Above, from top: Engraving of Kilroy on the WWII Memorial in Washington DC; “Abracadabra” definition from Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, available as full text on Google Books; paperboard templates by Karl Nawrot; illustration of tally sticks; mnemonic device for remembering Morse Code; results of research on chess players and memory chunking (click image to enlarge); numbers 1-40 constructed from the equivalent number of matchsticks by Julia Born; afterimage of black dots on a grid; the Hering Illusion applied to a circle.

The second Wikipedia Reader was created by ASDF (aka Mylinh and David) who kindly asked me to participate. I was honored, having been a huge fan of the first Wikipedia Reader after picking it up at the New Museum bookshop. Other contributors included curator Laurel Ptak, artist Amy Yao, designers and friends Ryan Waller and Dexter Sinister, and many more.

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Wikipedia on the Halting Problem: “In computability theory, the halting problem is a decision problem which can be stated as follows: given a description of a program and a finite input, decide whether the program finishes running or will run forever, given that input.” Alan Turing proved that, at least for his own purely abstract-but-nonetheless-computer-like Turing Machine, the halting problem cannot be solved. See also: Busy Beavers, Watchdog Timers, and a Dead Man’s Switch.

The nine categories of magical effects, according to Wikipedia: production, vanishing, transformation, restoration, teleportation, levitation, penetration, prediction, and escape.

Oh, Wikipedia, you’ve outdone yourself yet again with this list of eponymous laws. Includes everything from the famous Moore’s Law to the lesser-known Goodhart’s Law, which states rather poetically: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

Via the wonders of Wikipedia, we can experience a tesseract through a variety of descriptions: by its Schlaäfli symbol, Coxeter-Dynkin diagram, or an animated computer projection. I first experienced the word “tesseract” in the great book A Wrinkle in Time. Its author Madeleine L’Engle has recently passed away, but her wonderful book endures and its fourth-dimensional musings seem all the more poignant in her passing.

“Using a list of countries generated by The World Factbook database, flags of countries fetched from Wikipedia (as of 26th May 2007) are analysed by a custom made python script to calculate the proportions of colours on each of them. That is then translated on to a piechart using another python script. The proportions of colours on all unique flags are used to finally generate a piechart of proportions of colours for all the flags combined.” A great project, Flags by Colors, by media designer Shahee Ilyas (via Manystuff).

“Recently, Wikipedia had been the object of much controversy over the reliability of the its articles, and the frequent anonymity of its contributors. But during some recent critical events, like the Virginia Tech killings, the Southeast Asian tsunami in 2004, and the London bombings in 2005, the site has been transformed from an ever-growing reference book into a ever-updating news source.” NYT on Wikipedia’s coverage of the Virginia Tech killings.