Month: January 2017

 
What did we do before Wikipedia?

You might ask this (facetious) question all the time, but wikis, or user-edited websites, are older than you might think—in fact, they’re practically the elders of the online world. Long before Twitter, Facebook, or even Google, a computer programmer created software to help colleagues share information about their work. Since then, we’ve used wikis to compile knowledge on Wikipedia, track election patterns, catalog fandoms, preserve cultures, and laugh at ourselves. And unlike Netscape Navigator, Geocities, or Friendster, wikis have yet to become obsolete.

On March 25, 1995, a computer programmer named Ward Cunningham premiered what he called “WikiWikiWeb” on his website, c2.com. The “wiki” part was inspired by the Wiki Wiki Shuttle service at the Honolulu airport—wiki is the Hawaiian word for “quick.” The program was meant to help share knowledge about software design patterns among developers, and worked inside a user’s browser. It also included built-in edit tracking, which implied that article changes were worth preserving and discussing.

“It’s basically a way of writing where you’re reading,” Cunningham told New Relic. “On the Web before that, you would read something in one place but if you wanted to write more, you would have to go through a completely different mechanism. You couldn’t author through the Web before that.”

PEOPLE, PROJECTS, AND PATTERNS

Ward’s program meant that with no knowledge of HTML necessary, just a markup language that did formatting and linking for you, anyone could theoretically contribute to a body of knowledge for everyone else to learn from. Today, every popular social media platform owes something to the easy “what you see is what you get” interface that wikis popularized.

The focus of WikiWikiWeb was, and is, what Cunningham called “people, projects, and patterns”—patterns being replicable ideas about software design. “Friends,” Cunningham wrote in a May 1, 1995, email, “I’ve always been interested in the way programming ideas are carried by people as they move between projects … I’ve put together a new database to give the project [of documenting ideas about making programs work] another try. You can help.”

As soon as Cunningham released WikiBase, the software underlying WikiWikiWeb, into the wild, wikis began to evolve, branching out to cover any number of topics and communities. We have wikis to thank for sites as varied as TV Tropes, SourceWatch, and the comedy site Uncyclopedia. Formatting has changed, organization has improved, and underlying programming languages have grown, but the wiki has always been about egalitarian, transparent access to information that anyone can replicate and adapt.

That doesn’t mean people don’t try to use wikis to further their own agendas. Wikipedia itself, which celebrates its 16th birthday today, January 15, is full of arguments about whose knowledge is the right knowledge. Sometimes users have edited Wikipedia entries to harass, to spread false information, to profit, to eliminate evidence of wrongdoing, to challenge the neutrality of the entry or, simply, for the lulz. The Twitter account @congressedits tracks changes from IP addresses inside the Congressional offices. Sometimes it flags politically relevant edits, from representative pages to issue-related entries. But other times, it’s just about calling out government employees who should have better things to do than edit encyclopedia entries like “…Not!” and “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.”

The gender makeup of Wikipedia editors has also been a cause of concern—they’re reportedly around 85 percent male, which affects what topics receive the most attention and depth. Bias there matters in part because the site is so influential: it’s the fifth most popular website in the world. Wikipedia has more than 5 million articles in English, and versions of the crowdsourced encyclopedia also exist in about 280 other languages.

FROM “CONSENSUS ENGINE” TO “CHORUS OF VOICES”

However, Cunningham has a vision for his creation’s future, and it’s more like a blog network than a single authoritative source. He calls it the Smallest Federated Wiki. His goal, according to a 2012 WIRED interview, is to put the ultimate control of the wiki in the hands of all its users, rather than one centralized hub.

At present, all edits in a wiki take place on one page that everyone can work on, but it’s the only available version. Cunningham’s federated wiki lets users who wish to edit a page “fork” it, copying the page into their own wiki database and updating it there. He envisions a “chorus of voices” through groups of slightly different wiki copies (others have called the current wiki model a “consensus engine”) to encourage discussions about more subjective issues and opinions.

“Is it too nerdy to catch on?” WIRED asks. Cunningham doesn’t think so. “The assumption is that we won’t be creative, but Facebook proves that everyone wants to have their own page, their own stream,” he told the magazine. In theory, the most accurate article then rises to the top of the pile by being copied the most—it’s a conversation, rather than an argument. Federated wikis could also help users seeking out a particular perspective on a topic—perhaps one written by someone with a background different from their own.

