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Posted on June 13th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized, wikipedia.
I was at the wedding of my dear friend Erik Cohen-Levy two weeks ago, in Texas – quite a lovely and relaxing celebration. And was bitten by something unpleasant which over time made me quite ill. It took a while and some divergent opinions to get a blood test… I should know more Monday about what it is. But it’s nice in a way to know I don’t have the flu.
So I’ve been exercising, hydrating like I had a concert every night, and feeling inexplicably nostalgic. And as I’ve been too tired to move around much, I had time to get to a piece of sleuthing I’ve been meaning to do for a while : to track down who popularized the term ‘disambiguation‘, which Wikipedia has now made a household word ! The nostalgia wiki was helpful, and I’ve turned up some interesting leads, which I will share in another post. But if you have information on the topic, please share.
Posted on June 5th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.
Posted on June 4th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.
Let me amplify a bit the aside in my last post, because it is important. To pull back from the week[end] for a moment, there are many universal elements to modern human culture which we take for granted, and even sometimes rail against, but rarely appreciate as one-time innovations. Roughly in order of adoption:
apprenticeship, language, engineering, drawing, storytelling, astronomy, religion, music & art, holidays, government, law, agriculture, geometry, biology, architecture, education, currency, written language, geography, calendars, numerals, abstract mathematics, books, history, universities.
Many of these innovations have given rise to entire fields of study, so much so that I can more readily name the field than its founding innovation. The ordering is just a guess in many cases, and of course the timeline varies by culture even after distinct societies meet. I included some very specific innovations which seem so natural today that it is easy to forget how recently they were adopted by our civilization.
Privately, holidays and later calendars help to organize regular reflection and pause. They improve the mindfulness of individual life, amplifying the impact of new discoveries and the capacity to change individual habits. But the distributed effect of sharing this practice with others are more profound.
(more…)
Posted on June 4th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.
I’ve started helping out with wikizine again, and am working to make OLPC updates come out on a weekly basis as well. The invention of the week was a great human innovation, and we would all do well to honor it more.
(Aside: Honoring the Sabbath is something much more deeply meaningful than simple adherence to faith; it was an early step in global collaboration and division of labor, an arena in which we still have a few magnitudes of synchrony and productivity to eke out.)
Give wikizine a whirl, add your own news if you have any, browse the archives (soon to be on Meta as well), and help with translations if you can, particularly into/out of Spanish.
Posted on May 29th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.
Pfanne comments about the new Pixel Qi screen:
this completes the things that i want to have in my dreamnotebook…
40/45nm amd gpu/processor (with enough juice fur starcraft2+diablo3)
pixel qi display
gallium3d based driver
direct3d statetracker
6h+ batterylife
14inch screen
i’d give an arm for a computer with these specs…
more likely a leg, using a computer with only one arm is shit.
Now who’s pulling whose leg? Congrats to Mary Lou and team on approaching their first release; it looks simply beautiful.
Posted on May 28th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized, wikipedia.
…and should leave their source files publicly available. Because most logos need work, and you never know who’s going to improve on yours for their own reasons. (Of course you should still trademark them.)
Bjorn S. reflects on designing the first Wikipedia logo (designed for Nupedia but never used on that project), and describes how it led to today’s silver ball… and how he didn’t know about any of this until a week ago.
Posted on May 27th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized, chain-gang, international, wikipedia.
The GFDL 1.3 allows collaborative sites to switch from the GFDL to CC-BY-SA 3.0 as their license, under limited circumstances.
Wikimedia has been advocating for this change for some time, and with much effort from the FSF and Creative Commons a solution was worked out last November: such a transition would be available only for massively collaborative projects, and only for a limited time. If a project opted for this transition, it could not incorporate any new GFDL material after the release date of the new license (November 3, 2008); and it had to decide by August 1, 2009.
Given the first date, one would assume a site would want to move as quickly as possible to decide, to avoid a prolonged period when no outside material under most any free license could be incorporated. Nevertheless, it took us over 6 months to decide to make the transition. Now we are faced with two hurdles: ensuring that no GFDL material has been migrated into a Wikimedia project since November, and far more complex, communicating with the hundreds of smaller GFDL wikis who chose their license for compatibility with Wikipedia, to ensure they know about this change and what it means for them. They only have until the first of August to figure it out.
