This was a comment in the Ron Paul LJ community which I meant to be much shorter but which spiraled off; it may be worth saving. And then after that was another comment on why I felt the campaign didn't win, which may also be worth saving.

*

I think the war of ideas is pretty much determined by who has the ability to transmit and disseminate those ideas.

RP took advantage of the current strength of informal media -- blogs, sites like digg.com and reddit.com and facebook.com and myspace.com, web 2.0 and social networking in general, even livejournal.com -- but the current strength of informal, secondary media relative to mainstream, primary media is an anomaly and in all likelihood won't last very long, perhaps not even the four years until the next election after this one. It certainly wasn't anywhere near as strong four years ago.

This election cycle was also very weird because it actually had a few politicians who were principled and on the people's side running for president (Gravel, Paul, Kucinich to some degree), but this probably won't be the case most of the time.

It was a constellation of unlikely factors which caused the RP campaign to progress even as far as it did. I realistically don't see that constellation repeating in the next 10,000 years. So it's unfortunate that we lost, because the chance of winning this time was higher than it ever was before.

That isn't to say things are hopeless -- the chance of a billionaire or someone of great wealth, fame, or power clandestinely gaining power and then acting on loyalties to principles and the people rather than the power structure is becoming increasingly likely. It used to happen fairly often during the age of monarchy and empires, due to the untrustworthiness of loyalties through hereditary dynasties, but it's still possible now. The Founding Fathers fell under this category to some degree, so were a few of the so-called benevolent dictators (Catherine the Great, Frederick the Great, Peter the Great).

But it's just as likely today, because of a decrease in the ability to control people's thoughts as effectively as was once the case, ironically through the increased ability for anyone anywhere to control the thoughts of others, as seen in cults, leading to confusion as minds are pulled in many directions at once and forced to adapt. And because no minds are more controlled than those in the power structure itself, this weakening of the ability to control minds may lead to anomalies like people in power caring more about normal people than about maintaining their power.

Normally what happens currently when an anomaly appears within the power structure is that that person is identified and pushed out of it by the others. So what really needs to happen is that a network of them develop and keep themselves hidden within it. That too is becoming increasingly possible (and may even exist right now, for all we know).

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I think the biggest reasons the campaign didn't win are:

- Most everyone focused on putting up signs and building airships and almost nobody focused on face to face interaction and convincing friends and family members one on one, when the second is easily ten-thousand times as important and effective. Most often my experience is the average RP supporter had not convinced a single member of their family or a single one of their friends, if they even had any, to vote for him.

- The RP campaign staff itself was surprisingly ineffectual, as described in good detail an article I linked to from this community a few months back. He really should have hired the greatest talent he could, rather than relying on his personal friends and the Lew Rockwell crowd, or worse.

- RP worship, which led to relying on him to do everything because of a mistaken premise that he's superhuman and that all that was required was cheering him or chanting his name like a mantra, despite his repeated claims that he was just a messenger and that it was up to us.

- RP himself failed to be as convincing or as charming as he could have been when the opportunity arose. Another reason was his earlier personal immoralities, particularly the issue with letting bad stuff be published under his name -- even if it was without his knowledge, it's pretty inexcusable to not have knowledge of things done by your own ghostwriters and such. Some slack should be given to him in the articulate department because he's like 73 of course, he did a good and occasionally a great job during most of his interviews and the debates, but it still could have been far better.

- Resistance from the other campaigns, including infiltrators, and resistance from the power structure, including mainstream media. But those resistances were expected and should have been taken for granted.

"Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest lasting lifestyle in human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve it. Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited us from outer space where trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a twenty-four hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. It the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day,from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p.m., we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering facade and that have so far eluded us?" - Jared Diamond (pdf file)

Because the dollar is losing so much value (well, maybe not because of that, but it seems suspicious) they are now releasing a new series of $1 and $10 coins. Each of the $1 ones will have a dead president on it, all of the presidents who have been dead for more than 2 years will get one. Each of the $10 ones will have a dead president's wife; each wife will get one.

Because Jefferson had no wife (while in office), they actually have a made up one for him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Jefferson_Liberty_First_Spouse_Coin_obverse.jpg (called Jefferson's Liberty).

