If the fool…

Ex-Lemmingworks. ##.

William Blake, in the The Marriage of Heaven and Hell3 write: “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.” But the funny thing is that I thought that Nietzsche said it…

Puppy smoothies: Improving the reliability of open, collaborative wikis

Ex-Lemmingworks. ##.

From First Monday:Puppy smoothies: Improving the reliability of open, collaborative wikis, via Jeremy

The reliability of information collected from at large Internet users by open collaborative wikis such as Wikipedia has been a subject of widespread debate. This paper provides a practical proposal for improving user confidence in wiki information by coloring the text of a wiki article based on the venerability of the text. This proposal relies on the philosophy that bad information is less likely to survive a collaborative editing process over large numbers of edits. Colorization would provide users with a clear visual cue as to the level of confidence that they can place in particular assertions made within a wiki article.

The Usenet Oracle

Ex-Lemmingworks. ##.

This is my favorite UseNet Oracle post from I don’t remember how long ago. It predates the WWW for me, so probably late 80s. It is archived at http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~reich/DATA/oracle.html and is something I think useful for reflecting on critical thinking.

This question was posed to the Usenet Oracle:

> If you drop a buttered piece of bread, it will fall on the
> floor butter-side down. If a cat is dropped from a window
> or other high and towering place, it will land on it’s feet.
>
> But what if you attach a buttered piece of bread, butter-side
> up to a cat’s back and toss them both out the window?
> Will the cat land on it’s feet? Or will the butter splat on
> the ground?

And in response, thus spake the Oracle:

} Even if you are too lazy to do the experiment yourself you should be
} able to deduce the obvious result. The laws of butterology demand
} that the butter must hit the ground, and the equally strict laws of
} feline aerodynamics demand that the cat can not smash it’s furry back.
} If the combined construct were to land, nature would have no way to
} resolve this paradox. Therefore it simply does not fall.
}
} That’s right you clever mortal (well, as clever as a mortal can get),
} you have discovered the secret of antigravity! A buttered cat will,
} when released, quickly move to a height where the forces of
} cat-twisting and butter repulsion are in equilibrium. This equilibrium
} point can be modified by scraping off some of the butter, providing
} lift, or removing some of the cat’s limbs, allowing descent.
}
} Most of the civilized species of the Universe already use this
} principle to drive their ships while within a planetary system. The
} loud humming heard by most sighters of UFOs is, in fact, the purring of
} several hundred tabbies.
}
} The one obvious danger is, of course, if the cats manage to eat the
} bread off their backs they will instantly plummet. Of course the cats
} will land on their feet, but this usually doesn’t do them much good,
} since right after they make their graceful landing several tons of
} red-hot starship and pissed off aliens crash on top of them.