So I’ve started compiling a list of GFDL wikis and other collaborative sites that have not yet indicated any awareness about the license switch or considered switching themselves. This includes at least half of the 20 largest GFDL wikis other than Wikipedia, both major medical wikis (Medpedia and WikiDoc), PlanetMath, and the old Spanish Wikipedia fork. Please help contact these sites and update their status on this project page: [[m:Licensing update/Outreach]]
Posted on May 17th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Too weird for fiction, Uncategorized, indescribable, wikipedia.
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.
Posted on May 8th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.
The wraps are coming off of Wolfram Alpha, and even in infancy it is poetry to my left angular gyrus. A recent review compares it with Google. Many rightly note that the two aren’t really tackling the same problem. The interesting points to note in the review are those hits where the questioner is flooded with detailed data that, among other things, advises him about what dimensions of reliable detail exist.
On one hand, Google’s original mission, to provide information effectively to the world, does encompass this… but then it encompasses many things they do not yet pursue. They have avoided projects that trying to directly answer difficult questions, or to provide more than an algorithmic gloss of public approval on top of public link- and word-association. Google Answers, which I would have expected to stay around forever even at a loss for its direct contribution to the mission, was shelved years ago. Brief forays into public data portals for gov docs in the US and educational materials remain tentative.
So deep access to public data has been better provided by individuals such as Carl M. and by university research projects than by Google. Of their recent initiatives, only their book and catalog scanning projects have really been successful at making public data more available.
On the other hand, the goal of search engines has always been basic search. The field, and its developers and system-gamers, have been working with a limited, transient concept of what it means to capture the desire for knowledge and provide related resources.
Posted on May 7th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, Uncategorized.
Simply brilliant. The world needs more media like this. And more of those fat sign-anything markers.
Posted on May 4th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.
Reading through the Torture Memos, I found one useful tidbit : an improved lower bound on how long one can last under stress without sleep.
During a particularly busy week in college, I once spent 4+ days without sleep (just over 100 hours), and remember the world had a certain quivering texture, and that I heard occasional faint singing in the background, the last day. I wasn’t exhausted when I had dinner and went to sleep at last, but certainly slept soundly for the next dozen or so hours. So I’ve often wondered what the accepted limits on healthy sleeplessness are.
Well, now I know with a bit more detail : those human health heroes who also advise no more than 4 hours of waterboarding sessions and 24 minutes of simulated drowning in a 24-hour period (else you might start to inflict permanent physical or mental harm) say : no more than 7.5 days (180 hrs) without sleep before resting for a full 8 hours. If any of you manage longer than that, let me know…
Posted on April 25th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.
Clay Shirky takes a step back.
“In 1987, a a teenage girl in suburban New York was discovered dazed and wrapped in a garbage bag…”
Posted on April 24th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.
What do you get when you cross Japanese cuisine, never a hotbed of sweetness, with mounds of pure, refined sugar? To make any headway on the Japanese table would probably require a foodstuff so addictively sweet it would eat its own head.
Indeed, rule 51 holds true: if you can think of it, there is a cult ja following making videos about it. Moral : buy stock in ritalin and anti-diabetics.
Posted on April 19th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.
I like Hugh Jackman. I’m certain he is good with kids. He doubtless helps old ladies and boyscouts alike cross the street. Which is why even with his stage skills and the benefits of strenuous exercise and makeup, he’s no Wolverine. #23 on the list of Things Wolverine Would Never Say:
“The FBI are on to it and they’re taking it very, very seriously.“
Posted on April 8th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.
Sometimes people are wrong today. More often they are wrong tomorrow.
Posted on March 19th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.
That the commenter with 22 exclamation marks per paragraph is the highly prolific xword puzzle writer featured here. I suppose I mean I would never guess. And it’s not guessing now that I know.
I should put in a plug for Joon’s crosswording feats : congratulations, my friend.
Posted on March 19th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.
A friend of mine had a stroke last night, and tried to sleep it off before heading to the hospital in the morning. It is hard to know how to deal with sudden changes out of the blue, especially when they are to something as fundamental to your sense of self as your body or mind… I’m not sure how to think about such things, or how to prepare for them.