It’s a compelling idea, but only time will tell if it’s as popular as Cunningham’s initial conception of the wiki. You can listen to him describe how he developed the wiki, and where he sees it going in the future, at his TEDxPortland 2012 talk below.

UK-based artist Kate Kato makes tiny, life-sized sculptures of insects, plants, and fungi from old books and other recycled materials. She works mostly with paper and textiles, adding color or detail using paints, embroidery, and metal wire. Then, she displays the delicate models in small collections or dioramas.

Kato says her work is inspired by a lifelong love of nature. She grew up in Bristol, England, and now lives in the Welsh countryside. “As a child I spent a lot of time collecting bits and pieces in tins or boxes, which I would take with me on walks through parks or countryside,” she explains in an artist’s statement. “This has had a huge influence on my work, along with my love of botanical illustrations, the natural sciences and the nostalgia of museum visits where, as a child, I would be mesmerized by the variety of exhibits and the way they were displayed. I tend to view my work as a 3D record of my knowledge and experiences of the natural world.”

Kato’s work has been exhibited both domestically and abroad; last fall, her work was showcased at the Confluence Gallery & Art Center in Twisp, Washington. (You can also find her on Etsy.) View some of her sculptures and check out a video of her creative process below.

Photos courtesy of Kate Kato.

In Wichita, Kansas, Maggie Ballard and her son Paxton have opened a tiny food pantry in their front yard. Modeled after the little free library concept, Maggie and Paxton call their little free pantry a “blessing box.” It’s a red wooden box with a glass door. They keep it stocked with food and sanitary supplies, and a sign encourages visitors to take whatever they need and contribute what they can. All transactions are anonymous.

Here’s a short video tour of the box:

And here’s Paxton with the box:

Maggie told NPR, “My son is 6 years old, so it gives him a little chore to kind of watch it and see what comes and goes and who comes and goes, and maybe learn a little lesson from it.”

Maggie told mental_floss this week that community members have left cards, donations of supplies, and even cash (including a $20 bill between two cans) in response to the project. Here are some photos of the box and early donations:

And here’s a sampling of the cards:

Maggie and Paxton’s project is an extension of a small movement going on nationwide. From NPR’s report earlier this week:

Similar “yard-based” food pantries have gone up across the country, in states like Oklahoma, Indiana, Kentucky, Florida and Minnesota. Much of it seems to trace back to Jessica McClard, who created what she calls the “little free pantry” in northwest Arkansas.

“The products that are stocked are put directly inside the pantry and turnover is in about 30 to 45 minutes,” McClard says. “The frequency of the turnover and the fact that other sites in town are also turning over that frequently, it suggests to me that the need is tremendous.”

McClard maintains a Little Free Pantry website with guidance on how to make your own blessing box.

Finally, here are Maggie and Paxton:

(All photos courtesy of Maggie Ballard, used with permission.)

It’s a well-known fact that cats and dogs don’t get always along—except when they’re pictured on Pals Socks. The company’s socks combine unlikely characters to show that it’s what makes you different that makes for a great friendship.

“Pals socks reminds us that the coolest way to be is to be yourself, and despite our differences, we can all be friends,” their website explains. “Pals are much more than colorful mismatched socks – they’re a way of thinking, of promoting harmony. Kids are really our future, and we want to help them grow into empathetic human beings… one foot at a time.”

The unlikely duos include a cat and dog, a unicorn and dragon, and a lion and zebra. The pairings are meant to start a dialog with kids about being open with who they become friends with.

Their socks come in sizes for all ages. Each pair costs $9, or you can make your own custom gift box of three pairs for $25. A portion of the company’s profits are donated to charity. The best part is that when one sock gets lost, the other can be paired with a new pal. You can view all the options here.

Every year, NASA releases a year-end review. In 2016, it’s a doozy. The wide-ranging list includes: Juno’s orbit of Jupiter, Kepler’s exoplanet survey, the New Horizons Pluto flyby, Commander Kelly’s ISS mission, piles of Mars research, Earth climate and weather research, asteroid research (including the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission), the latest X-PLANE, and even its participation in the Star Trek 50th anniversary commemoration and Hidden Figures movie production. It’s exhausting typing that list, and that’s just some of the highlights.

