The Longest Now

I can’t get over this amazing geographic feature of Quebec. The central km-high peak is now way up on my list of mountains to climb.

Every Saturday people meet up at MIT to figure out how to help the relief process in Haiti.

Video: “What I did at CrisisCamp”

For the record : I’ve found online a full set of photos of my favorite angelic work from the ^//. century – a masterfully illustrated treeware ‘pedia from a parallel dimension.  Now that I own a copy I should take proper photos, however…

Book 1,  Book 2

It has been claimed that twitterpedia will one day replace Wikipedia, at the point where everyone needs no more than a tweet about any given topic.

FT2 astutely comments:

the predictable twitterpedia sequel follows:
– user#217869: pov warring!!
– @83476238 not so!
– @217869 is so!!
– @83476238 not so!
– @both: u blocked 24 hrs 3rr
– @admin plz no?
– @217869 o ok
– @admin kthxbai
– @83476238 u block I not u suxxor pov war!!!
– @admin u involved,, @arbcom plzdesysopkthx?
– @user no wai!!
– ……….

A tip of the hat to all involved for scrying the essential parts of our post-singularity knowledge landscape.

…because he doesn’t mind when the chips are down, and can be mighty funny.

Bonus: When Photo Credits Go Bad :

Seen on the latimes blog : “Photo credit: Somebody who’s dead“. Why is it so hard to get these things right?  Isn’t this what photo archivists are for?

I hope you’ve all seen this by now.  Thank goodness for perpetually-compounded world-saving.

Ike hit Texas hard this morning, straight over central Galveston.  They say 3m will be out of power for two weeks… including our house in Houston.

UPDATE:  Our street was lucky.  Our house is good as ever, having no enormous trees nearby.  My mother reports the only noise it made was a loud humming from the gutters at a certain windspeed (I could hear it over the phone!).

UPDATE 2: A house across the street had its roof aerated by falling trees from both adjacent properties, and the ancient oak in the open lot next to us (vacated and cleared after the last big flood) was ripped down.  Flooding wasn’t bad; only 2 ft of water in the street.  The local bayou is far from the main channel, and was a good 3 feet from flowing over when high tide passed at 4pm.  10 blocks away things were worse…  Now everyone just has to make do without power for the next fortnight.

UPDATE 3: Only 1m are still without power; we expect to do without for another week.

And this is why we went into space 40 years ago: an image of Ike from the International Space Station… with a little ‘station finger’ over the lens.  Great buildings such as the Pyramids and the Wall are, despite what they say, hard to see from space.  But massive atmospherics?  You can see those from Saturn.

More below the fold.

(more…)

So says my spam filter.  Headline generation algorithms are getting funnier.  UPDATE: Here’s the original spoof email on which the spam was based – in which young Meeme dies in [an] in-shower tragedy.

comes… wikipe-tan. enlightening newspapers everywhere.
Noone knows where sugar-tan comes from, but the Raelians like her.

Update : Now It Can Be Told — this winsome creation comes from Winona of the Weecast.

This site‘s for you — orthography, artwork, transcendental essence, and all.

Noting ages to four significant figures is going to be all the rage soon, mark my words.

Auntimame has an interesting XO peripherals site, and while I’d like to see us set up an official cut-rate store, it’s nice to see this getting off the ground. Some of the gear there gives new meaning to the word “awesome”. A green USB-latching XO viewfinder? Yes, please…

Inspired by this spoof of Mankiw and the droll wit of my future Aikido opponent, I am tempted to publish a blog tackling each failed field in turn.  Oh, and there are so many…

Chinese philosophers debated for centuries whether one discovers the nature of the universe by investigating oneself or by investigating the outer world. I don’t have a dog in that fight (I might say both grant equal power of discovery when approached properly), but I do like poring through random selections to get a feel for an expansive whole (yes, I want a Special:Random for the universe).

Sometimes I do that reflexively while thinking, practiving a little Langerfulness. So it was that I found myself tonight seven pages into the discussion threads for the YouTube video “Why Chuck [Norris] endorsed Mike [Huckabee] – Episode One [of Five]“, where I ran across the following exchange between BuckDresser and jtm04d; those of you who know my favorite tests of familiarity with good scientific method may appreciate it… (more…)

The cast behind the lavishly told story of Thamesis — a social and political intrigue set in a world of vivid colors and sound — are more fascinating than the cast within the story itself… they remind me of the early thirteen‘ers, and of Great Big Pants (before I even knew of Worldwide Pants Incorporated).

