Society Wired

Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet

A look at the utopian vision of Wikipedia, the only not for profit in the top ten most visited sites on the web, and a journey through some of the tricky challenges inherent in creating any encyclopaedia, let alone an online one that is crowdsourced. Wikipedia is now so integrated into the web that its data arm powers all sorts of other services; a sign of its maturity to be sure, though also occasionally resulting in blips, such as when Apple’s Siri voice assistant “briefly thought Bulgaria’s national anthem was “Despacito”.

Life The New Yorker

Was Jeanne Calment the Oldest Person Who Ever Lived—or a Fraud?

Jeanne Calment was 122 years of age when she died in France in 1997, and the oldest person in the world. It was only some years after her death that people started to question whether 1875 was in fact the year of her birth, and suggesting that the woman who claimed to be Jeanne Calment was in fact her daughter Yvonne. This is a fascinating story of gerontology (including such alarming nuggets as the the Gompertz law which states that “the mortality rate for adult humans roughly doubles with every additional eight years of age”) and social history.