If you’ve got three and a half minutes, check out this highlights video:

For more details, read this 4,000-word summary of what NASA got up to in 2016.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center recently released a stunning image by the Hubble Space Telescope of a megamaser—a galaxy that is basically one giant laser in space.

Iras 16399-0937, as the galaxy is called, does not blast visible light. It’s a little longer on the electromagnetic spectrum, in the microwave range. And there’s a lot going on out there. Unlike our own Milky Way galaxy, which has one core at its center, Iras has two, and they are merging slowly. The southern core, as one of the pair is called, is a star factory. The northern core, meanwhile, hosts a black hole that’s 100,000,000 times the mass of our Sun. The interaction of the two, and consequent galactic turmoil, gives the galaxy its beautiful shape.

The image was captured using two instruments on Hubble: the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (which was superseded by the more capable Wide Field Camera 3 in 2009) and the Advanced Camera for Surveys, which was installed on Hubble in 2002 and is still in use.

SET MASERS ON STUN

Maser is actually an acronym: Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. So was laser, at least initially: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. That’s the difference between the two: microwave versus light. They’re both coherent energy beams, but a maser emits microwave radiation, while a laser emits visible light. Einstein proposed the basic principle in 1917. Masers are used in everything from atomic clocks to NASA’s Deep Space Network. In the case of the latter, giant dishes receive weak signals from spacecraft as far from Earth as the interstellar medium. Cryogenically cooled ruby masers cleanly amplify the signals and allow data to be extracted.

You might not have heard of masers—only lasers—but there was a time when the opposite was true for many. “Phasers” on Star Trek are a shortened form of “photon maser.” Lasers had only been invented a few years before the debut of the television series. To the extent they were known, they certainly weren’t thought to be as powerful as the mighty maser, which was first built in 1953. (Gene Roddenberry worried during filming of the second pilot that people would say, “Oh, come on, lasers can’t do that.”) Even shortly after the laser was invented, theoretical work on masers led to a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964.

GOING GALACTIC

Sometimes stimulated emissions of radiation occur naturally. Vaporized molecules in comets can mase, as can protostars in stellar nurseries. Sometimes masers go big time. A megamaser like Iras is 100 million times brighter than the dinky masers of the Milky Way. With that kind of power, the host galaxy itself is basically a cosmic maser beaming microwave emissions across the universe. There are also gigamasers, which are a billion times brighter than our masers, but that’s just showing off.

Extragalactic masers are useful to astronomers for, among other things, the independent calculation of the galaxy’s distance. Iras, for example, is 370 million light-years from Earth. For comparison, the closest star to our own—Proxima Centauri, of the Alpha Centauri star system—is 4.4 light-years away. Because of how nicely light-years scale, if the Earth were one inch from the Sun, Iras would be 370 million miles away. While we won’t be visiting anytime soon, we can still enjoy its natural, tempestuous beauty.

You’d better stock up on cheesecake: all seven seasons of The Golden Girls will be dropping on Hulu on February 13, 2017. For those of you who were too young to watch the show when it first aired, many of the topical references might seem like ancient history. Hopefully, with this handy reference guide, those reruns will be twice as funny in the future.

1. DANNY THOMAS

“I’ve never known any personally, but isn’t Danny Thomas one?”
“Not Lebanese, Blanche, Lesbian.” — Dorothy, to Blanche, “Isn’t it Romantic?”

Danny Thomas was born Amos Muzyad Yakhoob Kairouz in Deerfield, Michigan, but grew up in Toledo, Ohio (also the hometown of fellow Lebanese-American actor Jamie Farr). When Thomas was struggling to make a name for himself in show business, he prayed to St. Jude, the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes, and pledged to make a shrine in his honor if he found success. Not long afterward, Thomas landed several regular roles on network radio shows, which ultimately led to his own long-running TV sitcom, Make Room for Daddy. Thomas went on to produce several other successful TV series and also founded the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

2. ISHTAR

“Let me tell you girls the three most important things I learned about life: Number one, hold fast to your friends; number two, there’s no such thing as security; and number three, don’t go see Ishtar. Woof.” —Sophia, “The Audit”

Ishtar is a 1987 comedy starring two box office powerhouses of that time, Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, as two untalented songwriters who get a gig performing in Morocco and somehow end up involved in some Cold War shenanigans. Directed by Elaine May, the film received a lot of negative press before it was released due to its enormous budget and reports of fights between the stars and director. It went on to become synonymous with “expensive box office bomb” and ended up on many “Worst of” lists.

