Entries such as the one on Lolita demonstrate why perfection on Wikipedia remains an "unattainable" goal—when the topic is contentious, perfection will always butt heads against "is completely neutral and unbiased." One man's undeniable literary masterpiece is another man's abominable pedophilic trash, and they're both editors on Wikipedia. The edits to the Lolita page (and any Wikipedia page) can seem tedious and petty, and many of them are. But the users’ vigilance in keeping some words and changing others, and debating over content and style, does have a purpose: it keeps critical thinking alive and well. The writing, editing, rewriting and re-editing process of a Wikipedia page creates a new entity—the Lolita Wikipedia page, which is not Nabokov's Lolita, but a work in its own right. In the collaborative editing process, any reader can use the Lolita page to challenge its meaning. In fact, he can reach right in and edit it himself, until someone else edits it again.

Right now, Wikipedia is busy asking for donations to stay afloat. Here’s a thought. If it wants donations, maybe open things up so that outsiders feel like they can contribute expert knowledge without wasting their time.

Is there a new anti-intellectualism? I mean one that is advocated by Internet geeks and some of the digerati. I think so: more and more mavens of the Internet are coming out firmly against academic knowledge in all its forms. This might sound outrageous to say, but it is sadly true.

When I need a clear, straightforward summary of a topic, I’ve started reading the ‘Simple English’ version of Wikipedia. It’s primarily written for people whose first language isn’t English, but I’ve used it profitably.

Hardboiled crime fiction is a literary style, most commonly associated with detective stories, distinguished by the unsentimental portrayal of violence and sex. The style was pioneered by Carroll John Daly in the mid-1920s,[citation needed] popularized by Dashiell Hammett over the course of the decade, and refined by Raymond Chandler beginning in the late 1930s. [1]

The Hardboiled detective: He works alone. He is between 35 and 45 years or so, and both a loner and a tough guy. His usual diet consists of fried eggs, black coffee and cigarettes. He hangs out at shady all-night bars. He is a heavy drinker but always aware of his surroundings and able to fight back when attacked. He always "wears" a gun. He shoots criminals or takes a beating if it helps him solve a case. He is always poor. Cases that at first seem straightforward, often turn out to be quite complicated, forcing him to embark on an odyssey through the urban landscape. He is involved with organized crime and other lowlifes on the "mean streets" of , preferably Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, or Chicago. A hard-boiled private eye has an ambivalent attitude towards the police. It is his ambition to save America and rid it of its mean elements all by himself.

Irony (from the Ancient Greek εἰρωνεία eirōneía, meaning dissimulation or feigned ignorance)[1] is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions. Ironic statements (verbal irony) typically imply a meaning in opposition to their literal meaning. A situation is often said to be ironic (situational irony) if the actions taken have an effect exactly opposite from what was intended. The discordance of verbal irony is created as a means of communication (as in art or rhetoric). Descriptions or depictions of situational ironies, whether in fiction or in non-fiction, serve a communicative function of sharpening or highlighting certain discordant features of reality.

The results of these collaborations, like Wikipedia, represent not just new methods of packaging knowledge, but a new vision of what might come to be meant by “knowledge”: something more like what Marshall McLuhan called “a galaxy for insight.”

The bootstrap paradox is a paradox of time travel in which information or objects can exist without having been created. After information or an object is sent back in time, it is recovered in the present and becomes the very object/information that was initially brought back in time in the first place. Numerous science fiction stories are based on this paradox, which has also been the subject of serious physics articles.

In his seminal work, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Csíkszentmihályi outlines his theory that people are most happy when they are in a state of flow— a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation. The idea of flow is identical to the feeling of being in the zone or in the groove. The flow state is an optimal state of intrinsic motivation, where the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing. This is a feeling everyone has at times, characterized by a feeling of great absorption, engagement, fulfillment, and skill—and during which temporal concerns (time, food, ego-self, etc.) are typically ignored.[6]

If you thought Wikipedia had seen its heyday, you'd have thought wrong. A small study performed by Wikipedia staff and published today found that new Editors are signing up and making edits to the site at a far greater rate than they were years ago. A slight majority of their first edits are acceptable or better.

The park is best known for an unusual waterfall located on the Brule River 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from its mouth.[4] The river splits in two to flow around a mass of rhyolite rock. The eastern flow goes over a two-step, 50 foot waterfall and continues downstream.[2] The western flow surges into a pothole, falling at least 10 feet (3.0 m), and disappears underground.[11] It is believed the water rejoins the main channel of the river or has a separate outlet into Lake Superior, but it has never been located.[6][8] Researchers have dropped brightly colored dyes, ping pong balls, and other objects into the Devil's Kettle without result.[12] There is even a legend that someone pushed a car into the fissure, but given that the Devil's Kettle is wholly inaccessible by road, most commentators dismiss this as hyperbole.[5][13]

A Shepard tone, named after Roger Shepard, is a sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves. When played with the base pitch of the tone moving upwards or downwards, it is referred to as the Shepard scale. This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that continually ascends or descends in pitch, yet which ultimately seems to get no higher or lower.[1] It has been described as a "sonic barber's pole".[2]

Rule 30 is a one-dimensional binary cellular automaton rule introduced by Stephen Wolfram in 1983.[1] Wolfram describes it as being his "all-time favourite rule"[2] and details it in his book, A New Kind of Science. Using Wolfram's classification scheme, Rule 30 is a Class III rule, displaying aperiodic, chaotic behaviour.

