I really just like the way wikipedia goes to town on the entries for Heaven and Hell.

I really like this entry on Intentional Living. I was watching Six Feet Under and I got turned onto the Quakers, and how they have these meetings where people just sit there, in peace. I started googling about quakers and found out that they also believe in living a simple life, and that they were one of the first, outspoken abolitionists.

My life is somewhat a combination of trying to live a simple life with minimal responsibilities, and also well within my financial means. This would make me just a plain-lifer, but I also include this aspect of leveraging technology and tricks to optimize my experience. The idea of "intentional living" is just a handy bit of phraseology to make me think, "hmm, there's a lot of people like me, even if they live with intent in different ways."

Interesting story about Vietnam POW Doug Hegdahl. Seems like the way I'd like to handle things if I were a POW. (Found his name via Slate article asking, Did McCain's captors really need permission to release him from Hanoi Hilton?)

This is interesting bit from wikipedia on the Jingle

Jingle

A jingle is a memorable slogan, set to an engaging melody, mainly broadcast on radio and sometimes on television commercials.

History

The jingle had no definitive debut: its infiltration of the radio was more of an evolutionary process than a sudden innovation. Product advertisements with a musical tilt can be traced back to 1923, around the same time commercial radio came to the public. However, if one entity has the best claim to the first jingle it’s General Mills, who aired the world’s first singing commercial. The seminal radio bite, entitled "Have You Tried Wheaties?", was first released on the Christmas Eve of 1926. It featured four male singers, who were eventually christened "The Wheaties Quartet", singing the following lines:

Have you tried Wheaties?
They’re whole wheat with all of the bran.
Won’t you try Wheaties?
For wheat is the best food of man.

While the lyrics may appear hokey to modern day society, the advertisement was an absolute sensation to consumers at the time. In fact, it was such a success that it served to save the otherwise failing brand of cereal. In 1929, General Mills was seriously considering dropping Wheaties on the basis of poor sales. However, advertising manager Sam Gale pointed out that an astounding 30,000 of the 53,000 cases of cereal that General Mills sold were in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, the only location where “Have You Tried Wheaties?” was being aired at the time[2]. Encouraged by this incredible results of this new method of advertising, General Mills changed tactics entirely. Instead of dropping the cereal, it purchased nationwide commercial time for the advertisement. The resultant climb in sales single-handedly saved the now über-popular cereal.

After the massive success that General Mills enjoyed, other companies began to investigate this new method of advertisement. The jingle movement was bursting. Ironically, part of the appeal of the jingle was that it circumvented broadcasting giant NBC’s prohibition of direct advertising[1]: this new variety of advertisement could get brand’s name embedded in the heads of potential customers without trying to sell it. The art of the jingle reached its peak around the economic boom of the 1950's.

The jingle was used in the advertising of branded products such as breakfast cereals, candy, cheerios and snacks (including soda pop) and other processed foods, tobacco and alcoholic beverages, as well as various franchises and products that might reflect personal image such as automobiles, personal hygiene products (including deodorants, mouthwash, shampoo, and toothpaste) and household cleaning products, especially detergent.

Today, with the ever-increasing cost of licensing preexisting music, a growing number of businesses are rediscovering the custom jingle as a more affordable option for their advertising needs.

This is news to me! Republican Charles Curtis was a quarter Kaw Indian, and vice president to Herbert Hoover during 1929-1933. Some ideas come to mind:

• Barack Obama's potential ascendancy as the first African-American President seems a little less interesting or novel.
• Only 70 years ago, Republicans were, in some ways, the "diversity party"?
• Was America open-minded 70 years ago? (during the Jazz Age and Roaring Twenties)
• If so, how did we lose that?
• Does our collective amnesia of this factoid point to a property of the media that always seeks to exalt our current generation? i.e. Barack Obama's story is much more interesting if we forget about Charles Curtis.
• "News" comes as much from discovering the past as it does from experiencing the present (or the FOXNews version of it)

My understanding of history between the end of the Civil War up until the Great Depression is totally blank save for a few random interesting tidbits, such as the prevalence of marijuana usage, Nietzsche, Freud, and the Titanic. What if we as a society we were more enlightened in 1907 than we are now?

Six flags over Texas is the slogan used to describe the six nations that have had sovereignty over various parts of the land now known as Texas. This slogan has been incorporated into shopping malls, theme parks (Six Flags) and other enterprises. The "six flags" are also shown on the reverse of the Seal of Texas.

Spain

The first flag belonged to Spain, who ruled parts of Texas from 1529 to 1685 and from 1690 to 1810. There were two versions of the Spanish flag used during this period. Both designs incorporate the "lion and castle" emblems of León and Castile.

France

The second flag belonged to France from 1685 to 1690. In 1684, French nobleman Rene Robert Cavelier founded a colony on the Texas Gulf Coast called Fort Saint Louis. The colony was unsuccessful, and was soon abandoned. During this time, there was no official French flag, so a number of different designs are used in displays of the "six flags".

Mexico

The third flag belonged to Mexico from 1810 (Mexico's declaration of independence) to 1836 (Texas's declaration of independence).

Republic of Texas

The fourth flag belonged to Republic of Texas from 1836 to 1845. The republic had two national flags during its history, the first being the so-called "Burnet Flag" (see Flag of Texas). The "Lone Star Flag", the final national flag, is also the state flag.

United States of America

The fifth flag belonged to the United States of America from 1845 to 1861 and from 1865 to the present day.

Confederate States of America

The sixth flag belonged to the Confederate States of America from 1861 to 1865. During this time, the Confederacy had three official national flags. The first national flag, the Stars and Bars, is the flag most commonly used in the "six flags".

