24 March 2008

Amusing Wikipedia Articles: "Real life"

I love it when Wikipedia editors thoroughly cross-reference their entries. Although such dutifulness can be a problem, it also helps you find pages you'd never have guessed existed. As a case in point, when reading today about magic cookies (I was passed there by reference), I came across the following sentence, complete with what I thought was a surprising link:

"A magic cookie is analogous to, for example, the token supplied at a coat check (cloakroom) counter in real life."

Of course, there are all kinds of albums, books, etc. of that name, but the entry you're taken to is actually about, you know, "life or consensus reality outside of an environment that is generally seen as fiction or fantasy."

I'm glad I wasn't the only one who thought of Russell's Paradox when contemplating the seemingly transfinite size of the set of all Wikipedia articles. Of course, its actual cardinality (right now) is a paltry 2,301,678, at least according to this.

Anybody have favorite humorous articles? Leave a comment.

1 comment:

Kyle Matthew Oliver said...

My favorite today: Erdős–Bacon number. Strictly speaking, though, I suppose this entry's really a fairly normal Wikipedia article about a funny idea.

(Thanks xkcd #403 --which, as it happens, can be found today at http://www.qwantz.com/.)