You are looking at posts that were written in the month of July in the year 2005.
Posted on July 27th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: indescribable.
There are some stories that are just too silly to take
seriously. You often run across them in the news and in popular
books. And yet they are not jokes; standard news outlets and
publishers — if not the best, at
least internationally-known names — publish them and stand by
them. The canonical story format is: vague allegations, alarming
hyperbole, unsourced quotes, and unlikely statements presented without comment as fact.
Sometimes the subject is political, sometimes corporate, sometimes
“When chickadees attack!” human interest. In each case it is fun
to guess why the stories are being propagated.
The question for news reliability is, what does this say about how much
news accuracy or relevance matters to readers? Does anyone really
care to have reliable news? What kinds of guarantees do we have
from even the best articles? Are there particular classes of news
articles that can be as random and fictitious as you like without
damaging the societal web? Are there other types of news which
should be handled by only extremely reliable organizations?
A tip o’ the keys to Saadi for the pointer to this recent beauty:
Posted on July 24th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.
Feeling mopey about speaking too few languages? Want to get a kick out of seeing translations of your favorite articles side-by-side, while feeling useful at the same time?
The Interwiki Link Checker is here to help. You can choose which pair of languages to browse, and be shown a stream of articles in different language Wikipedias with the same title. You then are asked to say whether they are the same article (this will create an interwiki link between them) or not. (Expert tip: you don’t need to be well versed in either language to do this; you can always select “I don’t know” if the similarity isn’t clear)
Posted on July 21st, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.
The programme for the first annual Wikimania conference is almost finished! You can see the draft
of it online; there are still a handful of late additions to fit in,
and moderators to be finalized for two panels. Let me know what you
think… O’Reilly had the misfortune of conflicting with our dates, so you can see that we snagged all the coolest people.
You can still register online for only 20 Euros a day, or 50 Euros for
the weekend; and if you get in touch with me fast (i.e., by this
weekend), you may be able to snag a room at the Haus der Jugend where
the conference is being held before it’s booked.
For more info on where to stay in Frankfurt, see the location page on the site. Reserve your rooms now, before the nearby places are all booked!
Posted on July 19th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory.
If “Cellar door” is the most beautiful combination of two words in the world, “Lahar” has to be among the most beautiful solo.
Posted on July 17th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: poetic justice.
Posted on July 15th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: fly-by-wire.
Address: Elizabethtown, NY 12932
Campground Phone: (518)942-5292
It’s no Heart Lake, but it’s moughty fine all the same. Update:
Light, cascading showers! Porters who smoke packs while running
up and down the mountain, as found about Kili, were nowhere in
sight. Great fun was had by all.
Posted on July 14th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: poetic justice.
News from the wiki: a lovely idea for Wikipedians to offer and send gifts to one another in exchange for serious research is taking on steam.
In other news, Wikipedia and Google are showing up together in newsfeeds again.
Posted on July 14th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.
You have to love a country where you can have cheerfully-mindless-yet-vicious government satire at whitehouse.org, and pornography (well, not anymore!) at whitehouse.com. Now if only journalists would stop producing content that is similarly mindless and easily confused with pulp…
The best concise articles on the Plame affair, despite recent coverage, remain ones written back in 2003 (like this slightly anti-administration
Newsweek piece).
You would think some busybody would have improved on them by now. If
you know of another good overview article, particularly a pro-administration one for good measure, please
leave a link to it.
At least we now have a fairly encyclopedic overview of the case vis-a-vis Rove, and a decent timeline.
But the real story isn’t about Rove or alleged illegality, it’s about
why multiple people in the government (and outside of the
administration) decided this was an acceptable result. Not sexy,
hard to research — don’t hold your breath for detailed coverage this decade. Just snag a copy of Pravin’s 2017 “Global Politics in Turn-of-the-Century America” when it comes out.
Posted on July 14th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.
More than you ever wanted to know about Tooth enamel and Doom. Also, the love-struck story of Layla, Melbourne’s most encyclopedic gramamar school (Caulfield), and a brief flyover of Hong Kong.
Posted on July 13th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.
In this case, the real story of LANL — the Los Angeles National Laboratory. Documented via blog; you’ll love it. Waiting for the “List of works subtitled ‘the Real Story‘” article to complement the fine start at List of books with the subtitle ‘Virtue Rewarded’.