Why Wikipedia Wins

I've noticed all sorts of articles, blogs, radio and TV shows etc, using Wikipedia as a source especially in the last year. Often times it's used with tongue slightly in-cheek -- ie. can you believe this? -- but the trend is only going to become more pronounced. Why? As long as an article idea doesn't instantly offend other contributers either because of spam/commercial concerns, obscurity or axe-grinding you can create it. Thus any reporter looking for information on any subject may end up there first since "Google is just a frontend to Wikipedia".

If you've written something remotely interesting it will be adopted by other editors, expanded and made into great little bundles of knowledge. I can't begin to list the number of articles that I've started with just the notion that "there should be an article about this" and created a short stub and look back a year or three later to see a great entry. It's like magic.

Of course, you can't get out of responsibility entirely, you have to check your watchlists to fix vandalism and creeping idiocracy. But we're definitely creating the Hitchhiker's Guide to Life, the Universe and Everything. You'll get frustrated over certain aspects: perhaps the clutter (and nagging) of "needs citation" or some religious war of formatting or a nuance of phrasing but in general these arguments are settled in a reasonable manner.

In all of human history, there has never been a better source for fun learning! (It's my blog so I don't have to cite a source! Hah!)

I haven't blogged for a while so here's a diary entry:

On Highland Ave just west of Elizabeth where everything's getting built on the north side, they had carefully scrubbed down the facade of the old Grinnell Sprinkler building (they waterproofed many buildings back in the day but not the Winecoff!) but this morning when I drove by the whole thing was being torn down. Oh well, at the least the building next door is being saved for a restaurant.

For lunch we tried a new place (for us), Papi's Eastern Cuban at Myrtle and Ponce. Their pork special was awesome, more like street food than Las Palmeros on 5th. Not sure if that's an east-west thing :)

Tonight, scheduled to meet the wife downtown so I walked to the train station. Noticed all the fences had been taken down along those goofy Inman Station condos: the brick columns are still there but all metal and wood fences are gone. No game at Philips but there was still a decent crowd at CNN Center. Noticed Rimini's Pizza finally closed, that's about the only truly wretched pizza I've ever had... gahhh. McCormick & Schmick's had a good crowd going.

Walked over to Centennial Tower (their accent lights at the top are looking fine), to check out the media opening for Thrive on the first floor. It was a nice space but severely packed. It will be interesting to see how they do in the future but they have a good staff to start. We wanted something more substantial for dinner and headed over to sidebar a place I've really missed since leaving downtown for midtown. I'll have to make point of getting down there more often. Good crowd there too.... and.... and the spot on the corner (formerly Icon, formerly (crap I can't remember)) is a new location of Slice from Castleberry. They didn't change the decor at all from Icon and it had a better crowd than the previous occupants usually got. Bravo! For some reason, I seem to remember there was supposed to be a new Slice over off Edgewood, but I cannot find no corroboration. Signing off. Peace, baby

How 'bout the Tidy Bowl?

At least that would be funny! I was looking over the list of NCAA bowl games for this year and it's nice to see familiar names like Sugar, Rose and Orange but man the sponsorship names are getting lame!

The Papajohns.com Bowl... ah, catchy. How about GMAC Bowl? Gheh. The MPC Computer Bowl has the double-whammy of sounding stupid and being tech-related.


But my pick for stupidest sounding name is
http://www.meinekecarcarebowl.com/
in beautiful Charlotte, North Carolina. Geez

Take the A Train

This cool website lets you put together a list of all the various mass transit systems you've ridden on. I'm ticked now that I didn't make a point of riding in every city I've visited. I kind of made up for it in cities that have two different systems.... seems you always have to transfer when there's two :)






Do yours at b3co.com

Thanks for the link, Joe!

A Real Butcher
I think they finally went out of business but last year I was able to get an old 1910s-era Corona typewriter repaired in Decatur and they did a fantastic job. It was awesome that I caught them in time, but I wonder about a bunch of older-fashioned-type businesses that have been hurting the last 30 years or so. Lately with a new grill I've been severely dissatisfied with grocery meat: Whole Foods, Publix and Kroger are all hit or miss. So, I returned to an old Decatur Square stalwart that had to move to Emory Village a few years back: Shields. You pick your cut, you pick the thickness, you pick the size of some delicious aged beef plus they make their own sausages and meatloafs. Yeah, it's about 40% more expensive but damn good and, while it's four miles away, it's probably the only real butcher within 30 miles of the house.

Suburbia Extinctia?
An article by Seth Brown from two years ago had some interesting points about the high-tech industry, outsourcing and suburbia. He posits that places like Tyson's Corner and Alpharetta could quickly become Flint, Michigan. I.E. places where there's nothing to do since what was there happened to leave. I hear from people hiring in places like that who can't find folks who want to deal with the drive and avoid the gig -- no matter how cool it might be.

To me this doesn't seem to be related to the death of suburbia but what do I know?

ROBOTS!!!

I've been trying to unload paper magazines for about 15 years now and some of the most beautiful artifacts I've had to part with are those old Omni mags from the 1980s. They did fiction (Gibson, Stirling, etc) and science tidbits and interviews with scientists and various other thinkers. In March 1985 was an interview with Edward de Bono who had an provacative suggestion: that "workers and unions, instead of retreating before robots, should take the initiative and get to own the robots, then lease them to the factory. I suggest a trinity concept betweeen finance companies, management and suppliers of labor or robots." Now this is a very bold idea which obviously never took hold: abstract the physical action applied to mass-produced sequences. But De Bono had another idea that can now be found in many a "wish it had happened thus" text, including for example Cradle to Cradle, where a factory's inputs should be downstream of its outputs and that lends to the notion that it doesn't pollute its own water and, by extension, anyone's water.

Caught a lecture tonight from Mayflower author, Nathaniel Philbrick at the Carter Center in the hopes of not needing to buy the book but frankly I was inthralled. The period from 1620 to 1675 was almost idyllic, sure plenty of intrigue but not much civ-threatening violence. Then all hell breaks loose with King Philip's War. The losses were stupendous! Of 70,000 total people in New England they lose a higher percentage than were lost in the American Civil War. The English settlers were more than "decimated", most villages burnt, and survived by the luck of Benjamin Church who had been living happily with the Indians in today's Rhode Island. Fascinating stuff and like Philbrick said, I didn't know much between "The First Thanksgiving" and 1776. So, anyways, I guess I'll have to get the book!

I don't get to look at blogs much anymore: funny how having everything blocked at the work desktop can change things :) So I happen to check Boing Boing today for the first time in months and what's at the top but a strange story about a back yard in Grant Park!


http://www.boingboing.net/2006/06/05/the_demon_fish_of_so.html

Not sure what this means for the future, but hopefully it's not one of my old houses!