3. DOUG HENNING

“Well Rose, do I look like the Mayor of Palm Springs?”
“Doug Henning is the Mayor of Palm Springs?” —Rose, to Sophia, “An Illegitimate Concern”

Doug Henning was a Canadian-born magician/illusionist who gained fame in the 1970s with his World of Magic TV specials, and eventually a Tony-nominated Broadway show.

4. FESS PARKER

“Rose, you know how uncomfortable I am in front of a camera. Besides, I always come out looking like Fess Parker.”
“Don’t worry, Dorothy. This is a documentary; it’s okay if you’re not good looking.” —Rose, to Dorothy, “Whose Face Is This, Anyway?”

Actor Fess Parker was actually considered to be ruggedly handsome, but that’s probably not the ideal look for a woman. Parker played both Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett on two different TV series in the 1950s and ’60s.

5. HEE-HAW

“Rose, I’ve never met anyone quite like you.”
“Check the cornfield on Hee-Haw.” —Sophia, to Rose’s boyfriend Miles, “Triple Play”

Hee-Haw was a long-running (over 20 years in first-run syndication) comedy/variety show that was a rural version of Laugh-In. Each episode was filled with hayseed humor (a recurring skit featured cast members trading one-liners in a makeshift cornfield) and the top country music stars of the day.

6. SUSAN HAYWARD AND ANITA BRYANT

“This is more moving than Susan Hayward’s climatic speech in I Want To Live!”
“You’re ready to fly right out of here, aren’t you?”
“Well excuse me for living, Anita Bryant!” —Caterer, to Blanche, “Sophia’s Wedding: Part 1”

Susan Hayward won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Barbara “Bloody Babs” Graham, a former prostitute and small-time crook who gets involved with a gang of men that commit a murder. Badgered by the press and represented by poor legal counsel, Graham was ultimately sentenced to the gas chamber.

A former Miss America finalist, Anita Bryant became the spokeswoman for the Florida Citrus Commission in 1969 and appeared in a series of TV commercials singing the praises of orange juice. Then in 1977 she led a highly publicized campaign to repeal a Dade County, Florida, ordinance that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation. Her statements equating homosexuals with child molesters resulted in a national backlash that, for many years, made “Anita Bryant” a common insult directed at any person displaying an intolerance for homosexuality.

7. BURL IVES

“That child over there is trying to steal my daddy away. She ain’t better but a tick on a slow moving hound dog.”
“Why is everyone around here talking like Burl Ives?” —Dorothy, to Blanche, “Big Daddy’s Little Lady”

Burl Ives wasn’t born in the south, strictly speaking, but rather southern Illinois. However, early in his career, he gained fame as a folk singer with such homespun hits as “Bluetail Fly,” “The Foggy, Foggy Dew,” and “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” He later acted in films and on television, and is probably best remembered today for his holiday hit “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas” and his narration of the annual TV special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

8. SHINOLA

“You know, back in Minnesota, I was known as the Sherlock Holmes of St. Olaf.”
“Figured out which one was Shinola, did you, Rose?”
“The hard way.” —Rose, to Dorothy, “The Case of the Libertine Belle”

Shinola was a brand of shoe polish. In the 1940s, a popular colloquialism to describe someone’s naiveté was, “He doesn’t know sh*t from Shinola.” Perhaps that’s why the brand eventually went out of business; the Shinola folks couldn’t come up with an advertising slogan that was more memorable than the insult. 

9. THE PLO

“Maybe you ought to join an organization that is a little less fanatical in its devotion, honey.”
“Oh, like what, Blanche, the PLO?” —Dorothy, to Blanche, “Sophia’s Wedding”

The Palestine Liberation Organization is a paramilitary organization founded in 1964 and was considered by the United States and Israel to be a terrorist group until the Madrid Conference in 1991.

