Wikipedia and the Meaning of Truth

Wikipedia’s accuracy and reliability will always be debated, but its one the best resources we got out there right now. Its problem is not really if it’s accurate or not, but more about how it deals with “truth”, which is not dealing it with it at all. From the article:

What makes a fact or statement fit for inclusion is that it appeared in some other publication–ideally, one that is in English and is available free online. “The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth,” states Wikipedia’s official policy on the subject.

There’s a great video I highly recommend watching about this same issue called The Truth According to Wikipedia. Bookmark it though. It’s a 48 minute doc.

The New Cult of Canon: Office Space

Great overview of why the movie Office Space has reached cult status.

There have been many portraits of cubicle culture before and after Office Space—The Office, Clockwatchers, Dilbert, and the early scenes of Joe Versus The Volcano immediately spring to mind—but none have laid out the parameters of this soul-sucking modern world quite so comprehensibly. 

Evidence of a Global SuperOrganism

This is a compelling read written by Kevin Kelly where he hypothesizes about an emerging Super Organism in “the cloud”. It sounds like something taken out of The Matrix, with things like the One Machine, but it all depends on how we define “intelligence”, “consciousness”, and “autonomy”. Kevin Kelly explains:

My hypothesis is this: The rapidly increasing sum of all computational devices in the world connected online, including wirelessly, forms a superorganism of computation  with its own emergent behaviors.

Superorganisms are a different type of organism. Large things are made from smaller things. Big machines are made from small parts, and visible living organisms from invisible cells. But these parts don’t usually stand on their own. In a slightly fractal recursion, the parts of a superorganism lead fairly autonomous existences on their own. A superorganism such as an insect or mole rat colony contains many sub-individuals. These individual organisms eat, move about, get things done on their own. From most perspectives they appear complete. But in the case of the social insects and the naked mole rat these autonomous sub individuals need the super colony to reproduce themselves. In this way reproduction is a phenomenon that occurs at the level of the superorganism.