I'm famous!

I'm famous!

Well, sort of. An erratum I submitted to the Unicode Consortium (or is it "Unicode, Inc."? That's what the footer of the email I received said) got accepted and is now in the list of Updates and Errata for The Unicode Standard, Version 5.0.

Unfortunately, it doesn't have "my name in lights", so I'll just have to know contentedly that the erratum timestamped 2007-June-7 is due to my report.

Wikigroaning

Originally from SomethingAwful, apparently; via jwz, who posted an entry about this:

The premise is quite simple. First, find a useful Wikipedia article that normal people might read. For example, the article called "Knight." Then, find a somehow similar article that is longer, but at the same time, useless to a very large fraction of the population. In this case, we'll go with "Jedi Knight." Open both of the links and compare the lengths of the two articles. Compare not only that, but how well concepts are explored, and the greater professionalism with which the longer article was likely created. Are you looking yet? Get a good, long look. Yeah. Yeeaaah, we know, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. (We're calling it Wikigroaning for a reason.) The next step is to find your own article pair and share it with your friends, who will usually look for their own pairs and you end up spending a good hour or two in a groaning arms race. The game ends after that, usually without any clear winners... but hey, it beats doing work.

Lots of examples in jwz's entry ("Half-life" vs. "Half-Life 2", "Real life" vs. "Second Life", "Category:American philosophers" vs. "List of big-bust models and performers", "Women's suffrage" vs. "List of fictional gynoids and female cyborgs", "Marine (military)" vs. "Imperial stormtrooper", etc. etc.).

I'm not sure whether to be amused or what.

A physics teacher begs for his subject back

A physics teacher begs for his subject back: an open letter to AQA and the Department for Education

In a nutshell, while he is still called a physics teacher, what he is teaching is no longer the precise science he loves but unquantifiable debates based on vague specifications and dominated by topics such as global warming. Students debate the merits and disadvantages of nuclear power plants while not learning much about how they work or what radiation is.