10. YASSER ARAFAT

“You grow a beard, Dorothy! Believe me, I woke up one morning, I looked like Arafat!” —Sophia, to Dorothy, “End of the Curse”

When Sophia discussed the effects of menopause, she name-dropped Yasser Arafat, the longtime leader of the PLO, who was also known for his distinctive chin stubble. (Even younger viewers should probably understand this one.)

11. DAVID HOROWITZ

“I’m sorry, Dorothy, it’s all my fault. I misunderstood the brochure.”
“’Fun in the buff at a mountain retreat! Hike, swim, and play volleyball while the sun beats down on your fanny!’ Call David Horowitz; I mean, how can they get away with this misrepresentation!” —Dorothy, to Rose, “Valentine’s Day”

Consumer advocate David Horowitz used to host a TV show called Fight Back. He specialized in exposing false advertisements, shady business practices, and outright rip-offs.

UK-based needlework artist Humayrah Bint Altaf doesn’t do typical embroidery projects. Intricate patterns and flowery flourishes don’t dominate her work; bugs do. The expert in needlework, as Vice recently highlighted, makes amazing embroidered images of beetles, butterflies, and other natural wonders.

The three-dimensional images require intense dedication to get every bead and stitch just right, and they often have to be begun anew at some point in the process. Her images of insects shine with metallic stitches that reflect the light just like a real beetle might. Here are a few of her amazing creations from Instagram.

[h/t Vice]

You might think you’re tech-savvy enough to spot a fake email from a scammer pretending to be PayPal or eBay, but what about one coming from a familiar contact? And what if the message attached read just like something sent from a real person? That’s exactly what a new email phishing scam is doing to unassuming Gmail users, according to Boing Boing.

The attack, which was initially reported by Wordfence, comes in the form of an email from a user who has already been compromised by this scheme. The email will come from a familiar address in your contacts, complete with an attachment (an image or link) to click on. Some of these emails are even designed to look like replies to previous emails to your contacts, making it even harder to spot the scam right away.

Once you click on this attachment, you’ll be sent right back to your Gmail sign-in screen. This could all sound suspicious already, except for the fact that in the URL for the sign-in screen, you’ll see “accounts.google.com.” It won’t be the real Google sign-in screen (there is other extraneous URL text that confirms that) but if you’re in a rush, or just unfamiliar with what it should read, it’s easy to assume you just have to re-input your login info. And that’s where they get you.

After that login information is entered, the hackers will now have your information, and they are ready to do the whole thing over again to one of your contacts. Wordfence has an account of how this all works:



“The attackers log in to your account immediately once they get the credentials, and they use one of your actual attachments, along with one of your actual subject lines, and send it to people in your contact list.

For example, they went into one student’s account, pulled an attachment with an athletic team practice schedule, generated the screenshot, and then paired that with a subject line that was tangentially related, and emailed it to the other members of the athletic team.”

Twitter user Tom Scott posted a screenshot of what to look out for if you’re ever mysteriously propositioned to log back into your Google account for no apparent reason after clicking on an attachment:

This is disturbingly clever. You get sent to a text/html data URI! Not testing any further but, blimey, talk about using power for evil. pic.twitter.com/TamVn7DBfW

— Tom Scott (@tomscott) December 23, 2016

In the URL, you can see “data:text/html…..” at the front, which shouldn’t be there. And if you scroll (a lot) past the text in the address bar, eventually you’ll come across even more funky code. At that point, get out of dodge and change your login info for good measure.

[h/t Boing Boing]

Zero is a tricky number. It’s the only integer that is neither positive nor negative. You cannot divide by zero, but you can add, multiply, and subtract. It is simultaneously a number (in the sense of an integer) and the absence of a quantity (in the sense of “none”). So how did we get zero, and why is it so odd unusual?

In the short animation below, Dr. Hannah Fry explains the story of zero. It’s a number with ancient origins and worldwide implications. Enjoy:

If you’re not into video, Wolfram Mathworld explains the math aspects of zero very well (minus the history bits), and this Yale Global article handles the history. (You might also consider that zero can be a hero.)