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/10/23/1-out-of-56-is-not-most/

During the last debate Huckabee claimed that most of the 56 people who signed the constitution were clergy. I thought 'that can't be true, can it?' when I heard him say it. It turns out he was lying, or at least ignorant. Only one of the 56 men who signed it was a clergyman, and only three were ex-clergymen. Four out of 56 is "most"?

I've heard the people who believe America was founded as a Christian country say some pretty odd things, but that most of the people who signed the constitution were clergy is a first. Where do they get ideas like that? Huckabee, as an aside, is also a creationist, along with Chuck Norris, who endorsed him recently.

A few ideas semi-prevalent in science which I disagree on:

Time - I've discussed this with Taernost before, I think physicists assume that just because time is best modeled as a 4th dimension that it actually is a 4th dimension, overlooking the crucial difference that unlike the spatial dimensions, information not at our current point is forever destroyed, never to return: not only the future but also the past isn't objective, only the present is.

Entropy - I've never seen a convincing large-scale proof of entropy. What's true on the small scale -- any enclosed system which we can handle -- many not necessarily be true on the large scale, and it shouldn't be assumed that it works that way, there are things which are true in some scales but not true in other scales.

That the mind is only in the brain - I've written about this one in LJ previously, such as in the entry about the guy who had a thin layer of cells in his skull, and no brain, and yet was otherwise a normal person. The mind also likely includes the other organs, the immune system, hormones in the blood, the spine, and so on.

That the scientific method is responsible for advances in science - It's usually just responsible for checking science, not for coming up with it, which is more the job of imagination and other thinking skills. The method is indispensable, but being good at it doesn't make you a good scientist, it makes you good at confirming things are true.

Taxonomic particle physics, for the reasons described in The End of Physics (buy it on Amazon if curious). Just because particles show up in certain extreme conditions doesn't mean they are relevant to any other conditions, and so far I haven't seen any evidence that, say, pretty much any hadron at all, is important.

As mentioned under Time, I don't like the idea in history that the past is objective; the past *was* objective, but no longer is, it's now reconstructed. This doesn't mean it can be anything we want it to be, but it means that we can't really know it, even where records are detailed the amount of detail lost over time is enormous, so enormous that selective attention applies to any reconstruction, not just in general things like "how did Rome fall" but even in more specific things like "did Jesus exist". There's no way to know either way for either of those, because there's no way to check it, empiricism doesn't apply. Sometimes you can be pretty sure, but I'd be careful about making positive claims about any past event, even ones you personally remember (memory's often wrong too).

Most of statistics. It works, but because it's not clear why, it should be distrusted, at least because measuring standard deviations isn't often accurate (especially not in both directions from the average) and most of statistical results relies upon what the standard deviation is; the whole standard deviation model is its weakest part: what actually is a standard deviation, metaphysically?

The whole idea that the goal of science is to prevent mistakes rather than to know truth. It's too cautious (never mind that my entry is a list of cautions). It's better to be right and not know why you're right than to be wrong and know why you're wrong. The point is to find out what's right, and secondarily to check that and make sure it's right, not primarily to check everything we already think is true to make sure it's right.

The technological view of history. This is the view that most significant historical events are repercussions of particular technological changes. In particular, major changes in the technology of communication, transportation, weapons, and agriculture, usually lead to major changes in politics and culture, rather than the reverse (although there's some two-way interaction of course, but the idea is that it's much more important in one direction than the other). Like all viewpoints the following is a simplification.

Communication. The invention of writing is of course obviously significant, it led pretty directly to the idea of written laws (e.g. Hammurabi's Code); before that time politics didn't even have written statues, laws either had to be memorized or were made up on the spot. It also led to a powerful scribe class. Later, the idea of printing led to the idea of the nation-state; before printing, language was variable from area to area and even from person to person, blending together over areas like a rainbow, but afterwards there were sharp linguistic separations, through dictionaries different languages were invented, then came the Treaty of Westphalia, and people became separated into nations. Newspapers and pamphlets which could be printed in small shops like Ben Franklin's ended Monarchy (through the French, American, and Russian revolutions, which wouldn't have been possible without newspapers and pamphlets). The telegraph and telephone allowed larger areas to be more directly governed, increasing Federalism during the 20th century, and they also (along with the automobile) allowed suburban areas to be built. Radio, movies, and television allowed greater control of public opinion and led to World War I and II and the Cold War, which governments wouldn't have had the resources for without the large public approval and sentiment that broadcast media provided. The internet, it's too early to say.

