EBlogger

I have a couple of search ‘bots that track the use of “Britannica” and related keywords in the blogosphere. These frequently find “spam blogs” created by a robot to target specific ad-sense or YPN keywords. These fake blogs will crib content from other sites that seem to be related to their keywords, in hopes of drawing context-sensitive text ads that offer high rate of return. Since Britannica covers a broad set of topics, they frequently copy content from EB’s site.

Today I stumbled across one of these spam blogs that targets, of all things, the keyword “ping pong” (yes, as in “table tennis“). A search on google for “ping pong” currently shows nine “Sponsored Links”, so perhaps that is not such a funny idea after all. (I’m not going to link to it, as I don’t want to reward the behavior.)

This particular entry cribbed from an interesting article from the Britannica Student Encyclopedia on Ping-Pong diplomacy: “an episode that occurred in 1971, as the United States was just beginning to restore normal relations with the People’s Republic of China after more than 20 years. As a thaw in relations between the two countries was becoming evident, the Chinese government invited the United States table tennis team […] to visit Beijing and play in exhibition matches. […] The American team lost its exhibition matches […] but the Chinese team was invited to visit the United States. China’s government also allowed American and Canadian newspaper and television reporters into the country to cover the event. Within a year, Nixon himself visited China, and normal diplomatic relations were restored within the decade.”

Here’s an interesting tidbit:

Recently Saugata noted that the name “Pakistan” is in fact an acronym:

In a 1933 pamphlet Choudhary Rahmat Ali, a Cambridge student, coined the name Pakstan (later Pakistan), on behalf of those Muslims living in Punjab, Afghan (North-West Frontier Province), Kashmir, Sind, and Balochistan. Alternatively the name was said to mean “Land of the Pure.”

(from Pakistan - History - Background to partition.)

American puppeteer Jim Henson, born this day in 1936, was the creator of the Muppets (a meld of “marionettes” and “puppets”), whose characters included Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Big Bird, and the Cookie Monster.

[via This Day in History - 24 September

Also see EB’s index entries for Sesame Street, marionette, or string puppet, puppetry, and various entries on muppet.

In honor of the 100th anniversary of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, the French city of Nantes hosted a stunning parade. Impressive photos and video are available on the city’s website. (More EB coverage of Verne in the science fiction article and elsewhere)

[Via screenhead]

September 22 is World Car Free Day, an annual event seeking to celebrate and encourage alternatives to automobile transportation, such as mass transit or bicycles. Britannica has a number of related resources including in-depth articles on the history of transporation and transportation economics.

Everyone knows that these even-toed ungulates are the tallest of all land animals, but did you know that giraffes have prehensile tongues nearly one meter long?

In the 1930s quantum theory pioneer Erwin Schrödinger proposed his famous thought experiment, in which a cat in a closed box appears to be both alive and dead at the same time until someone observes it, as a demonstration of the philosophical paradoxes involved in quantum theory.

In 1986, an experiment conducted by David Wineland and colleagues of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, constructed an actual Schrödinger’s cat scenario, using a single beryllium ion in place of the cat. This experiment and others are described in Physics (from Mathematics and Physical Sciences) from the Britannica Year in Review 1997.

Schrödinger was born on this day, August 12^th, 1887.

“You can’t play anything on a horn that Louis hasn’t played.” — Miles Davis on Louis Armstrong

Happy birthday Satchmo.

(Trivia question: Where does the name “Satchmo” come from?)

[Via Britannica’s This Day in History]

In Britannica’s Roller Coasters: Inventing the Scream Machine Wired, Make, TheFeature.com, Boing Boing, etc. contributor David Pescovitz presents the history, physics and engineering of roller coasters through words, pictures and animation.

For your Friday fun: X-Entertainment’s Commercial Downloads Center archives American TV commericals from the 1980s, including one they label Annoying Encyclopedia Britannica Boy.