TMNTing Wikipedia Pages: A Twitter Account

This is the right type of Twitter account. ;)

Pseudo-random number samplinghttps://t.co/bTMMPJhmlL pic.twitter.com/Sh8cScM65b

— Wiki Titles Singable to TMNT Themesong (@wiki_tmnt) December 19, 2019

(Tip of the cap to Evelyn Lamb.)

Wikipedia Page: List of Obsolete Units of Measurement

There is a Wikipedia page that gives a list of obselete units of measurement.

(Tip of the cap to John Dudley.)

Creating Wikipedia Entries for Underrepresented Scientists and Engineers

As described in this article, physicist Jess Wade has been doing incredible work on writing new Wikipedia entries.

Meet @jesswade, a scientist working to increase the number of underrepresented scientists and engineers on @Wikipedia: https://t.co/4JAJirmWDp #WomenInSTEM @WikiWomenInRed pic.twitter.com/f6jiX47WLL

— Wikimedia (@Wikimedia) July 13, 2018

A Wikipedian Text Adventure

Someone wrote some software to turn Wikipedia into a text adventure in a really nice homage to Infocom. I approve!

Wikipedia Page for "Crackpot Index"

I was inspired by a recent e-mail sent to me (and, apparently, many other Oxford academics) to look up the Wikipedia page for Crackpot Index. Under its "See also" section is a link to the Wikipedia page for List of amateur mathematicians. That's not nice!

Omar Vizquel and Asymptotic Scaling

I think I just found my new favorite Wikipedia easter egg: "Little o" redirects here. For the baseball player, see Omar Vizquel.

Yes!

Wikipedia Page of the Day: List of Serial Killers by Number of Victims

This wikipedia page is awesome.

And do you know why? Because the text starts out with the following words: This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding this article to provide more information about past victims. Please do not expand the list with original research or adding yourself.

(Tip of the cap to the Demotivational Poster blog.)

It's not Wikipedia, bit it is a Start

I apparently have a wiki entry as a "writer" at BoardGameGeek because of an role-playing game article I wrote for Polyhedron in 1999. (I got the publication as a winning entry in a contest to design a character based on a picture published a couple of issues earlier in the magazine.) Somebody else wrote the page, and I just now added links to my blog and my Oxford home page.

I'd prefer an entry in Wikipedia, but I think I will need to become a bit more famous first. (And I'm not crass enough to write my own page.)

It is nice, however, to be have an entry on a gaming wiki. Ideally, the Legends of Caltech movie project will eventually land me with an IMDB entry.

Deadpan Synopsis of "Baby Got Back"

How awesome is this? As discussed in the blog Mental Floss, the "synopsis" portion of the wikipedia entry for the song "Baby Got Back" is written in a wonderfully humorous deadpan manner. It's like the writer was producing an essay for a high school English class. I approve!

(Tip of the cap to Mariano Beguerisse Díaz.)

50 Years of Anderson Localization!

Do you know why I'm excited today? (Actually, this is very recent news, as I only found out about this a few minutes ago.)

Here's why: The August 2009 issue of Physics Today includes a 50 year retrospective on Anderson localization. I won't read it until my hard copy arrives, but I am very much looking forward to reading these articles.

As described in the wikipedia entry, Anderson localization is "the absence of diffusion of waves in a random medium". (Imagine a crystal with defects that do their damnedest to curtail wave transmission. Admittedly, I'm not trying to score major points for accuracy with this description.)

Wikified Classmates

I now know of two of my fellow Beverly High classmates [in this case, people who I actually know] from the class of 1994 who have been wikified. (Maybe there are more, but I just found out about the second one today.)

I went to both Beverly High and Hawthorne elementary school (since 1st grade, if I remember correctly) with Dina Rae (though I know her as "Dina Franks"). I went to Beverly High with Saba Soomekh, whose sister Bahar has also been wikified. I took classes with Saba, but I don't remember whether I met Bahar (maybe I did), who has appeared in MI: III (among other films).

Then, of course, there is also Angelina (who I mever met, though my collaborator JP Onnela can tell you at least one story about her; she was one year ahead of me in school and apparently left after sophomore year) and this person (whose family lived a block away from mine and whose brother is the one who first taught me how to throw a frisbee).

