Month: March 2005

Here’s the press release:

The Wikimedia Foundation announced today the creation of the 500,000th article in the English-language Wikipedia, its project to create a free, multilingual, online encyclopedia. The article was about “Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union.” The total of 500,000 articles far exceeds any other encyclopedia project. At the average of 2,500 characters per article, this is 1.25 gigabytes of raw text, which if printed double-sided would form a stack about 66 feet or over 6 stories tall. Other recent additions to its English-language edition include hundreds of full-length songs, almost a gigabyte of new images, and subject-specific portals.

Congratulations! If you haven’t already visited Wikipedia, I highly recommend it…

Forbes reports that car developer John DeLorean died last Saturday at the age of 80 of complications from a recent stroke. Best known for his stainless steel sports car featured in the Back To The Future movies, “DeLorean’s company collapsed in 1983, a year after he was arrested in Los Angeles, accused in a sting of conspiring to sell $24 million of cocaine to salvage the company.”

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that GeoURL is back in development. Splintered has released a Firefox GeoURL extension that adds a button to the status bar (and optionally in the main toolbar) showing whether the current document features either an ICBM or geo.position META element, opening a list of nearby sites in a new tab if you click on the button (seen at right). Pretty cool…

The Online Video Game Atlas has a good amount of user-compiled maps of video games in the form of huge image files. Very cool…

The legendary punk bar CBGB’s is apparently on the brink of eviction.

CBGB’s, with its familiar white awning, holds a special place in [New York’s] music history. It was here that the Ramones, the Talking Heads and Blondie created the punk scene for small crowds that paid a $1 cover charge.

It would be quite a shame if it really did get closed down…

The Wall Street Journal Online (of all places) explores the history of yelling “Freebird” at concerts.

Update: Robot Filter offers an observation that is sorely lacking in the WSJ article: 🙂

this is truly a great and interesting article but it fails to mention that puking after yelling “freebird!” is optional although in all my travels, the person yelling “freebird!” usually boots shortly afterwards…

The Onion’s Irish-Heritage Timeline would’ve been a great St. Patrick’s Day post. Oh well, it’s still funny today… 🙂

If you don’t want to watch a depressing animation that makes you ponder your existence and Life’s meaning, then you should probably avoid AloneInTheDark’s Renaissance.

Despite the risk of offending an entire state, I just had to post about this t-shirt. 🙂

New Scientist has a very interesting article entitled 13 things that do not make sense.