Hello World

I hope you were all watching the World Cup final yesterday. And I especially hope you were watching toward the end of overtime when the French capitaine, Zinedine Zidane, brutally head-butted an Italian player, earning himself an obvious red card. Lucky for him, Les Bleueuueueus held on for penalty kicks, but they lost anyway because another player missed his shot (Zidane is a notoriously-skilled penalty shot specialist).

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• A fascinating and in-depth look at how to design a book interior.


• A wrong-minded column that purports to describe the problems with Wikipedia. Column summary: in the minutes after Ken Lay's death, some people wrote inaccurate/biased things in his Wikipedia entry. Over the next several hours those inaccurate/biased things were filtered out and by the afternoon of the day he died the entry was accurate. The column says that the fact that people can write things that are wrong in the posts is an enormous weakness. It doesn't mention the fact that the thousands of contributors to Wikipedia ensured that less than a day after Lay's death, his entry was up-to-the-minute accurate; that the very fault the writer finds in Wikipedia--the faceless masses with the ability to make corrections to every entry--is the reason Wikipedia is reliable. And of course the columnist neglects to mention that anyone concerned about the accuracy of an entry can easily browse every single change made to it and the citations to justify them. Just a generally bizarre column, overall, which in my opinion is a better polemic for Wikipedia than against it.

  Some examples of how misguided this column is: Mathew Ingram's perspective, Open Culture, this Boing Boing post, this Boing Boing post, this Boing Boing post, this Boing Boing post.

  It's true, though, that Wikipedia's value as a source of news information is limited. It's neat that this year's World Cup entry already lists Italy as the winner, but the presence of entries for contemporaneous people and events does make more glaring the short-lived but irritating "corrections" that are rightfully maligned in the column.


• I saw Pirates of the Caribbean over the weekend. I enjoyed it but it wasn't particularly good. Certainly not $132,000,000 good. Depp's Captain Jack was just a tired retread of the role in the first one, in my opinion--a caricature of a caricature going through the expected motions--and aside from the truly excellent bad guy and his minions I didn't really have any interest in the other characters. The effects and action stuff were generally fun, though, and if you can manage to see it at a drive-in theater I can assure you of an entertaining evening (if you aren't unlucky enough to park next to a van stuffed to the gills with pre-teens on cellphones).

In other news, if you want to talk to me you should add me to your google talk list--calamityjake at gmail.com.

Just look at this.