Avram's journal

Wikipedia’s been in the news a bit recently. John Seigenthaler, former administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy, discovered recently that a prankster had posted a biography of him to Wikipedia, claiming that he‘d been thought to have been involved in the assassinations of the two Kennedy brothers. Painful, but there are assholes all over, and at least he was able to get the offending material changed; try doing that with dead trees. (It took the NY Times 18 months to apologize for falsely accusing Wen Ho Lee of espionage, and all those papers are still out there accusing him in libraries all over the world.)

Some jackass is trying to gin up a class action suit. he claims that it took Seigenthaler “more than four months anguish and hard work” to get his Wikipedia entry changed — clear bullshit, since all Seigenthaler needed to do was log in and change it himself. This is probably a mis-reading of the line from Seigenthaler’s article, in which he says that the false information stood for four months; that’s probably the span between when it was posted and when he saw it.

And that’s about typical of the quality lawsuit site’s arguments. Here, check out the news articles they link to. Right now there’s four of them, all articles on Baou.com. One covers a spat over linking to QuakeAID, an earthquake relief organization, but it doesn’t bother explaining the arguments behind the spat, or that QuakeAID is owned by the Baou Trust. Another goes on about Nazi salutes and socialism and the holocaust (or “Wholecaust”) and holy crap, it’s like an autism sufferer ate a few Ayn Rand books and threw up into the keyboard.

Piling on is Andrew Orlowski, who must have gotten tired of attacking Google. Notice the name Daniel Brandt in in Orlowski’s article, described as a “researcher” and “prominent critic” of Wikipedia? That name sounded familiar, and so I googled around, and it turns out Brandt was the guy behind the anti-Google site Google-Watch, who got upset that Google gave his business site, NameBase, a big link farm, a lower rank than he thought it deserved.

Bruce Sterling, in Viridian Note #450: Rude Calamity:

How the ironies multiply. We've got historically high oil prices at the moment that America's most storm-vulnerable large city takes a direct hit from a Category 5. Katrina's core is the equivalent of a thirty-mile wide F2 tornado. It's heading with devilish precision for a large, fragile, moldering city that's mostly situated below sea level. I'm sitting here watching Singaporian hotel TV, which includes CNN, BBC, a Portuguese channel, a Spanish channel, a French channel, a German channel, a whole crowd of wacky, nondenominational Chinese channels, Bollywood dance videos, Channel News Asia, Discovery channel, and a lot of sports. Austria flooded this season. Portugal is on fire. The fires that were ravaging Indonesia and choking Malaysia are in abeyance for the moment, which allows me to breathe relatively freely here in Singapore. My hotel TV just showed me a flood-drenched building, unfit for habitation, collapsing onto its inhabitants in Bombay. And now Katrina. Wow, eh? Welcome to life on the Greenhouse Planet. Someday, this is gonna be all that people talk about.

And while I’m on the subject of the Viridian Notes, you’ve got to read Note #404: Car Ergonomics, a Car and Driver review of the Nissan Quest’s dashboard ergonomics that starts out by quoting from Apocalypse Now. It’s the best car-dashboard-ergonomics review I’ve ever read. It’s the Citizen Kane of car-dashboard-ergonomics reviews.

I’m currently almost done with Sterling’s recent non-fiction book, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next 50 Years. Most of it’s not really anything you couldn’t pick up yourself by reading the right blogs, but the chapter on warfare — three multi-page biographies of Eastern European or Middle-Eastern terrorist warlords, including a description of the nightmarish fighting in Grozny during the Chechen Wars — is gripping, far and away the best part of the book. (Wikipedia tells me that grozny means “terrible” in Russian.)

Just before this I read Sterling’s latest fiction book, The Zenith Angle, which finally came out in paperback. I enjoyed it — I realized ten pages into it that I’d had more fun in ten pages of Bruce Sterling than I’d had in a hundred pages of the latest Harry Potter book — it’s got the traditional Bruce Sterling virtues, the wide-ranging array of current-events bits and pieces all bouncing off each other in witty ways, but it’s not quite up there with Zeitgeist, my favorite of his books.

“Pope Loses Battle With Peace-Symbol Dove”
“Gowan, geddadaheah, ya symbols of peace ya!”
(AP photos, so check ’em out before they go away.)

“I Ate iPod Shuffle”
A poem. Contains much more humor than you’d think was inherent in the premise.

“Williamsburg Doesn’t Need a Space Elevator”
Sez you!

Goldfish Racetrack
Yes, it’s a racetrack for goldfish. Place yer bets!

The Ad Graveyard
Advertisements that never got made. The first dozen or so are really funny, then it drops off.

pshift — The Unix paradigm shift utility
“Normally pshift operates silently; in verbose mode it publishes a 500+ page bestseller entitled ‘Rethinking [input stream] in the [zeitgeist] Age’, and then begins soliciting honoraria until the operator types ctrl-c. On some systems it runs for Congress.”

Unusual Wikipedia articles
Did you know that the Wikipedia has entries on an evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet, or the anime concept of hammerspace, or on a boy named Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116 (pronounced “Alvin”), or a timeline of unfulfilled Christian prophecy, or about the classical Chinese poem “Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den” which consists of the word “shi” repeated 92 times with varying tones, or Gene Ray’s Time Cube theory?