Historical Sidenote

There is a seventh flag for those who live in the southern part of Texas along the Rio Grande river: The flag of the Republic of the Rio Grande. It is not considered one of Texas's flags because the Republic of Texas and the Republic of the Rio Grande both claimed some of the same land. However, in Laredo, the capital of the short-lived Republic of the Rio Grande, the local newspaper displays seven flags instead of six.

See also

• History of Texas
• Flag of Texas

From Wikipedia

Interesting paragraph on wikipedia's entry for Alternative society:

Mahatma Gandhi and his followers such as Satish Kumar advocate, as an alternative to violent revolution, the creation of alternative social services, alternative transportation systems, alternative food and clothing production, alternative housing, alternative medicine, alternative arts and alternative communications media including an alternative press. By recreating every facet of society and providing better services than the official ones the plan is that the people will flock to the alternative society and desert the establishment. Then the leaders of the establishment would follow. Thus change would be accomplished without violence.

Yeah! Let's do it!

Yet another gem in wikipedia: wikipedia's entry on Egalitarianism

Money is a funny thing with hipsters. They exist in a state of perpetual luxuriant slumming. They drink blue-collar beers but hold white-collar jobs. Or vice versa. Whether he comes from above or below, the hipster takes care never to appear to be striving. Class anxiety isn’t hip. There’s something utopian about the trucker hat. But of course the hipster couldn’t afford to dress down if there weren’t a taut social safety net in place. Debt relief from mom or dad might be just a phone call away. Then there’s that steady freelancing gig that’s always there when you need it, no matter how distasteful it might be to proofread ad copy or put on that catering uniform. And let’s not forget that guy you can count on. His star always burned a bit dimmer than yours, but it never burns out. Perhaps he wears glasses, but without irony. There’s something weird about his apartment—it’s nice, not squalid. You may not talk to him much anymore—he’s not in your crowd, not hip enough, I guess, but loyal, and responsible, still holding down the same basically shitty job. He’ll always bail you out or put you up. -- http://www.nplusonemag.com/neato.html

Sounds a lot like me.
(CF: wikipedia's entry on "hipster")

I once entered an epistemology class at Stanford and I was like, "what the heck is this stuff." Oh yeah, it was a philosophy class, my bad. epistemology is the study of knowledge, like on a technical level. I think I just left the room frustrated muttering well that's what YOU think.

Recently, though, I stumbled upon a great discussion about knowledge and life. It's from wikipedia's discussion on NPOV (neutral point-of-view):

Wikipedia is a general encyclopedia, which means it is a representation of human knowledge at some level of generality. But human beings disagree about specific cases; for any topic on which there are competing views, each view represents a different idea of what the truth is, and insofar as that view contradicts other views, its adherents believe that the other views are false and therefore not knowledge. Where there is disagreement about what is true, there's disagreement about what constitutes knowledge. Wikipedia works because it's a collaborative effort; but, whilst collaborating, how can we solve the problem of endless "edit wars" in which one person asserts that p, whereupon the next person changes the text so that it asserts not-p?

A solution is that we accept, for the purposes of working on Wikipedia, that "human knowledge" includes all different significant theories on all different topics. So we're committed to the goal of representing human knowledge in that sense. Something like this is surely a well-established sense of the word "knowledge"; in this sense, what is "known" changes constantly with the passage of time, and when we use the word "know", we often use so-called scare quotes. In the Middle Ages, we "knew" that demons caused diseases. We now "know" otherwise.

We could sum up human knowledge (in this sense) in a biased way: we'd state a series of theories about topic T, and then claim that the truth about T is such-and-such. But again, consider that Wikipedia is an international, collaborative project. Nearly every view on every subject will be found among our authors and readers. To avoid endless edit wars, we can agree to present each of the significant views fairly, and not assert any one of them as correct. That is what makes an article "unbiased" or "neutral" in the sense we are presenting here. To write from a neutral point of view, one presents controversial views without asserting them; to do that, it generally suffices to present competing views in a way that is more or less acceptable to their adherents, and also to attribute the views to their adherents. Disputes are characterized in Wikipedia. They are not re-enacted.

To sum up the primary reason for this policy: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, a compilation of human knowledge. But since Wikipedia is a community-built, international resource, we cannot expect collaborators to agree in all cases, or even in many cases, on what constitutes knowledge in a strict sense. We can, therefore, adopt the looser sense of "human knowledge" according to which a wide variety of conflicting theories constitute what we call "knowledge." We should, both individually and collectively, make an effort to present these conflicting views fairly, without advocating any one of them, with the qualification that views held only by a tiny minority of people should not be represented as though they are significant minority views, and perhaps should not be represented at all.

There is another reason to commit ourselves to this policy. Namely, when it is clear to readers that we do not expect them to adopt any particular opinion, this leaves them free to make up their minds for themselves, thus encouraging intellectual independence. Totalitarian governments and dogmatic institutions everywhere might find reason to be opposed to Wikipedia, if we succeed in adhering to our non-bias policy: the presentation of many competing theories on a wide variety of subjects suggests that we, the creators of Wikipedia, trust readers' competence to form their own opinions themselves. Texts that present multiple viewpoints fairly, without demanding that the reader accept any one of them, are liberating. Neutrality subverts dogmatism, and nearly everyone working on Wikipedia can agree this is a good thing.

The author is Larry Sanger, a co-founder of wikipedia.

This is a great example of positive philosophistry. Note how the author doesn't necessarily try to pin down the precise definition of knowledge. Instead he gives the English language his best shot at describing what knowledge should be construed as in wikipedia. The discussion also involves a heavy emphasis on the applications of this discussion.

Check out wikipedia's entry on God as an example of where they shine. Their entry on George W. Bush, on the other hand, should count as a failure.