Metaweb talk:FAQ
From the Quicksilver Metaweb.
Add your questions about the Metaweb to the bottom of this page. Site editors will collect the questions and answer them in the FAQ.
this isnt perhaps the right place to write about this, but i think i can help a lot with the concept of the "metaweb". I have spent a lot of time working on various user interfaces, and I like where this one is going, but feel like there is a lot of work to be done. there are a lot of ideas i have on this, but think i will start elaborating only if there is interest... here or slushymunkee@hotmail.com.
I could be mistaken, but this is a Wiki site. See http://www.wiki.org for more information.
Not just any old wiki!
This site is running the Wikipedia software, which is (I believe) the most power wiki software ever created.
Many people think tikiwiki is more capable and MoinMoinWiki is more flexible. And the reliance on MySQL is unwise in the extreme. Mediawiki's most likely fate is to die once it helps to set the wikitext standard.
I suppose it has to be, as Wikipedia is by far the largest wiki and the most used. We even use the software for our own company's internal documentation and project notes. Very handy!
Not that there isn't plenty of other wiki software out there. I've even written some myself. Also check out TWiki if you're going to set up a new wiki.
There's another one!
A surprising end to a chapter (Page 92)
My apologies are offered, as my first posting concerns the very end of the chapter "Aboard the Minerva, off the Coast of New England, November 1713", and is not some brilliantly incisive scientific or historical comment.
Having bought "Quicksilver" this week, I have just got to the end of the chapter above, where the last paragraph ends '...watching the gravy slosh with the ship's heaving (a microcosm of the Atlantic?), and all of a sudden it's " and that's where the chapter ends. This is the newly released UK hardback, an I'd love to know the rest of this sentence on page 92. Thank you. Ian
Just keep reading to the title of the next chapter: "All of a sudden it's... The Plague Year, Summer 1665." --Jeremy 15:30, 4 Oct 2003 (PDT)
The Eating Habits of Monsieur le Duc D'Arcachon
The Duke's predilection for rotten fish intrigues me. Is this a reference to a specific myth or reltively obscure cultural practice? Is it an archaic remedy? Or is it wholly a literary conceit - something to suggest Arcachon's monstrous nature... or what?
Stephenson:Neal:Quicksilver:576:rotten fish (Neal Stephenson) addresses it.
Quicksilver as the source of an explanation of the world ?
Hi. Isnt' there something pretentious in this Metaweb project ? I.e : The rationale seems to be this one : at first, explanations will be put on topics closely related to Quicksilver, and it will gradually shift to non-related topics, the goal being to provide a site where people can find good explanations about things. In the end, won't it be strange to get a fully documented web site, full of explanations about everything in the world, and to be able to say : it all started with Quicksilver ?
I added a couple of hopefully non-controversial items. The Wikipedia similarity should be addressed up front since there's already an article on it. And suggesting to possibly-newbie end users that they can or should run mediawiki on their own is a really unfair thing to do. Most of the developers themselves advise against anyone else using it - due mostly to MySQL problems.
Before reading Quicksilver, I was under the impression that quicksilver was mercury. Yet these two substances were not treated interchangably in the book. Rather, it seemed they were different substances. Every dictionary I searched listed mercury as the first definition of quicksilver. Are they the same? Are they composed of the same metals as an alloy? I am losing sleep over this one.
Quicksilver, mercury, and philosophikal mercury
Mercury and quicksilver are the same, in reality and in the novel. Philosophikal Mercury is a different substance altogether.