So much for my sordid past. At least I can have second-order fame through the people I know.

How important is somebody?

Here is an interesting-looking article that was just posted on the arxiv. I don't plan on reading it in detail immediately, but its abstract is certainly intriguing. Here's the abstract:


Co-occurrence Network of Reuters News

Arzucan Ozgur, Burak Cetin, Haluk Bingol

Networks describe various complex natural systems including social systems. We investigate the social network of co-occurrence in Reuters-21578 corpus, which consists of news articles that appeared in the Reuters newswire in 1987. People are represented as vertices and two persons are connected if they co-occur in the same article. The network has small-world features with power-law degree distribution. The network is disconnected and the component size distribution has power law characteristics. Community detection on a degree-reduced network provides meaningful communities. An edge-reduced network, which contains only the strong ties has a star topology.
"Importance" of persons are investigated. The network is the situation in 1987. After 20 years, a better judgment on the importance of the people can be done. A number of ranking algorithms, including Citation count, PageRank, are used to assign ranks to vertices. The ranks given by the algorithms are compared against how well a person is represented in Wikipedia. We find up to medium level Spearman's rank correlations. A noteworthy finding is that PageRank consistently performed worse than the other algorithms. We analyze this further and find reasons.

Wikipedia versus Conservapedia

Lemming just pointed me to the following boingboing article comparing a recent compilation of the top 10 most viewed pages in Wikipedia and Conservapedia.

I guess Mark Foley is recruiting again.

See! The third dungeon in Zelda: Twilight Princess is really hard!

OK, I feel vindicated now!

As this recent article in The California Tech demonstrates, I am not the only person who found the 3rd dungeon (the water dungeon) in Zelda: Twilight Princess. Some of you reading this will remember that I got very frustrated by it and kept putting it down for long periods of time on multiple occasions.

Well, many of you have probably heard of the program WikiScanner, "which traces back anonymous edits of Wikipedia entries to corresponding IP addresses and organizations that they are associated with, allowing users to uncover cases of companies, businesses, politicians, and others editing their own entries in a way that benefits them."

And guess how this program came about? It was because its author couldn't beat the 3rd dungeon of Twilight Princess! Here is the evidence in his own words:

“I was playing Zelda and I got all the way to the third dungeon, the water dungeon, and it was very hard,” explained Griffith. “I got very frustrated at the puzzle, I still haven’t beat it, so I had to go do something else. And that’s the only reason that the WikiScanner exists, because that dungeon is too hard.”

Given my experience with that dungeon, I can't overstate how much that quote amused me!

In related news, I really was in the mood to play Zelda today. I hope my stuff from the US arrives soon, so I can set up my Wii again (buying an appropriate new tv, if necessary). I really want to play Twilight Princess right now, although I have been dealing with my gaming needs by playing Civ IV. (I'm well on my way to another cultural victory.) Video games cost roughly twice as much here as I'm used to paying, so my plans for the forseeable future include buying my games in the US (and for the Wii, I have a US version of the system anyway, so I have to buy them that way). Sadly, I found out last night that Super Smash Brothers Brawl got delayed yet again, so it looks like that particular brand of four-player goodness will have to wait a bit. I have requests from people to... um... come over and play with my Wii, and while I can have some fun with some Wii sports to show off the system, I really want to get Super Smash Bros. Brawl and play multiplayer games with that.

Six Degrees of Wikipedia

First of all, I am stealing this idea from Gazebo.

One of the things I study is real-world networks, and one of the major issues is how they are connected, which includes the even harder problem of how to navigate them when you don't know their structure. This field started with a brilliant sociology experiment by Stanley Milgram. Duncan Watts and Steve Strogatz were inspired by this experiment in their pioneering small world networks paper that appeared in Nature in 1998 (and was the subject of Duncan's Ph.D. thesis). This area of research has absolutely exploded since then, and I am one of the participants (though not one of the centrality players---though I do know some of the main people pretty well and have co-authored a couple papers with one of them and had another of them on my thesis committee), so I was obviously very excited to see Gazebo's blog entry. More recently, there was an e-mail version of Milgram's experiment (by Duncan Watts, Dodds, and I think one other person) and, of course, Jon Kleinberg recently won the Nevanlinna prize partly due to his research on network navigation.

