Take the Live Earth Pledge

July 7th, 2007, 1 Comment »

Today, as you probably know, is the big day for a global series of concerts for climate change (et al) called Live Earth. There’s a schwack of concerts all over the place–you can see a complete list of performers on Wikipedia.

It’s interesting how this global concert phenomenon has re-emerged. Correct me if I’m wrong, but we have Live Aid in 1984 (you young’ins may want to look that up), and then no huge, multi-continent concerts until Make Poverty History. What’s changed? I’m a cynic, so I wonder if it’s in part because the record industry is trying to stave off its slow, messy demise.

In any case, it’s for an excellent cause, so you should go answer the call and make a very reasonable commitment to lightening your impact on the planet.

In related news, MSN is streaming the concerts over the web. I visited their site using Firefox, and got shunted to this page:

The Usual Pound of Flesh

Guess they couldn’t resist taking their pound of marketing flesh, eh?

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Wikigroaning, An Wikipedia Article Length Redux

June 5th, 2007, 10 Comments »

Geoff linked to my post about the peculiar article length trends in Wikipedia, and also referenced a Something Awful article entitled “The Art of Wikigroaning“. What’s Wikigroaning?

For example, the article called “Knight“. Then, find a somehow similar article that is longer, but at the same time, useless to a very large fraction of the population. In this case, we’ll go with “Jedi Knight“. Open both of the links and compare the lengths of the two articles. Compare not only that, but how well concepts are explored, and the greater professionalism with which the longer article was likely created.

It’s sad but true. There’s some pretty funny examples of Wikigroaning pairs, including:

Steam
Steampunk

Astronomy
List of changes in Star Wars re-releases

You get the idea. I wanted to think of one of my own. The best I’ve got is:

Bass
All your base are belong to us

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