I was one of those kids who read the dictionary. Start at Aardvark. Would the Aardvark be as famous if he didn't start the dictionary?

A project to make git repositories out of Wikipedia, with the aim of allowing distibution and backups.

"A quarter of UK internet users aged eight to 12 had profiles on Facebook, Bebo or MySpace last year, research has found, although the lowest minimum age set on any of the sites is 13." "44% of children between 12 and 15 thought downloading shared copies of films and music for free should not be illegal." Quite a few interesting nuggets here.

Today's random Wikipedia discovery, via Vauxhall Bridge. Pilkington try to sell glass by promoting crazy modern architecture. "The Glass Age Development Committee is best known for its ambitious 1971 proposal for a glass and concrete offshore city housing 21,000 people, to be anchored off the coast near Great Yarmouth and accessed from the mainland by hovercraft."

"If I read that Boltzmann died in 1906 on Wikipedia I'd jump over to Britannica to check the date. After a few months of doing this I realized that I was never finding inaccurate information on Wikipedia" "I noticed a significant difference between Wikipedia and Britannica: Wikipedia was a great starting point for my research [but] Britannica was a dead end [because] Wikipedia insists that citations are needed for its content."

Oh my. This is... really rather good. As someone else said, "the semantic web is here".

The sheer scale of the top four Far East ports is amazing. They dwarf Rotterdam, which in turn dwarfs Felixstowe, the biggest container port in the UK.

Chris Heathcote argues that Clay Shirky's much-linked talk on "social surplus" is weirdly anti-consumption and values the Internet more highly than TV for no good reason. Can't say I entirely disagree (cf growth of web video).

"Its time to stop building version control systems on top of SQL databases, and move to the real thing. Its time to let the content of Wikis be free, easily available, to be used in ways not restricted by the web environment" Call to arms there.

Two CD set due out soon. For ages I've had a tape- and then MP3s- of the glorious '94 performance, from the BBC, but I've never had the live version of Are We Here?. Great news.

"The death toll was 270 people from 21 countries, including 11 people in the town of Lockerbie." Unless I suddenly forgot something, this is the only terrorist attack on a UK-US flight in the last twenty years.

Got a lot of the way towards the Lorentz transformations, but fifteen years earlier. Not much on this page though.

The US really knows how to treat scientists.

I couldn't remember when 01 stopped being valid (1990, apparently)