Why I Love Wikipedia
I love Wikipedia. It is so much better than any other encyclopedias. Since each entry can contain inline links to other Wikipedia articles and so you end up jumping from entry to entry and end up at a topic completely unrelated to the one you started on. It would be interesting to see some network statistics of the relationships between entries.
Anyway, the other day I was reading the entry on hurricanes and through various links I ended up reading the "request for deletion" pages regarding some of the schools I went to. Here's just a few things I've learned from Wikipedia in the past couple of days:
- After the list of names for hurricanes is exhausted, the Greek alphabet is used. (What happens if a Greek-lettered hurricane has to be retired?)
- There are six lists of names that are used on a rotating basis, with particularly damaging hurricane names being retired and replaced.
- Southern hemisphere hurricanes are rare (only three cyclones have been observed there) and spin in the other direction.
- Global warming has little to no effect on hurricane creation.
- Cincinnati Bengals Wide Receiver Chad Johnson went to my high school, as did Sin City star Mickey Rourke.
- Adam Curry was the first owner of mtv.com, but when he left his VJing job there, MTV sued him for it (they settled out of court).
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