“I never need porn again, as I can just watch that video over and over and over” – Mattchew, from the comments

The Longest Now crystal ball says Matt will need something else to watch soon, once such designs become bog-standard.  And we won’t be calling them ‘touchscreens’ soon… because why would you use a non-responsive display?

Book 1,  Book 2

A bit of background.  The word disambiguation was not popular before the 50s.  It is used in quotes in a 1954 federal court case, expressly referencing the earlier work of the one philosopher and author who consciously used it for a specific purpose: Jeremy Bentham.  But who introduced it into the jargon of linguistics?  And to the original point, who introduced it to Wikipedia?

The word’s recent history touches on Rush, Nirvana, Invictus, Larry, and Magnus… and started with a page on Naming conventions/Disambiguating.  Details after the jump.

The dominance of today’s Internet makes the latter question easier in ways and harder in others.  We can track revisions of most Wikipedia pages, but the use of this term predates the creation of the new software to preserve all revisions,  in August 2001 — so some guesswork is required even there.   Certainly the Wikipedia usage was guided by the linguistic usage before it:  “word sense disambiguation” and disambiguation in semantic analysis were all the rage across linguistics in the 1990s, as the term had moved out of computational linguistics into the field’s mainstream.

Early uses of the term in the 50s are in the context of ‘disambiguation programs’ and ‘automatic word disambiguation’.   Then by 1960 comes Dwight Bolinger, using it boldly and provatively.  “understanding presupposes disambiguation.  Disambiguation presupposes the processes that make it possible”.    This was picked up by literary critics in France, and by other linguists such as Anthony oettinger writing about automatic translation.

Sometime around March 20, 2001, the issue of disambiguating Wikipedia articles comes up.  User:Invictus (NB: no userpages back then) creates the article [[RushBand]], following the earlier model of [[NirvanaBand]].   And who should respond with a philosophical note on the right way to disambiguate than Larry Sanger, starting the page Naming_conventions/Disambiguating .    Within eight months, Magnus Manske has written new code allowing the use of parentheses in article titles, and the use of the term ‘disambiguation’ to describe appending a parenthetical clarifier at the end of an article name, and pages listing similar titles, has taken off.

I have to say, I do like it better than the alternative name suggested for those lists : ‘jump pages’.  So a tip of the dab-hat to Larry, may this be only one of your lasting contributions to encyclopediana.

For following along with me for so long, here’s a special bonus : the original quotation from Bentham’s papers laying out the place of Disambiguation in the heirarchy of Exposition.  This is from George Bentham’s 1827 Outline of a New System of Logic, in which he reviews his uncle’s papers and a recent set of writings on logic by one Dr. Whately.

He diagrams the elder Bentham’s 12 modes of exposition (physical designation, translation, etymologization, definition, individuation, paraphrasis, archetypation, description, parallelism including antithesis, enumeration, exemplification, and illustration), and says:

If exposition be considered with respect to its immediate object, it may be divided into Onomatopoea, or the giving a new name to an idea, and into Exposition of existing words.

In following the same principle of division, exposition of existing words may be subdivided into the following operations:  —
1. Substitution of a new sense to the one in which a word has already been used, an operation resembling onomatopoea, but attended with much more practical inconvenience, excepting where the use of the word in its old sense be at once disadvantageous, and of rare occurrence.
2. Elucidation—where the object is to give clearness to an obscure term.
3. Disambiguation—where it is to fix the sense of an ambiguous term. This operation has been termed distinction by some Logicians, and erroneously reckoned as a species of division.
4. Ampliation—where it is to extend the sense of a term.
5. Restriction—where it is to restrict the sense of a term.

Extra special nostalgia bonus: note the link-preserving awesomeness buried in the first post to wikipedia-l : that link still works, through a dozen TLD, domain, software and naming changes.

Faves: March is a state of mind …

For those of you who missed it the first time around in early 2004, before I knew how wikipedia works or even that it was community owned and run.  Here it is again: On Multilingual Encyclopedia and Dictionary (public domain).

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.

From the coast:

How Texans prepare for the London olympics.

• a 100M activity containing most of the Spanish Wikipedia, with illustrations, math fontification, and templates

• scripts that support generating a new version from the latest articles, from heuristics defining the most popular titles, with only a few hours of work

There is also a short blacklist of pages and images that need improvement which will change over time.  A whitelist of unpopular but crucial pages will surely build up, and the process will find a way to learn from the subject-specific wikireader efforts to produce smaller uncompressed collections.  The same idea and scripts can provide a roughly Britannica-sized collection for every major language; or a multilingual cover of the 200 smallest languages; expect an English one soon for comparison.
While this reader (which has to unzip each page as it is requested) is slower than browsing html, it is still a pleasure to use. The real lack, shared with other readers to date, is that comments and editing don’t yet work…

Some of the country representatives will be in town for the rest of the week, for a project and learning workshop; stay tuned for points of interest for the community that come up. I am particularly looking forward to finalizing details of the educational blog project underway in Uruguay, with help from Greg Smith and Tarun Pondicherry, and the WebJournal project that Robson Mendonca will be working on this summer in Brazil with Juliano Bittencourt.