Transportation. The horse and chariot allowed empires to form, because the size of an empire is limited to how fast an army can travel in a few weeks. Trains allowed the industrial revolution but also were a globalising force, increasing economic interdependence between nations. The automobile's effects were probably less important than the train's, it did the same thing, just on an individual basis, but they allowed long distance commutes to work and probably led to the rise of companies with tens of thousands of employees rather than small businesses or loosely associated guilds. Airplanes, I think their importance is minimal considering that most people only rarely use them, except for the aristocracy. Maybe once they're more cost-efficient.

The effects of the development of new weapons has been widely written about by others so I can skip that.

Agriculture, likewise, although one thing people neglect about agriculture is the results of changes in diet on society. Also neglected are recent major changes to agriculture, where most food eaten in developed countries is now processed and composed of not only agricultural produce but industrial waste products like (random example) vanillin. I think this change has led to pretty major social and political changes, comparing people in the 60s and 70s with the people of the 90s and 00s leads me to believe that this type of agriculture increases hopelessness, passivity, and social alienation, you can't blame it entirely on TV or the education system, I think the main blame goes to the radical changes in diet over the last few decades.

I wanted to save a theory I expressed to konami recently but haven't written about here.

The idea is that humans are not adapted to grow up and live in safe environments, we were adapted to have to struggle for survival: to be constantly on the lookout for things to hunt or things hunting us, including other tribes, to have to work hard all day and make life and death decisions fairly regularly.

Today, especially in industrialized countries, but even to a good degree in third world countries, that's all gone. In the past you had to work extremely hard to live to 10, now you can pretty much do whatever you want, even just laze around all day and expend no effort whatsoever, and live to be 80. The difference is tangible and unimaginable.

I'm not saying we should go back to the old ways, only that we should recognize that this change has brought along problems and maladaptions. I'll go through a few.

Take habits for a big example. Habits were originally intended to get us to repeat things which help us survive and not repeat things which do not. But today, no matter what you do, you will probably survive. You don't need habits anymore. Really, habits are completely useless today, even though they were life-saving and indispensable 50,000 years ago.

I'd even go so far as to say that our propensity to habit is a very big liability today, particularly because they work by detecting what helps you survive and repeating it over and over; this leads to addictions, but more importantly this leads to repeating arbitrary actions over and over simply because those actions don't kill you; your brain reasonably believes that if you're doing something and you're still alive, it must be a good thing to repeat.

A second thing is free time. Our brains weren't built for idle thought; thinking without action is the cause of most psychological problems. Knowledge exists as a supplement for action, the only reason we're as good as we are at thinking is because it helps us choose better actions. But collectively humanity has become so good at choosing actions that we've pretty much eliminated the need to choose actions.

In other words, humanity is so good at thinking that there is no longer any reason for any person to think. You can think like Einstein or you can think like Forrest Gump and chances are you'll live the same amount of time either way. Maybe you'll gain another three years on average if you're a better thinker, by avoiding unhealthy foods or whatever, but big deal.

Because this is so, thinking, like habits, has become counter-productive. In most people, it causes more problems than it solves. I'm not saying we should abandon thinking, because we can't; we can't abandon it any more than we can abandon habit. But we should recognize that most of the time thinking causes more problems than it solves, just as having habits causes more problems than it solves.

I don't mean normal thinking like figuring out how to best get from point A to point B on a map or figuring out how to tie your shoes. I mean abstract thinking, such as whether mankind is inherently noble or ignoble, or whether or not this movie is Kurosawa's best movie, or who killed JFK. That type of thinking doesn't actually help you do anything, it makes no tangible difference in your actions, it's for all intents and purposes waste heat, which exists because that type of thinking was once useful in your evolutionary past but no longer is. Most habits are bad, and most thoughts are bad. Even when the thought is factually correct, it can still be morally bad to dwell on it, to have it consume you.

