One problem with running a Wikipedia sightseeing blog is that Wikipedia is constantly changing, so my links go old after a while. This is especially sad in the case of the “sexual stubs”, which is still my favorite Wikipedia page. So I did some digging and found that now, it’s simply “sex stubs”. Enjoy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Sex_stubs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Sex-stub
Today’s link — Cremaster muscle
The cremaster is the muscle that raises and lowers the scrotum. That’s already a little unnerving to contemplate, but I think this description of how it can be triggered “clinically” is even more unsettlingly intimate.
Clinically, a reflex arc can be demonstrated by lightly stroking the skin of the inner thigh downwards from the hip towards the knee. This causes the cremaster muscle on the same side to rapidly contract, raising that testicle. This so called cremasteric reflex is much more pronounced in boys than in men.
As if the notion of a doctor “lightly stroking” my inner thigh weren’t shuddery enough, they had to top it with the note about boys.
Today’s link — Sea cucumber:
Sea cucumbers breathe out their butt. A sea cucumber can have a worm, a fish, or even a crab living in its butt.
Sea cucumbers extract oxygen from water in a pair of ‘lungs’ or respiratory ‘trees’ that branch off the cloaca just inside the anus, so that they ‘breathe’ by drawing water in through the anus and then expelling it. A variety of fishes, most commonly pearl fishes, have evolved a commensalistic symbiotic relationship (commensalism) with sea cucumbers in which the pearl fish will live in sea cucumber’s cloaca using it for protection from predation, a source of food (the nutrients passing in and out of the anus from the water), and to develop into their adult stage of life. Many polychaete worms and crabs have also specialized to use the cloacal respiratory trees for protection by living inside the sea cucumber.
Today’s link — Domain name:
From the subsection titled “Caveat Emptor”, about the process of choosing good domain names:
Care should always be exercised when registering a domain name: DNS is case-insensitive and the modern trend of words run together with intercapping can be misinterpreted when converted to lowercase. Who Represents, a database of artists and agents, chose http://www.whorepresents.com; Experts Exchange, the programmers’ site, famously had http://www.expertsexchange.com; Pen Island unwisely chose http://www.penisland.net; a therapists’ network thought http://www.therapistfinder.com looked good and of course the Italian power company PowerGen Italia became http://www.powergenitalia.com.
Sadly, most of these are dubious or outright fakes. There’s a Snopes page about PowerGen Italia. penisland.net looks like a straight-faced hoax (notice the descriptive text about thick pens, long skinny pens, and big black pens), and the Expert Exchange website is actually www.experts-exchange.com, with a hyphen. But they’re still good examples of how phrases can scan differently when they’re written without spaces in all lowercase.
And, strangely enough, www.WhorePresents.com actually is the website for Who Represents, and www.TheRapistFinder.com actually does look like a therapist locator site.
I guess I’ll rewrite the section to reflect this, once I get some time.
Today’s Link — Talk:Phyllis Schlafly
Also — Wikipedia:Wikipedians with articles
There are a lot of biographical articles on Wikipedia about living people, and a lot of these living people are active on the Internet. This being so, I’ve long wondered when I would stumble across a biographical page (other than a vanity page, or a page about a prominent Wikipedian) where the subject of the article stops in and says hi.
Well I haven’t found it yet, but I’ve found something close: a budding edit war on the Phyllis Schlafly page, between an experienced Wikipedian and someone who identifies himself as Roger Schlafly, a relative of Phyllis (her son probably, according to Google).
Things like this apparently have happened before, because Wikipedia already has a policy strongly discouraging people from writing or editing articles about themselves. To me, though, it’s still an interesting issue. On the one hand, autobiography (and, indeed, writing about your parents) goes against the long-standing Wikipedia policies of Verifiability and, arguably, No Original Research. On the other hand, no one knows more about a person’s life than that person themselves. It makes me wonder, would the author of a book be frowned upon if they corrected an article about their book? Then why should we frown upon those who take part in the discussion of their biographical article?
I suppose ultimately the Wikipedia policies are right. Normal people can’t be NPOV about themselves, and neither can their children. But when you look at it in a certain light, it certainly is odd to trust information from newspapers, books, and Google more than information from the article’s subject’s son.