If you have projects you’d like to see pursued more actively, or data you would like to see from countries and schools, leave a comment here…

Topics will include storytelling itself, storyboarding of great ideas, how to run a storyboarding session with children, thoughts on interviews by and of children, how to learn to interview others, capturing personal stories for the OurStories project, and code and designwork needed to improve the above.

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…

BD : Being a professional engineer, a nuclear scientist, and an agnostic until age 40 when I “for fun” did the research to realize that the God of the Bible is real…I realize this: “A little science estranges a man from God. A lot of science brings him back.” You don’t need to leave your brain behind to appreciate the Bible – in fact, unless you challenge the conventional wisdom of sound-byte “scientists” you probably never will.

jtm: I doubt any rational scientist would believe the earth is 6000 years old(bible) and evolution is false[Huckabee ]. The Scientific community is whole heartedly supportive of evolution. I’m a Biology major and we study evidence for evolution on the chromosomal level. On the bible if you want to defend it you have an extremely difficult job ahead of you.

BD: jtm04d, mutation & natural selection are real – evolution is contrary to the 2nd law of thermodynamics. On the chromosomal level you witness rearrangements, not new more highly ordered structure. Evolution implies an increase in order. The 6000 years is the date when Adam was created, not the earth. You might read “the Science of God” by Gerald Schroeder (not a Christian) which is a plausible reconciliation of a 15 billion year universe, the 6000 years + 7 days of creation. Seek & guess what..

jtm: Buck I think your a smart guy, much smarter than the creationists I usually debate on my campus. But the fossil record does not agree with your 6000 year old Adam theory. In fact the record points to Homo Sapiens being around 250,000 years. And I know you think homophobia, misogyny, racism, genocide and totalitarianism are wrong too, but the bible contradicts you on all those points. I’m just saying its time we educated people reevaluate Bronze Age texts.

jtm: oh and my chromosomal evidence has nothing to do with rearrangements during Meiosis or even the similarities between primate DNA and human DNA(though they are relevant), I could give you a link to a lecture on that if ur interested, oh and add slavery to the list of immoralities the bible approves of

BD: jtm, I must sign off for several days, but… a debate is just a competition, & no debate will lead you to truth. An open mind, enough open books, and a humble heart might. My experience is, that until the Lord created a spirit of life in me, I had no idea I had been dead. And I still don’t know why He did it – an arrogant SOB like me didn’t/doesn’t deserve such grace. But He’s the King, & He does what He will. Thank God! Good night, jtm. Buck.

jtm: You’re right about debates, and I respect your belief and your experience. But its time our society had an honest debate about the bible and religion and its effects. I personally turned from religion when a friend of mine was murdered by someone on a divine mission in Iraq. I’m not saying that all theists are terrorists, but it made look at my beliefs outside the box.

BD: I’m sorry. That misguided fanatic may represent the face of religion, but not God. Don’t let him kill you along with your friend. Your mind and your heart testify that the Creator is not some atavistic being which we in our current highly-evolved state can now judge. At best, we may be better positioned to understand Him than our fathers could thousands of years ago. At least from a scientific & historical knowledge perspective – I’m not sure our hearts have evolved much at all. G’night for real

jtm: Buck, I can honestly say you give the strongest argument for theism than I’ve heard from any of my professors or scholars

jtm: PS: entropy does not refute evolution, don’t you think the scientific community recognizes that? or do you think that I and the scientists are part of an “evil conspiracy” to “Satanize” the world. As for your argument of irreducible complexity, thats been refuted too, nice try though. (I may seem condescending, i don’t think theists are stupid, they’re just wrong[)]

A few things here aside from the obvious. 1) it would be neat to have spanshots of life on earth 6000 years ago, for all sorts of reasons. 2) jtm forgets in the end he’s talking to a scientist. 3) I’m waiting for an excuse to nest that thing with the brackets one level deeper.

It’s funny to think that none of my hometowns have something similarly simple and to the point. Perhaps they do, and I just don’t know about it?.Perhaps this is easier to do comprehensively, with a passion, for a small town. Of course I would settle with this sort of history for any of the blocks or neighborhoods I’ve lived in, but they tend not to have the same cohesive history as a town fending for itself against the vagaries of war and time.

At any rate, enjoy. I particularly like the photos of Hluboka and of this building — with what seems to be yellow steel sculpted girders on the outside. I wonder : are they structural?

Off to Berlin in a few days for the Sea of Chaos. I’ll try to document the trip properly.

Now who is using it ? where are the transclusions for mediawiki instances?   I can’t wait to see the beta site develop.

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.