The cause of most political and social problems is at root psychological, that humans are not yet adapted to always being safe and never having to fight for survival. And we probably never will be adapted for that, for biological reasons (particularly because, genetically, extremely large populations evolve extremely slowly, and there's 6 billion of us -- there's a reason the cockroach hasn't changed much in so long: there are so many of them).

But what can't be changed genetically can be changed through culture, and I think a culture in which we foster things adapted to civilization has been developing for some time. There are pretty major ways that culture tries to adapt you to civilization, things which are completely alien to tooth-and-nail life: various moral ideas are just the start, entire emotions (or more specifically emotional interpretations) have been fabricated and brought into being which didn't previously exist, yet feel just as real as can be.

There are deep manipulations of someone's psychology going on as they grow up that aren't noticeable, even when we look for them. They mainly take the form of expectations about ourselves, such that we usually falsely believe such things are part of human nature when they are not which only becomes obvious when you read ethnographies of peoples still living in prehistorical ways and notice, say, that 90% of them aren't monogamous or that most of them don't see murder as a serious crime if it's done to someone outside your tribe or that most of them don't have a concept of falling in love (and neither did even Western civilization until recently).

But back to my point: we are built for tough lives, not soft lives, and the more comfortable your life is the worse you feel. Happiness comes from the achievement of goals, but if you're handed those goals before you're even born (supermarkets to provide easy food, sinecures to provide easy funds to buy that food, and the rest is entertainment) there can be no happiness in the sense that someone who struggles to survive knows happiness.

There are no real answers to this problem. You can't just become a hermit in aboriginal Australia (well you can, but not practically), nor can you accept the full comforts of modern society and expect to be happy (not even content), and any attempt to mix the two will also fail because they can't be mixed, either life is constantly dangerous or it isn't, either you're living on the edge of death or you're not.

The best answer I know of is Karma Yoga: to do good work and to focus all your energy on doing good work. It doesn't matter if that work is making games or baking cakes or building watches, as long as it can't be done automatically (a living death) and especially as long as there is a constant struggle to do it better and better and some type of prideful record of one's work, like a stack of novels you're written that's getting ever taller. If done correctly this maintains the safety of modern society while avoiding most of its problems (it avoids habit because it provides an constant, if artificial, challenge, and it avoids thinking too much because there's no time to be idle).

Preferably the work should do good for others and be useful, but that isn't even mandatory, building houses out of cards and trying to get ever better at that, or juggling 7 balls and then 8 balls and then 9 balls and trying to become a master juggler -- both of those sound pretty useless but they're still Karma Yoga. My personal preference is that the work be useful, but even someone pursuing mastery of juggling is better off than someone who just entertains themselves by watching X-Files or going to concerts or all the other millions of things that people become stuck in habits around, and certainly better off than people who think all the time and never do anything and create psychological problems which eventually end in suicide.

EDIT: And yes I know this entry is doing exactly what I say we shouldn't do (thinking too much), but in my defense I'm so overactive at thinking that I can come up with theories like this over the course of the few minutes it takes to drink a cup of coffee, and I type at 100 wpm and this entry only took a few minutes to write, so it doesn't really take up much of my time, most of which is spent on making and playing games (or, more recently, on getting Ron Paul elected).

http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/timeline.swf

Prehistory of mankind, flash animation for how they spread out. It was more difficult than I thought, a desert wiped out one branch, a supervolcano near Sumatra separated mankind into two parts for thousands of years, creating an ice age of 1000 years and leaving fewer than 10,000 people left alive on the entire planet -- humans came close to extinction 74,000 years ago.

One thing I've been thinking is that a lot of history has been lost. Many forms of writing and most forms of civilization would not survive tens of thousands of years in order for us to find them, so *for all we know* there could have been civilizations as advanced as the Mayans and Aztecs, all across the world, with writing and trade and their own lost cultures, for tens of thousands of years. They were advanced enough to build boats to cross large bodies of water (such as reaching Australia and Indonesia and Japan and so on) so they could easily have been more than tribes and cavemen for those 50,000+ years of lost history.