Wikipedia is a perfectly serviceable guide to non-Internet life. But as a companion to the stuff that was born on the Internet, Wikipedia — itself an Internet artifact — will never be surpassed.

Oak Island is noted as the location of the so-called Money Pit, a site of numerous excavations to recover treasure believed by many to be buried there.[1] The island is privately owned, and advance permission is required for any visitation. Several documented treasure recovery attempts have found layers of apparently man-made artifacts as deep as 31 meters, but ended in collapsed excavations and flooding. Critics argue that there is no treasure and that the pit is a natural phenomenon, likely a sinkhole.[2] Excavations have revealed evidence of man made architectural structures.

James Truslow Adams (October 18, 1878 – May 18, 1949) was an American writer and historian. He was not related to the famous Adams family (though he wrote a book about the family in 1930). He was not an academic, but a freelance author who helped to popularize the latest scholarship about American history, especially New England. and his three volume history of New England is well regarded by scholars.

I remember clearly the day I first found out that you could see page view statistics for Wikipedia articles. I came into class and asked the students if they had any idea how many people were reading their work. Instead of the usual assignment of an exam or term paper read by exactly one person, their professor, they were now writing for a real public. 
They were shocked to find out (for example), that the Gabriel García Márquez article that they were rewriting was read by something like 1,500 people a day: 62,000 a month, or close to three-quarters of a million people a year. That really gave them a sense that what they were doing mattered in some way.

The narrative mode (also known as the mode of narration) is the set of methods the author of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical story uses to convey the plot to the audience. Narration, the process of presenting the narrative, occurs because of the narrative mode. It encompasses several overlapping areas of concern, most importantly narrative point-of-view, which determines through whose perspective the story is viewed; narrative voice, which determines the manner through which the story is communicated to the audience; narrative structure, which determines in what order events are presented; and narrative tense, which determines with what sense of time the story is expressed, whether in the past, present, or future.

Impossible colors are hues that can only be perceived under specific conditions. Examples of impossible colors are bluish-yellow and reddish-green[citation needed]. This does not mean the muddy brown color created when mixing red and green paints, or the green color from yellow and blue, but completely unique "new" colors.

New Urbanism is an urban design movement, which promotes walkable neighborhoods that contain a range of housing and job types. It arose in the United States in the early 1980s and continues to reform many aspects of real estate development and urban planning.

New Pedestrianism (NP) is a more idealistic variation of New Urbanism in urban planning theory, founded in 1999 by Michael E. Arth, an American artist, urban/home/landscape designer, futurist, and author. NP addresses the problems associated with New Urbanism and is an attempt to solve various social, health, energy, economic, aesthetic, and environmental problems, with special focus on reducing the role of the automobile. A neighborhood or new town utilizing NP is called a Pedestrian Village. Pedestrian Villages can range from being nearly car-free to having automobile access behind nearly every house and business, but pedestrian lanes are always in front. [1] [2][3]

Self-actualization is a term that has been used in various psychology theories, often in slightly different ways (e.g., Goldstein, Maslow, Rogers). The term was originally introduced by the organismic theorist Kurt Goldstein for the motive to realize one's full potential. In his view, it is the master motive—indeed, the only real motive a person has, all others being merely manifestations of it. However, the concept was brought to prominence in Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory as the final level of psychological development that can be achieved when all basic and mental needs are fulfilled and the "actualisation" of the full personal potential takes place.

RT @oliverburkeman: The Drinker Paradox: There is someone in the pub such that, if he is drinking, everyone in the pub is drinking. http ...

The availability heuristic is a phenomenon (which can result in a cognitive bias) in which people predict the frequency of an event, or a proportion within a population, based on how easily an example can be brought to mind.

Gary Hustwit's Helvetica was fascinating. Lots of strong opinions for and against a 50-y-o typeface. http://bit.ly/27hKTm

Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, or practice that focuses on human values and concerns.

The Garden city movement is an approach to urban planning that was founded in 1898 by Sir Ebenezer Howard in the United Kingdom. Garden cities were intended to be planned, self-contained, communities surrounded by greenbelts, containing carefully balanced areas of residences, industry, and agriculture.

The Ulam spiral, or prime spiral (in other languages also called the Ulam cloth) is a simple method of graphing the prime numbers that reveals a pattern. It was discovered by the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam in 1963, while he was doodling on scratch paper at a scientific meeting.

Rockism is often suspicious of the use of computer-based production systems. Rockism places value on the idea of the composer and performer as an auteur; authentic music is composed as a sincere form of self-expression, and usually performed by those who composed it. This is as opposed to the notion of manufactured "pop" music, created in assembly line fashion by teams of hired record producers and technicians and performed by pop stars who have little input into the creative process, designed to appeal to a mass market and make profits rather than express authentic sentiments.

"Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It's fact-encirclingly huge, and it's idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies—and it's free, and it's fast. In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, "Diogenes of Sinope," or "turnip," or "Crazy Eddie," or "Bagoas," or "quadratic formula," or "Bristol Beaufighter," or "squeegee," or "Sanford B. Dole," and you'll have knowledge you didn't have before. It's like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks."

"The Taman Shud Case, also known as the "Mystery of the Somerton Man", is an unsolved case revolving around an unidentified man found dead at 6.30am, December 1, 1948 on Somerton beach in Adelaide, Australia. Considered "one of Australia's most profound mysteries" the case has been the subject of intense speculation over the years regarding the identity of the victim, the events leading up to his death and the cause of death."