Yesterday, I took one look at the shoe hat pictured in the IDS and realized I officially don’t get the younger generation. That was yesterday. Turns out, it’s a kind of crazy that dates back a while. Elsa Schiaparelli teamed with Salvador Dalí in the 1930s to come up with a shoe hat. This image [...]
Defra re-opens
After a lock-down to reassess the project, the Defra wiki has re-opened for business. On the front page is the following caveat: The wiki is currently OPEN – we normally “lock” the wiki overnight – between about 6pm and 8am UK time – to prevent editing or registering for new accounts during this period. To [...]
‘She opened government to everyone’
Whether that epitaph is ultimately true or not, there is no denying that former Texas Governor Ann Richards — who died Wednesday after a bout with esophageal cancer — made the effort to make is so. She was a firebrand grandmother figure, the kind everyone would want to have and never want to cross, who [...]
Some things of interest from today’s IDS
I love the local student paper. It’s free, and it’s got some interesting things you don’t get even in the other local paper (which, grrr, restricts access to its web stories). A sample from today … Wikipedia to take on academia Hot on the heels of the Wall Street Journal article on a debate between [...]
Death of the Encyclopedia
Today, the Wall Street Journal Online published an interesting debate between the head honchos of Wikipedia and Britannica. The latter has been around since 1768; the former has been online since 2001. Jimmy Wales, the founder and chairman of the Wikimedia Foundation, squared off against Dale Hoiberg, the current senior vice president and editor in [...]
Hold on to your kids
As a little treat for myself, I bought the New York Times this Tuesday. I can nurse a Tuesday times for several days, thanks to the Science Times. This article caught my eye right away, and I violated my reading rules by skipping to the back of the section to read it. I’ve been meaning [...]
Write for Wired. (c’mon, everybody is doing it.)
I don’t know if my lame little change will make the final cut, but 15 minutes of my time — most of it getting a SocialText account — gives me a shot at being listed in Wired News. The two entities are teaming up to try their hand at communal writing, with the final version [...]