Considering that large-scale civilization (agriculture, writing) just so happened to "come about" simultaneously in the new and old worlds, it's possible it didn't come about at all but that the Mayan or the ancient Sumerian level of human development was the norm for 50,000 years. Sumeria is only about 7000 years old, remember -- and what we have left of them is barely nothing, some clay tablets and a few trinkets. Imagine what would be left of civilizations after even 30,000 years -- much less than that, if anything. The oldest city we know of is about 11,000 years old, and that's *only* because it's been a continuously operating city for all that time, when a city is abandoned it disintegrates without people to constantly maintain it. I imagine there are cities lost to time that were built three or four times as long ago as Jericho.

http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/050922/brainevolution.shtml

The genetics of the genes that control brain size, if you look at the dates of their mutations, roughly correspond to the great events of human history. For instance, the discovery of agriculture corresponded with an increase in brain size, as did the formation of the first civilizations in 4000 BC.

http://mondediplo.com/2006/12/02conspiracy

Alexander Cockburn (who I like to call the second-in-command to Noam Chomsky) wrote a good article on why the 9/11 conspiracies are foolish. I've really been surprised by the number and variety of people who fall for this conspiracy, it's one thing to be unscientific with regards to religion and astrology and medical cures, it's another to be unscientific about history.

Some photos of the impact of the “object” — the Boeing 757, flight 77, which hit the Pentagon — seem to show the sort of hole a missile might make. Ergo, 757 didn’t hit the Pentagon. A missile did.

Chuck Spinney, now retired after years of brilliant government service exposing the Pentagon’s budgetary outrages, told me: “There are pictures taken of the plane hitting the Pentagon — they were taken by the surveillance cameras at Pentagon’s heliport, which was right next to impact point. I have seen them . . . both stills and moving pictures. I just missed seeing it personally, but the driver of the van I just got out of in South Parking saw it so closely that he could see the terrified faces of passengers in windows. I knew two people who were on the plane. One was ID’d by dental remains found in the Pentagon.”

This won't faze the conspiracists. They're immune to any reality check. Spinney worked for the government. They switched the dental records. The Boeing 757 was flown to Nebraska for a rendez-vous with President Bush, who shot the passengers, burned the bodies on the tarmac and gave Spinney's friend's teeth to Dick Cheney to drop through a hole in his trousers amid the debris in the Pentagon.

EDIT: Read this version instead, it's the expanded edition of that article: http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11282006.html

Creating a post on any question. Arque writes: "but maybe something that explains...what kind of story would be better for something like a short story versus one for a novel. or more general, how to know which medium to use based on a given subject or theme (include painting or music or whatever)? or maybe you could just point me to a book on aesthetics but it would be fun hearing this from you"

A: The answer is to be found in the empirical study of those forms. For instance, what were the themes of the most popular and influential games, novels, plays, visual art, music, and so on? Let's see.

The five most influential novels in western history have been the Old Testament, the New Testament, War and Peace, Atlas Shrugged, and Harry Potter. Their defining characteristic is that they present an overall worldview, a way to see the world, what values are, what existence is really about. So themes about what life is about are best for novels.

The five most influential short stories in history have all been Aesop's Fables or fairy tales. Their defining characteristic is that they present a simple cause:effect relationship; if you do x, y will result. Their utility is in making simple moral decisions. So if you want to create an important short story, restrict yourself to a particular type of action, and its consequences.

The five most influential plays have all been by Shakespeare. Their defining characteristic is that they deal with particular psychological elements and their danger. In that way they are similar to short stories, but they go deeper into personality than short stories can, because you can actually see the person; so it's not 'do this type of action and bad things will happen' but rather 'be this type of person and you'll be psychologically destroyed'.

Movies are just plays in disguise, so I'll skip them.

The five most influential lyrical songs have all been folk songs (Happy Birthday is one). Their defining characteristic is celebration of particular events.