I can’t get enough. I want the crew responsible for character and clothing design, those responsible for sociology and scientific resarch, and those charged with spicing up the interwoven threads outside the flash but within the site (the brand incubation, the public relations crew, those who loaned outfits and music), in more than living color.

Today I stumbled across a luminescent painting, thanks to the fine taste of a fellow Wikipedian whose writing is so intimate and full of poetry that, despite never having corresponded, I imagine them an acquaintance. It was a portrait of a knitter, entitled Tricoteuse, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. I looked at it a few times, astonished by something about its honesty and quality of light that I could not quite place; and then astonished again by its unexplained orphanage — as it was included in no project pages save two user-space galleries across Wikipedia and her sister projects.

I inspected its central page on Wikimedia Commons to discover this last tidbit via the check usage tab… Commons also had a small descriptive page and gallery about Bouguereau and his works, where I found a second image similarly astonishing and underused. After marvelling on his works for a few long minutes, I realized I had found two extraordinary works in no time at all, and almost nothing of their origins; something was amiss.

It was no surprise to discover that his legacy had been somehow submerged for over half a century. Many compare him with Rembrandt, ignored for far longer and more actively in his own lifetime. Wikipedia had a short biography which alluded to this, and the first artsite I found with a page about him had a rant-like paean at once upholding his fine qualities and denouncing slanders that had kept him from public texts and encyclopedias and hidden his work from entire generations.
I then added his Tricoteuse and portrait of his future wife, Elizabeth Gardner, to the Wikipedia gallery dedicated to his works. Only as I was leaving that gallery did I realize I had seen — and bookmarked — one of his images before: a work of Nymphs and Satyr, again so striking that without remembering the artist’s name I had brought it to mind on a few occasions. And is this delightful piece entitled L’enlèvement de Psyché or Le ravissement de Psyché ? Rapture seems to suit it better.
At any rate, time spent with Bouguereau’s works is time well spent. Enjoy!

I don’t know how he does it, but Zvi has certainly done it again.  He is over at Kiva.org, making their amazing site render faster, load more stably, and run on a lean, mean pile of code.  I can only hope his work will be open sourced one day so that other sites with similar audiences can benefit from a working toolchain for community-centered design and bounty or feedback processing…

I want to start a series of children’s books of the form “Zvi Boshernitzan:Boy Wonder” and “Zvi Boshernitzan:nighttime at the Cancel Corral“.  Think they would sell?

Zvi Boshernitzan:Boy Genius …

Essjay, my eponymous Wikipedian colleague, was renowned for years for many things — his devotion to Wikipedia and meticulous attention to detail, his clear writing and sense of visual style, his ability to stay cool when discussions got hot, his comprehensive knowledge of religious details, and his enticingly half-revealed life history — a gay professor of theology with long academic credentials, who did not want to share his name or location.

Two months ago he joined the ranks of Wikia, and confessed that he was really just a young polymath who had been playing a role he set for himself, very carefully.  In the process, he had fooled most Wikipedians, and even given a telephone interview as his alter ego — the result of which was an excellent essay by Stacy Shiff in the New Yorker.  Everything in the essay remains true, save for the personal details about Essjay — and a new footnote at the end about his actual identity highlights some important elements of the site not explicitly laid out in her original prose.

Since his revelation, however, a growing number of Wikipedians and anti-Wikipedians have been asking him and eachother what to make of all of this. The person who wrote to tell the New Yorker the news was an anti-Wikipedian who had been wondering about his true identity for a long time…  one of the many interesting sidenotes in the aftermath is that almost noone mentions this point.

What distresses me most about the whole affair is: this was an extraordinary opportunity for Wikipedia, and its strongest proponents and most active members, to educate the world in a positive way about how it works.  Wikipedia does not privilege credentials.  Skill in writing?  Yes.  Demonstrable expertise in referencing their work, constructing arguments and presentations, and mediating disputes?  Certainly.  Level-headedness and willingness to consider alternate points of view?  By all means.  But not credentials as such.

So it pains me to see so many people – including people whose wiki work and philosophy I respect – repeating sound bites about Essjay misusing the trust of others, without qualifying every such statement with a similar discussion of the ways in which his actions in every sphere spoke louder than any fabricated identity.  I trusted in the quality and reliability of his work, both written and social, something unmatched in my experience with Wikipedians. I would continue to do so in any circumstance. 

…to be continued.

Wiki-twin falls afoul of fact-finding fisticuffs after fabrication …