Sputnik crisis

Hypothetical spacecraft

Mary Tofts (born c. 1701) was a maidservant from Godalming, England, who in 1726 became the subject of considerable controversy when she hoaxed doctors into believing that she had given birth to at least sixteen rabbits.

Erik Moller is on the wikimedia board; his blog has been pretty interesting lately.

For starters, LiquidThreads is sort of a cross between a wiki and a discussion forum. And why is Wikipedia a natural ally of the rest of the open-source movement, anyway?

If you're pissed off at Apple, you could buy a Wikipedia Think Free poster. Proceeds benefit the Foundation. (And I did the graphic design.)

Atmospheric beasts (also sky beasts or sky critters) are organisms which could hypothetically exist within the atmosphere of Earth or other planets. These could fly (or float) without wings as they weigh less than air. See also: Extremophile, Astrobiology.

Aokigahara(青木ヶ原), also called the Sea of Trees, is a forest at the base of Mount Fuji. The caverns found in this forest are rocky and ice-covered, even during summertime. It is an old forest haunted by many legends of monsters, ghosts, and goblins, which add to its sinister reputation.

Creative Commons is being sued!

If you're not a geek, here's some background:

By default, anything anyone writes is copyrighted with All Rights Reserved to the author. If it weren't for alternative licenses that let authors release some rights back to the public, Wikipedia would be completely impossible (so would Linux).

This sounds boring, but Creative Commons is actually tremendously important because it writes and produces these licenses. Wikipedia predates Creative Commons and doesn't use its licenses. It uses the GFD License instead, which was originally intended for software documentation and is craptastic in several ways but impossible to get rid of at this point.

Alright, the geeks can start reading again.

Update, 2007-10-9: The rest of this post is a bit of a stretch -- which is to say, I've changed my mind about the conclusion. It's preserved below, but just for history.

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You might have heard part of this story already, but to recap:

1. Virgin Australia found an an ordinary, charming snapshot on Flickr. The photo used a creative commons license that allowed commercial use.

2. Virgin cropped and colored that photo into a kind-of-insulting, borderline-racist cell phone advertisement.

3. Without ever contacting the 15-year-old girl in the snapshot, Virgin put the ad up on billboards across Australia.

4. ProfitGet sued!

Which is all well and good. But now the girl's family is suing Creative Commons, too, for "not adequately informing" people what "license this photo for commecrial use" means.

Aside from the sheer communitarian spirit involved in suing a cash-strapped nonprofit organization that has taken unparalleled pains to make legal language useful and comprehensible to ordinary people, there's also some small possibility that a negative ruling could affect Wikipedia—and, really, anyone else who's trying to fix our grungy copyright system by making an end-run around it.

So thank you, Virgin, for being such complete jackasses that you've possibly (though this is still unlikely) set back an entire global collaborative intellectual movement.

Nono, really—thank you. From all of us.

The Silver Arrow is a ghost train that (according to an urban legend) haunts the Stockholm Metro.

The Bloody Benders were a family of serial killers who owned a small general store and inn in Labette County, Kansas from 1872 to 1873.

The 8 Most Needlessly Detailed Wikipedia Entries. Like most of the new stuff at Cracked magazine, this is pretty funny.

(Of course, being funny doesn't make it literally true. As usual, the comments sections are buzzing with people pissed off about articles being deleted.)

So how many continents are there, again?

The 7-continent model is usually taught in most English-speaking countries, China, and most of Europe. The 6-continent combined-Eurasia model is preferred by the geographic community, Russia, Eastern Europe, and Japan. The 6-continent combined-America model is taught in Latin America, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, Iran, Greece and some other parts of Europe.

Dancing mania is a phenomenon that occurred primarily in mainland Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries, in which groups of people would dance through the streets of towns or cities, sometimes foaming at the mouth or speaking in tongues, until they collapsed from exhaustion.

Bumblebee myths

Thais use two systems for telling the time: the 24-hour clock and the traditional Thai six hour clock.

Hey, cool. I just found out that my city has a pretty active community wiki.

Sleepwalking murder

On September 17th, Jimmy Wales starts an article about a famous restaurant.

2 hours later, somebody tags the article -- not for deletion, but for speedy deletion, calling it spam.

The next revision removed the tag, and the current article looks good, but jesus. Speedy deletion is the quick guillotine intended for articles on which there can be no debate, articles that are unambiguously junk. If this is the type of treatment Jimmy Wales gets...

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Addendum: it's healthy for wales not to be treated like a monarch. But he does get cut more slack than regular users.
Addendum 2: It looks like the story's more complex. Geoffrey Burling has the details.

List of incidents famously considered great blunders

Wanted poster for john wilkes booth