Wikipedia Brown

I've been way behind in my blogreading the last few weeks, owing to a huge amount of, you know, actual work for my day job, so this may have been all over the Internets already. On the off chance that it hasn't, via Ethan Zuckerman, a link to Wikipedia Brown and the Case of the Captured Koala:

Leroy Brown's head was like Wikipedia. It was full of facts he had learned there. He was like the entire Wikipedia site walking around on sneakers. Simon Baron-Cohen had written a paper about him.

It's done as a set of image files, which is kind of annoying, but it's worth reading all the way to the end.

Tags

More like this

Continuing the current discussion of the questionable quality of popular science journalism, British researcher Simon Baron-Cohen weighs in at the New Scientist with his personal experiences of misrepresented research. Baron-Cohen complains that earlier this year, several articles on his work…
Pseudoscience is effective. If it weren't, people wouldn't generate so much of it to try to justify opinions not supported by the bulk of the evidence. It's effective because people trust science as a method of understanding the world, and ideological actors want that trust conferred to their…
I have the soul of a stamp collector. Some might object that it's an unusually loud and psychedelic stamp collector, but I think it's so. It shows in my research (data-heavy, fussing over terminological definitions, with a lot of statistics), in my attacks on nebulous jargon and muddled…
So, a funny story about this. I posted a snippet of a fantasy story back in August, and enough people said nice things about it that I actually got off my ass and did some playing around to format the full story as an epub. This was, of course, complicated by the fact that computers are awful, but…