Category: Random

Following on from Mr Webb’s experiment, here are the pages on Wikipedia that autocomplete when I type in en.wikipedia.org/wiki into my browser, complete with a brief bit of context:

• Anthropology – It’s a page I keep coming back to for a number of reasons – one because I’ve been looting Wikipedia for public domain pictures recently for a work prototype and because it has to do with Anthropology (sort-of), and also because I’ve always rather regretted not taking Anthropology or Ethology (or one of those courses that studies why humans or animals operate the way they do culturally and biologically) at University;
• Assassin Game – I honestly can’t quite remember why I’ve looked at this page except that I know Danah and most of the other social software Americans talk about it a lot. That’s probably why – along with its similarity to the Mafia game / Warewolf which I totally adore.
• Fern Kinney – Nice easy one this – she sang, ‘Together we are Beautiful’ which I think is a wonderful little song. Anything that includes the line, ‘I am the rain, he is the sun, and now we’ve made a rainbow, and it is beautiful’ works for me. I get older, I like happier songs and happier films and dark apocalyptic books where I can thrill to sado -masochistic political dystopias.
• Homotopy – I know precisely why I’ve got Homotopy in my autocomplete and it’s because I bookmarked it as something to read but kept forgetting to go and look at it. There’s a function in Illustrator that can create periodic steps between two homotopic shapes, should that interest you. It is not called the homotopic plane interstitial creator, but perhaps it should be;
• Image: Heart and Lungs – Simple context – looking for images to represent core concepts for work prototype. More complex context – I absolutely adore the engravings in Gray’s Anatomy. They’re stunning and I take every opportunity to incorporate them into things I’m working on;
• Mao (game) – The Mao Game is a game that resembles Nomic, in as much as it’s a game as much about the process of playing and understanding the game itself as it is about winning. In Mao you are not supposed to know the specific rules of the game, but to have to work them out as you play. I’ve been reading up on things like this as an attempt to get my head around some work on Barbelith, specifically around self-reflexive rulesets in online communities;
• The Mechanical Turk – The allegedly robotic chess player that secretly contained a tiny grand master was the inspiration for the Amazon web-service of the same name. I’ve been trying to work out if there are jobs I can get the Mechanical Turk to do – the tedious stuff that I don’t actually have time to accomplish personally. It might be good for reviewing potential candidates for Barbelith actually;
• Mind-mapping – Working with Simon has had its challenging aspects. One has been in his dislike of structured thinking exercises to get to a solution or map a terrain. I’ve been digging further into this stuff to convince him it’s useful, when secretly I know I just need to smack him around a bit until he bends to my will;
• Nomic – Like the Mao game above, I’m really reading up on Nomic because of work I’d like to do on Barbelith;
• Penis Envy – I studied a lot of Freud at university, and was pretty scandalised when I realised that Wikipedia had terrible information on psychoanalysis that was, for the most part totally unrepresentative. I wrote a comment about the penis envy article in particular – both on Wikipedia and on my site – and kept meaning to invest the time to fix the entry. Thankfully most of the work has since been done by the community;
• Regular Expressions – I find myself using regular expressions of one form or another fairly regularly, whether it be in Movable Type spam filters or in Automator or in BBEdit. Mostly I use BBEdit’s instructions. This article is useful for background, theory and reminders;
• Sunk Cost – I was sent to this by something on the 37signals blog. Can’t remember what. It’s a useful concept to bear in mind, and was much elaborated upon by an interesting economist at this year’s SXSW;
• Topic Maps – This is another one of those things like Homotopy that I note down to read around more solidly later and end up keep coming back to but never really interrogating;
• Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations – This mostly appeared on my radar during the whole fiasco where the US embassy was refusing to pay the congestion charge;
• Web 2.0 – Simon and I are having an ongoing argument about this term, and along with Social Software I keep wondering if I should be going in and intervening with the article to re-express that it is a contested term with multiple meanings or whether I’m too close to the subject to be impartial and encyclopaedic;
• Xenu – And this one is here for Mr Tom Cruise: “In Scientology doctrine, Xenu (also Xemu) is an alien ruler of the “Galactic Confederacy” who, 75 million years ago, brought billions of people to Earth in DC-8 -like spacecraft, stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. Their souls then clustered together and stuck to the bodies of the living, and continue to wreak chaos and havoc today.” Yeah, right.