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Today's reading list

• Wikipedia trust coloring demo [ via Boing Boing ]

Wizkids at the UCSC Wiki lab created an algorithm that determines a Wikipedia author's reputation by examining how long their contributions last. With these reputation values, they then created a tool to highlight article text with shades of orange. White is trusted, orange is untrusted, and everything in between are varying levels of trust. This is quite an achievement, and I hope that it makes it into the Wikimedia code soon.

• Amazon Fresh revivifies WebVan in Seattle [ via TechCrunch > WebbAlert > Boing Boing ]

We still have our WebVan refrigerator magnet and pine for those Halcyon days of sitting in front of the computer to shop and having our groceries wating for us in the lobby refrigerators. Yay!

• That Whole Puppy-Burning Thing

A one-page story from 1997 by Jim Knipfel. One of many stories hosted on his site Slackjaw including a prominently notable blurb from Thomas Pynchon. I haven't read anything else yet, but TWP-BT had a nice sardonic and parable feeling to it.

• 30 Day Challenge

Make your first $10 in 30 days. Entry fee is simply your email address. A co-worker snagged this from Digg and is signed up. All of the web references I can find are from (1) home business news sites that dutifully praise the event, (2) home businesses/blogs that are signed up for it, and (3) Digg. Not sure if I'm going to take the time...

Against the Day; Thomas Pynchon

The Crying of Lot 49; Thomas Pynchon

Maximalism

Maximalism [Wikipedia]. A term I've heard frequently but have only now looked it up. Art with a rich density of style and content.

Works from this genre are generally bright, sensual, and visually rich. ... Maximalism is used to describe the very extended post-modern novels, such as those by David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon, where digression, reference and elaboration of detail occupy a greater and greater fraction of the text.

I finally understand the label and then Salon says it's dead!

Style guide

This is an explanation of the formatting styles used on this site. Updates will be made as I formalize the different aspects of layout and style.

More on Venus

The Venus transit was a major theme throughout Mason & Dixon, and it is a signature trademark of Pynchon's stories. Many of his themes deal with ineffable transition periods (e.g. the parabolic arc of a rocket as it changes from ascending to descending in Gravity's Rainbow).

The reason behind early attempts at recording the transit was to calculate the distance of the Earth from the sun (the astronomical unit).

At the suggestion of Edmond Halley, the transit pair of 1761 and 1769 was used to try to determine the precise value of the astronomical unit using parallax. Numerous expeditions were made to various parts of the world in order to observe these transits; in effect this was the first international scientific collaboration.

Pynchon had Jeremiah Dixon involved in this measurement. I never researched whether Dixon actually did this or not.

Venus

On June 8th, we'll get to see the unspectacular but momentous transit of Venus. This event is when Venus passes between the Earth and the sun, and happens every 122 years in pairs eight years apart (so the previous two were in 1882 and 1874, the next two in 2012 and 2134). Oops, I took the 122 years number as gospel. It's apparently a cycle of 122 years -> 8 years -> 105 years -> 8 years -> 122 years, etc. Hope for clear skies or watch here.

(Thomas Pynchon wrote about the previous transit in his novel Mason & Dixon.)

Review: Quicksilver, Neal Stephenson (4/5)

I (finally) finished Quicksilver last week. Here's a review, and some additional links for reference:

• Metaweb (Wiki on Quicksilver)
• Quicksilver at Amazon
• Neal Stephenson's Web Page