As Gazebo writes, here are the rules:

1. Go to Wikipedia.
2. Click the random article link in the sidebar.
3. Open a second random article in another tab.
4. Try to find a chain of links (as short as possible) starting from the first article that leads to the second.


This is exactly the problem of network navigation, with the wikipedia network as the graph one is trying to navigate between one randomly chosen node to another. As with the Milgram and Watts experiments, we are using local information, though with one advantage---we can work both forwards and backwards. (We can't necessarily use backward links, but we can use the information obtained on the end page, which is much more extensive information than the information about the target that was given in the Milgram and Watts experiments.)

Thus, assuming a path exists (which a priori need not be the case, though it clearly usually will be) we want to find one of the paths of minimal path length. This is a hard problem. :)

My starting point was (1) Yvonne_John_Lewis and my target page was (N) Smethwick (UK Parliament constituency). N refers to the fact that this is the N'th page, so I will need N - 1 hops to get there.

I first found a path for which N = 8, but if I were a little more careful, I could have found N = 7 (I'll explain below) and I bet a couple other shortcuts could be found.

Here's what I did (with reasoning included):


2. England (because Lewis is a UK singer and I need a UK parliament constituency)
3. Parliament of England (because I need a UK parliament constituency)

note: parliament of UK didn't seem to be there; that's the one I really wanted

4. Parliament of the UK (that's what I ideally would have done with 3 if the link were there)
5. British House of Commons (perhaps I could have gotten here right from England?)
6. List of Parliamentary Constituencies in the United Kingdom (ok, so this is presumably on this website)

the one I want is in the West Midlands; why in bloody Hell is this not shown on the list of the constituencies in the West Midlands that are tabulated on this website; it should be here!!!! (ok crap, I just checked on the wikipedia entry I want that this was abolished in the 1974 elections... fuck! I should have been working backwards!!!!!)

7. List of former United Kingdom Parliamentary constituencies
8. Smethwick, my goal, so N = 8


I subsequently found a link directly from (4) to (6), reducing things to N = 7. (I checked and there is currently a link from England to British House of Commons, which have gotten me to N = 6.)

Anyway, thanks Gazebo for a very cool time-waster!

My wikipedia lineage

I just found yet another of my advisors/mentors on wikipedia, so I've got quite the lineage going. (Hopefully I can make them proud.) Thus far, my mentors with wikipedia pages include the following people:


Leonid Bunimovich, my official postdoc advisor at Georgia Tech (math department)

Predrag Cvitanovic, my unofficial postdoc advisor at Georgia Tech (physics department)

Michael Lacey, the PI of the VIGRE grant in Georgia Tech's math department (he wrote my recommendation letters that addressed teaching)

Richard Liboff, my Ph.D. advisor at Cornell

Jerry Marsden, my first SURF advisor at Caltech (and author of numerous recommendation letters for me back in the day)

Steve Strogatz, a member of my Ph.D. committee (representing my minor in Theoretical & Applied Mechanics)


Mentioned as a famous alum of the University of Cambridge's Theory of Condensed Matter group is Mike Cross, my postdoc advisor at Caltech. (His being mentioned in this manner suggests he probably will get his own page eventually.)

Lots of wikipedia pages also refer to John Guckenheimer (a member of my Ph.D. committee, representing my minor in Math), who is also likely to have his own page eventually. (I'm not sure if my final committee member, Greg Ezra, will end up with a wikipedia page.)

Gerald Whitham, my original faculty advisor at Caltech, probably deserves a page.

If one wants to generalize and consider mathematical genealogy, my grand-advisor Harold Grad (one of the fathers of kinetic theory) doesn't have a page but deserves one, his advisor was Richard Courant, and at that point one just keeps finding ultra-famous people as one looks at the advising history.

By the way, have I mentioned that mathematicians tend to be obsessed with academic genealogy? And that many of us have OCD?

WTF department: Wikipedia's "Notability guidlines"

Now, you might be wondering why I am flagging this post with a WTF.

Well, take a look at the page for Wikipedia's notability guidelines.

In particular, take a look at the chart on the right of the page that conatins specific categories for which wikipedia has published notability guidelines. One of them is pornographic actors. Hence, WTF.