Wikipedia is back on page one, or thereabouts. The Atlantic Monthly has a long article on how the WP got that way, with quite a lot of background on the persons and personalities involved and the sometimes rather juvenile squabbles that surround article writing and editing. Colbert, on the Colbert Report fired a couple of clips at the WP, especially the “anyone can write or edit anything” philosophy underlying the project, and the ‘consensus theory’ of truth. Crudely put, using Colbert’s example, if enough people come to the view that the number of African elephants is increasing, that position becomes the ‘true’ one. The Atlantic Monthly piece is less polemical and does a better job at the historical background of the Wikipedia. One thing the Blogging Grouch has noticed is that WP collaborators in other countries don’t seem to be gripped by the same ideological frenzy that animates, if that’s the word, so many US writers. They just seem to be going about the task of writing a public and free encyclopedia. They also seem to write less about the history of the Klingons and Vulcans. That’s just an impression. Confirming it would take a lot of “research”… although it might be kind of fun to see how many German articles there are about Klingonia or whatever the place is called. Rubes like the BG have been taken so often by slickers that we tend to regard almost everything as a ripoff. Right now, WP is very much in the “prove it to me” category, all the bloviating to the contrary notwithstanding.

The Hive

UTSYSTEM announces the system-wide availability of journal backfiles in Science Direct’s (i.e. Elsevier’s) Microbiology and Immunology collection:
Science Direct Immunology and Microbiology backfiles (73 journal titles)

Backfiles

So, you think you got troubles! Grant deadlines, lab equipment down, and the elevator in your building is on the fritz, again! Yeah, Yeah, tell all that to people trying to do research in Iran. They’ll laugh in your face. Science published an article on how things are going over there for scientists. It seems that one of the bigger problems is divining which groups are influential at the moment and what their agendas are. Not much different from Bethesda, actually. But it gets a lot dicier. Misreading the signals here can mean your grant gets rejected. Over there, it can mean a nice spell in the slammer, or worse. The clerical regime, on the one hand, is willing to back research that will lead to technical advances, prosperity and power. In fact there is an ambitious 20 year program to upgrade the country’s scientific infrastructure. But they don’t want to back anything that has, or could have, or could be suspected to have theological implications or could challenge the current interpretation of the scriptures. So, researchers and academic administrators have to watch where they put their feet. Some disciplines have a rougher row to hoe than others. The religious authorities ignore petroleum geology and and Double E, but people working in psychology, the neurosciences and especially sociology have to guard their words quite carefully. Sociology? Well, it seems that somebody started wondering if theocracy is actually very effective way to organize society and got into trouble for it. So, sociologists are under the regime’s watchful glance. It all sounds a bit strange to our ears. But it wasn’t all that many years ago when many of the same constraints were in force here, either officially and legally, or as part of the general “kultcha”. And there are probably quite a few who think those were the Good Old Days and wouldn’t mind having them back. It’s the “deja vu all over again” that Yogi Bera talked about.
Iranian Science

Let’s be honest. The British can be a real pain. All that talent, that energy, that reforming zeal can be very intimidating, especially to underachieving colonials whose main task in life is learning to be “comfortable” with their situation, and burnishing their “self esteem”. The high point of that annoying excellence was the 19th century, when some kind of remarkable Brit seemed to pop up behind every tree trunk . How did they accomplish so much? Who told them to do all that stuff, like end the slave trade, figure out evolution, come up with atomic theory, the equations describing electro-magnetism, the Oxford English Dictionary, and the rest of it? It’s enough to make the rest of us feel like a bunch of Homer Simpsons living on a diet of Stupid Pills, washed down by Laziness Elixer. Two of these annoying Brits are the subjects of recent biographies. One of them is Thomas Young and the other is William Plimsoll. Young was a hands-down prodigy, who did a lot of things and was good at most of them. His biographer styles him “the last man who knew everything”. That’s good marketing lingo, but it’s also pretty close to the mark. Young’s range of interest was very great, from optics to linguisitics. City planning, public works, naval architecture, several branches of math, color theory and the physiology of the eye were other areas where he touched down and made genuine contributions. Naturally, he knew several languages surpassingly well, which was not at all unusual for that time and social class, but which strikes us today as astonishing, almost supernatural, so dully monolingual have we become. What made Young tick, and what kind of a man was he, apart from being frighteningly smart? The reviewer in American Scientist thinks this side doesn’t come out too well, or at least seems to be saying that. But the brilliance was the man.
Plimsoll is a different case. He was famous in Victorian England, but is virtually unknown today, except among sailors and marine engineers, because of the Plimsoll marks each ship carries, to indicate the maximum depth a loaded vessel can safely attain . Back then, many cargo ships went to sea in poor condition and greatly overloaded. If the tub made it, the owners were happy. If the tub sank, and the sailors drowned, well, the owners were insured, so for them it was gravy either way. Plimsoll used his position in Parliament and his increasing fame as scourge of social injustices to back his causes which also included mine safety. He was an inventor, in a small way, coming up with a pocket umbrella (something you can really use in England) and a method of straining out impurities from beer. Ya gotta love a guy like that. He was so well known in his time that popular songs were written about him. He hated injustice, and fought it when he could as hard as he could. Today, he’d probably be in every government database with the label, “dangerous radical”. But, despite it all, he seems to have been a merry sort. An interesting guy, or rather, bloke.
Plimsoll
Young