An interesting page to watch, on this subject, is Wikipedia:Wikipedians with articles, which, as the name implies, lists all the people with Wikipedia articles about them, who have publicly announced themselves as editors of Wikipedia. The only people I recognize on the list are Roger Ebert (film critic), Richard Stallman (GNU dude), and, of course, Jimbo Wales.
I’m not entirely convinced that the user Rebert really is Roger Ebert, though. Why would he log in to Wikipedia just to quote himself saying that “turtle” is a comedy word?
Today’s link — Magic spoilers
I’ve always hated magicians. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind comedians who use magic, people who are really good at cheating with cards, and other magic-related entertainers. But the David Copperfields of the world, whose only skill is creating optical illusions using a fog machine, rhinestones, and a staring-contest facial expression — they’ve always bugged me. They’re like a grown-up version of the adults who would taunt me as a child by doing the “got your nose” trick. That bugged me then, and magicians bug me now.
So, hating magicians as I do, I love to read how their magic tricks actually work. Wikipedia’s list of magic tricks article describes the workings of many tricks, though some of the ones listed there don’t have an explanation. So, for a list of just the tricks which have an explanation, try the special page linked to at the top of this article. That’s the page that shows all the articles that contain the “magic spoiler” tag, used to warn people that the explanation for the trick follows, and they shouldn’t read it if they don’t want to ruin the magic.
Who wouldn’t want to know why the trick works? All of us, according to magicians! They argue this is just one of the many problems with the exposure of magic tricks. They also make a number of spurious legal claims about copyright and patent, and then finally appeals on behalf of their starving kids. To see some magicians in action attempting to suppress the free spread of knowledge, check out the discussion page for the “Out of this World” card trick.
Today’s link — David Icke
In case you don’t listen to Art Bell, David Icke is a conspiracy theorist who espouses the Illuminati conspiracy with a twist — the Illuminati are all lizard people. The article says that some of his theories about the Nazis and the Holocaust had made him popular with British neo-Nazis:
…Icke has strongly denied that he is an anti-Semite, and has stressed his belief that the Illuminati, which, he says, includes the Rothschild family, are lizards, not Jews.
It puts a whole new light on V, huh?
Today’s link — Image:Lawndart.jpg
This one’s short and sweet: an hilarious US government cartoon of a child playing with lawn darts. Remember lawn darts? I, like most people, never played with them, but I certainly recall thinking how funny the concept was when I heard that they’d been outlawed.
Today’s link — User:Rama/Sexuality_drawings
While reading the articles linked from Category:Sex-related stubs, I had noticed that one illustrator had volunteered to create pen drawings for many of the topics, sometimes with ironic details in the background. The most notable of these was the illustration for the potentially impossible sex-act of autocunnilingus, which features a model of a klein bottle on a shelf in the background.
Today I was sending a friend a link to the autocunnilingus image, when I noticed that the image was linked to by another article, namely Rama’s collection of sexual illustrations.
For those of you who aren’t intimately familiar with the usage of Wikipedia, this page illustrates a few lesser-known page types. For starters, whenever you see an image in Wikipedia, you can click on that image to be taken to a page devoted to it. This page can be edited like any other Wikipedia page, to allow the image to be annotated. Each image page even has a discussion page of its own where people can make suggestions or ask questions about the image (these tend to get vandalized a lot because they’re seldom trod).
This page itself, though, is an even more obscure page type. It’s a user subpage. A user can potentially create an unlimited number of these, by just creating new pages with a url like en.wikipedia.org/wiki/username/pagename. Such pages are used by people to store rough drafts of articles, to put up longer discussion items, and to create collections such as the one featured here.
Anyway, it’s hard to talk seriously about a page full of ink drawings of sexual positions, but I actually think Rama’s work is pretty impressive, in a non-pornographic sense. These pictures, which are of a delicate subject matter, manage to be informative without being either prurient or prudish. My hat is off to this volunteer. His work is one of the examples where Wikipedia goes right. The Wikipedia system is open-minded enough to have an illustrated article about doggy style sex, and mature enough not to make it into porn.
Today’s link — Crisco
Someone referred to San Francisco as “Frisco”, which made me think of Crisco, which is how I discovered that Crisco was not originally meant to be consumed by humans. It was originally meant to be candle wax. Not all that surprising, but I love the way they worded it in this article:
Electricity began to diminish the candle market, and since the product looked like lard, they began selling it as a food.
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