martin and others have pointed out, the way this has been handled has only made things worse: removing material from article histories only creates more controversy, not less. A simple denial is all that is needed to handle this surreal rumor. ... I don't agree with Tlogmer that requiring Administrators to furnish (or use) their real names would solve problems like this. For example, I happen to share the same name as a car dealer in Australia.

Bonus: When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

Abir is an ancient Israelite martial art. Scroll down for pictures of bearded guys with swords.

Being jewish (but, I hasten to add, not in favor of Israel's policies or any sort of secret agent), I think this is pretty cool. There's really nothing like finding out that your ethnicity has its own kung-fu.