Wikipedia discovery

You have to admit that Wikipedia has generated a ton of consumer surplus. Think about those guys coming door to door selling encyclopedias when you were kids? Every house had an encyclopedia, and they were all old and outdated. Except for stuff on animals or planets. That tended to never change, so of course the encyclopedias could be years old and still be fine. Today, though, they would stink since in a few short years we've lost Pluto as a planet, and constantly learning about new planets everyday in nearby solar systems. There's some error in Wikipedia of course, but it has amazingly efficient processes to minimize the errors on the more read entries (which really, if you wanted such processes, you'd want it on the most read entries), which is the strange open source tendency of the wikipedia community writers who are walking librarians correcting and revising entries.

Today I found an odd entry on Wikipedia. Last night we watched episode 3 of Lost, called appropriately "The Economist." I learned that Daniel Faraday, the odd scientist who reached the island with the 3 others, is named after the scientist Michael Faraday. Faraday's work was in electromagnetism apparently. It's long been speculated that electromagnetism or just something having to do with a magnetic field (is that the same thing?) is partly responsible for the weird occurrences on the island, like the healing, and the things crashing, and the compass with the spinning hands, and the weird light at times, and the fertility issues. So maybe that's a clue, though in Lost until they hit you over the head with something, you have to handle your clues carefully as they don't always lead to the things you think.

Looking around some more, I found this entry on a physicist at UConn named Ronald Mallett. Pretty bizarre entry in a way.

Ronald L. Mallett, Ph.D. is a professor of physics in the University of Connecticut.

Mallett was born in Roaring Spring, Pennsylvania, on March 3, 1945. When he was 10 years old, his father died, at age 33, of a massive heart attack. Inspired by a Classics Illustrated comic book version of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, Mallett resolved to travel back in time to save his father, which became his life's dream. In 1973, he received a Ph.D. from Penn State University. Also that year, he received the Graduate Assistant Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 1975, he was appointed a job at the University of Connecticut as an assistant professor, where he continues to work today. His research interests include general relativity, quantum gravity and time travel.

Time travel! It's all theoretical apparently at this point, though I think I saw that he has some experiments going on.