Because Wikipedia never stops enlightening me, and because Citizendium (the “elitist, anti net-cultural counter-project to Wikipedia,” as summed up by Florian Cramer) never stops boring me, I thought I’d post an annotated list of recent Wikipedia contrails. None of the following items can be found on Citizendium, and I’m not about to apply for the privilege to add them. Check the sidebar regularly to follow along at home.

• Art song: “Considered by afficionados to create musical experiences unsurpassed in sophistication, subtlety and dramatic truth.” Well, then.
• Pneumatic tubes: Did you know about the 60-kilometer pneumatic-tube mail-delivery system in Prague? Paris had a similar network of pneumatic tubes in use for mail delivery until 1984.
• Savile Row: Mentally preparing to shell out for a bespoke suit.
• Travelator: That high-speed walkway they have in Paris should immediately be installed at the Columbus Circle subway station here in Manhattan. Note: “it has been estimated that commuters using a [high-speed walkway] twice a day would save 11.5 hours a year.” Don’t we need these in New York more than they need them in France? This Wikipedia visit took place after idly searching for the name of the song in the background of the Geico commercial with the indignant caveman at the airport (it’s “Remind Me” by Royksopp).
• Cumberlandite: Extremely rare rock that only exists in Rhode Island. Often mistaken for meteorites; deemed sacred by the Nipmuck Indians.
• Steampunk: Cory Doctorow’s posts on Boing Boing finally got me to investigate this further. I told you history blogging is the new Twitter.
• Graham cracker: Originally developed by Reverend Sylvester Graham to suppress “unhealthy carnal urges.”
• 1 − 2 + 3 − 4 + · · ·: Good visuals.
• List of places blurred out on Google Maps: New York is currently the most blurred-out state.
• Coral Content Distribution Network: Cory Doctorow (there he is again!) used this to help distribute our recent 92Y Blog podcast of Kurt Vonnegut. Had to find out what the hell it is.

Work, travel and ironing have been consuming potential updates to this site but the 92nd Street Y summer season is now live. Go buy yourself an art class.

I’m also pleased to report that the New York Society of Association Executives just awarded us with the 2007 CyberSpace Award for 92Y.org in the donor category. Previous winners of the 9-year-old award include the Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center, the New York Botanical Garden, and us—we’re the only organization to have won twice. 400 nonprofit organizations’ websites were reviewed for “immediacy of overview, ease of navigation, aesthetics, consistency, timeliness of content, internal search capabilities, usefulness, interactability, originality and internet vision.” New York-centricity, I was told, was also a deciding factor. We’re honored.

Up til now my math-blog reading has been limited to Scott Aaronson’s Shtetl-Optimized (entertaining) and BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen’s LiveJournal (always glad to help). But Leland McInnes’ The Narrow Road is the kind of math blog you can sit down and have a drink with, because the posts are long and you probably aren’t going to fully grasp them anyway though it’s fun to try. McInnes is a mathematician completing his Ph.D. in pro-finite Lie rings. A pro-finite Lie ring, in case you cheated your way through abstract math, “is a compact Hausdorff topological Lie ring such that the open ideals of finite index form a neighbourhood base of 0.” But don’t let that scare you away. McInnes’ manifesto, If We Taught English the Way We Teach Math, is the best thing I’ve read today. You too can blame your elementary school teacher for focusing too much on the details and neglecting to instill in you an appreciation for the beauty and wonder of “the art of abstraction.” Then you can start at the beginning of Mr. McInnes’ blog and catch up.

• Joyce Images: Ulysses in postcards
• Philip K. Dick Book Cover Gallery [via Total Dick-Head]
• Art Fag City rounds up the New York net art galleries.
• Gallery of named graphs
• Soviet poster heaven
• Pixelator: Battling boring light criticism.

Scribd, the Y Combinator-backed “YouTube for documents” I and many others first blogged about a month ago, appears to be holding strong traffic-wise. Content-wise, it’s still largely a wasteland of crappy ebooks, but there are a few documents of interest buried amid the rubble. Here’s the best of what I’ve been able to find so far:

• The Mathematics of Electronic Music
• The Art of Noise: The 1913 Futurist manifesto, not the seminal British synthpop group with the scary girl video.
• Y Combinator Startup School 2007 Notes
• The Twilight Years of Cap’n Crunch and the importance of dentistry
• Mathematics Under the Microscope: Notes on Cognitive Aspects of Mathematical Practice
• Crazy Musical Scores: Indeed.
• Improving Tag-Clouds as Visual Information Retrieval Interfaces
• Pornsaints: “A brief essay on pornography and transcendence”
• Ruby on Rails cheat sheet: Potentially useful.
• William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: High-res scan
• Absinthe: The Hell-Drink That Can Put You In Your Grave: 1960s sweat mag scan

• BibliOdyssey captures the soul of the Americas.
• Scott Carney drops in on the world’s last handwritten newspaper.
• gmtPlus9(-15) visits the Museum of Japanese Anesthesia.
• Moon River discovers scratch atlases for a proposed 1977 Atlas of North American Cultures.
• Radical Cartography points to a map of all the ships in the ocean.
• The American Newspaper Repository implores you to dance in your bare feet.
• Plep observes Saturn from above.
• Galoshes fastened with key that locks rows of teeth: Behold the zipper.

Former Y-blogger Neal Ungerleider has a piece in this month’s Wired about boozy science nights at American bars.

I would like a drink with entomologist Justin O. Schmidt, creator of the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, courtesy of That’s How It Happened:

• 1.0 Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
• 1.2 Fire ant: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet and reaching for the light switch.
• 1.8 Bullhorn acacia ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.
• 2.0 Bald-faced hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.
• 2.0 Yellowjacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W.C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.
• 2.x Honey bee and European hornet.
• 3.0 Red harvester ant: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.
• 3.0 Paper wasp: Caustic and burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.
• 4.0 Pepsis wasp: Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath (if you get stung by one you might as well lie down and scream).
• 4.0 Bullet ant: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail in your heel.

Joe Lamantia is onto something with his idea for “cloud notes”—text-cloud versions of new books for use as preparation for cocktail-party conversation. He knows how to sell them:

[...] text clouds are the common executive summary on steroids and acid simultaneously; assembled with muscular syntactical and semantic processing, and fed to reading-fatigued post-literates as swirling blobs of giant words in wild colors, it consists of signifiers for reified concepts that tweak the eye-brain-language conduit directly.

As a public service for all my fellow reading-fatigued post-literates, here’s the text-cloud summary of Deeplinking (roll your own at TagCrowd):

We’re on a history kick at the 92nd Street Y today. It’s all because of Shorpy.

Research Room panorama. Full version.
The New York Public Library as we know it today began with the merging of three private collections, those of James Lenox, John Jacob Astor and Samuel J. Tilden (hence the library’s official name: The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations). Since then many other fabulously wealthy New York bibliofreaks have donated collections of their own, often centered around a personal obsession. Here’s a snack-sized run-down of some notable ones:

· The Spencer Collection of Illustrated Books and Manuscripts and Fine Bindings
Summary: William Augustus Spencer went down with the Titanic. Thankfully his collection of opulently bound illustrated books didn’t.
Standout: Almost everything is illuminated

· The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Summary: Thank God for book-loving physicians.
Standout: A copy of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, lovingly inscribed by Wilde to Reading Governor Major James Ormond Nelson.

· The George Arents Collection on Tobacco
Summary: Yes, tobacco.
Standout: Any of the compendiums of poems celebrating the “divine weed.”

· The George Arents Collection of Books in Parts
Summary: George Arents wasn’t just into cigarettes. He was also really into books published piecemeal over a period of time, sort of like blogs.
Standout: A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls by G.K. Chesterton.

· The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle
Summary: Financier Carl H. Pforzheimer, Sr. was secretly emo.
Standout: Harriet Westbrooke Shelley’s suicide letter.

· The Martin J. Gross Collection of Voltaire and His Contempories
Summary: Superstars of the French Enlightenment.
Standout: The very rare first Irish printing of Candide in English.

· The Leonard B. Schlosser Collection on the History of Papermaking
Summary: Paper exec and connoisseur Leonard B. Schlosser reminds you that we would never have gotten anywhere as a species without paper.
Standout: Carrot-slice paper.

The latest 92nd Street Y podcast is well worth a download, particularly if you have an inventor-grandfather.

From Petrus Apianus’ Astronomicum Caesareum (1540)
In case you missed it Friday, Maud Newton has the Metafiltered link of the day for rare-book fetishists and BibliOdyssey subscribers: The Rare Book Room offers hundreds of rare books in digital form via high-res photography. Octavo is the company behind the scanning. Almost anything in the religion category is worth a browse and the Firefox window resize.

We launched a much-needed redesign at the 92nd Street Y tonight. Embedded Flash, rollovers and RSS badges rule the day, and the content’s been lured away from the upper left-hand corner of the screen. Send us feedback and tweets on your new navigational experiences.

Once upon a time, before my time, text files were the most interesting thing on the internet. You could learn how to program computers, blow things up, pick up girls, obtain free phone calls, survive nuclear war, pirate TV signals, perform witchcraft and conquer Zork in one short evening without leaving your bedroom. You could still do this if you weren’t spending so much time on YouTube.

Scribd hopes to be the YouTube for text files, only the text files are now tricked-out with embeddable Flash players and convertable to every format around including MP3 with a British accent. They’re accompanied by statistics showing views, votes, referrers and locations of readers. Their uploaders get extensive profile pages. If more interesting people would upload more of them, this site could get unusually entertaining.

The Techcrunch commenters hate it, so it must be good. Start uploading those old Phracks.

UPDATE: Jason Scott, proprietor of Textfiles.com, offers his take on Scribd: “A gigantic, farting zeppelin of web 2.0 lazily rising into the sky to grab a little piece of the money sun before exploding in flames. Will they make it to the safety of the moon before they’re caught out for facilitating book piracy as a business model?”

When Ning relaunched with their “Create Your Own Social Network for Anything” tagline, I joked that someone should use Ning to create a social network for social networks. LibraryThing creator Tim Spalding was ahead of the game as usual and went and did exactly that: SocialCatalogers is a social network for people who make or who are for some reason profoundly interested in social cataloging sites. Social cataloging sites being “social” media sites centered around books, beer, words and other things people feel compelled to list and explore.

It’s a burgeoning micro-industry and if you share the love with me, join up.

Speaking of nerdy widgets, Random House and HarperCollins just came out with their own book widgets while I slept.

Both widgets allow you to read and search books, but the Random House widget is the clear winner for its self-contained design. Contrast it with the clunkier HarperCollins one.

For a good example, check out the widget for Random House’s Meta Math by Gregory Chaitin. My only gripe is they should make these things easier to find on their site by putting them all in one place.

Yes, even nerdier than manual pseudo-widgets for Wikipedia faves and Wordie lists. I’m talking real, creative web widgets for embedding on your blog, Myspace and wherever else you assert your precious individuality online.

YouTube arguably democratized the widget revolution with the embeddable video. Give people code, they showed, and they’ll run with it and spread your site’s name all over the web, provided you offer something worth embedding. Now everyone’s embedding everything and it doesn’t look like they’re going to stop. Why should they? But where are the truly interesting web widgets for discriminating embedders? Scroll down.

Gaping Void widget
Embittered, cluetrained cartoonist-blogger Hugh MacLeod had his cartoon widget up and running before those other cartoonists could say “viral marketing.”

Shelfari widget
Show off your books on a virtual, clickable bookshelf. You don’t buy books just to read them, do you?

The New Yorker Cartoon of the Day
Required cubicle decoration in New York, and now on your blog? Widgetbox created this cartoon-of-the-day widget because the Cartoon Bank hadn’t thought of it yet.

Random Wikipedia Article
Let people flip through random Wikipedia articles without leaving your beautiful website. Confuse your readers and celebrate the noosphere.

Urban Dictionary Word of the Day
When you start getting really into the widgets, don’t forget to maintain your street cred with this one.

Upcoming.org badge
Too stylized for my taste, but good if you want to show off all the awesome events on your radar.

The Best Stuff in the World
Make a collage of your favorite stuff. Isn’t that what widgets are for?

Blufr Trivia
This thing’s hard not to click. Particularly if you’re a nerd.

Head to Widgetbox to browse and preview endless widgets. Am I missing any good ones?

• List of White Label Social Networking Platforms
  Growing like Tom’s friend list.
• 10 Company Name Types on TechCrunch
  Compound or blend?
• Ning - Create Your Own Social Network for Anything
  Now everyone create their own social network so we can build a social social-network network.
• What the Web’s most popular sites are running on
  Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.
• New York Gets Googled
  Google’s Chelsea office = good omen for New York startup culture?

After I posted this silly pseudo-widget idea, Lauren emailed to say: “Wouldn’t an automated Wikipedia contrails widget be an imposition on your browser history? Scary!”

Maybe, but Slifeshare, which tracks every minute of your online activity in order to find other people doing similar things, is approximately 100 times scarier. Yet isn’t this what all this widgetry is leading toward? Banal surveillance media? Let’s be interesting then.