Poetry works the same as lyrical music, except that it's more extended. The most influential poems are the epics: the two Homer's, the two Indian epics, and Gilgamesh. They share the idea of heroism (which notice that the best novels etc. typically *do not* share; though they usually have heroes they aren't focused on the deeds and life and being of the hero the way epic poems are). So the best poetry is epic, and deals with people who can do anything, its purpose is to break the common but false idea that you can't do anything you want.

The five most influential non-lyrical songs are by various classical composers, and their defining characteristic is harmonic integrity through time, on the combination or orientation of parts into a whole or system, the persistence of identity through time, or in other words that time does change things, but it doesn't change identity.

The five most influential games are poker, chess, soccer, tag, and hide-and-go-seek. Their defining characteristic is that they simulate mathematical systems (i.e. systems that deal with measurement) in a simplified way, and in particular systems which deal with conflict between opposing forces. So the best games are about conflict between two or more sides (not necessarily violent conflict, but it is necessary that one side win and the other lose). Their central theme is that life is fair, that it follows predictable rules, and that if you figure out these rules and use them for your advantage you will be victorious; that victory goes toward the person who knows the game the best.

The five most influential videogames are The Sims, the Mario series, the Grand Theft Auto series, the Gran Turismo series, and the Final Fantasy series. Their defining characteristic is wish fulfillment, creating a life which a person would rather have than the one they have right now. So if you want to create an influential game, create one that lets a player do things he only dreams of doing (hopefully he'll then try to make real life more like he imagines it could be).

The five most influential paintings are all either portraits or landscapes, and those five all share the idea of depicting places better than the view outside a person's window, and people who are better to look at than one's friends and family, and in that way they have a similar purpose to the best videogames, with the difference being that videogames allow you to do things you want to do but cannot, whereas paintings allow you to be surrounded by things you wish to be surrounded by but cannot.

(17:16:52) Paul Eres: also, a study was published recently that showed
(17:16:58) Paul Eres: that humans are not 99.9% identically genetically
(17:17:03) Paul Eres: that we have vast genetic variance
(17:17:26) Paul Eres: we vary quite a bit in how many copies of different genes they have
(17:17:35) Paul Eres: and that many of our traits
(17:17:38) Paul Eres: may have more to do with
(17:17:43) Paul Eres: the number of copies of a gene we have
(17:17:47) Paul Eres: than whether we have that gene at all
(17:18:00) Paul Eres: if you have 5 copies of a gene, it's actually 'expressed' more, meaning
(17:18:09) Paul Eres: more of that protein will exist in the body
(17:18:15) Paul Eres: since each gene codes for a protein

(17:18:51) Paul Eres: so intelligence being genetic could be as simple as the number of intelligence-promoting genes a person has copies of
(17:29:01) Paul Eres: our differences are more differences of number of copies of genes
(17:29:17) Paul Eres: the 99.9% genetically identical thing
(17:29:24) Paul Eres: only means that we share 99.9% of our genes
(17:29:30) Paul Eres: not that we share the exact number of copies of each

(17:34:38) iamthevoid242: Generating intelligence logically cannot be controlled by something that stupid
(17:34:48) Paul Eres: it's not stupid
(17:35:12) Paul Eres: it's not 'generating' per se
(17:35:33) Paul Eres: there are many possible ways this could be done
(17:35:35) Paul Eres: a simple one is
(17:35:50) Paul Eres: imagine if in the past when conceptuality first evolved we were much more intelligent
(17:36:15) Paul Eres: but it was found that we survive better by making some members of a tribe less intelligent
(17:36:19) Paul Eres: leaving intelligence as rare
(17:36:31) Paul Eres: there would then be evolutionary selection toward that arrangement
(17:36:47) Paul Eres: the tribes that had that arrangement conquered the other tribes and populated the world
(17:37:20) Paul Eres: now imagine if there is a gene that reduces intelligence
(17:37:30) Paul Eres: the very smartest people would have only 1 or 2 copies of that
(17:37:35) Paul Eres: with others getting 5, 10, 50
(17:38:00) Paul Eres: each copy releases a protein which increases mental dullness
(17:38:08) Paul Eres: by making the brain work less effectively in some way

http://www.101influential.com/

1. The Marlboro Man

2. Big Brother

3. King Arthur

4. Santa Claus (St. Nick)

5. Hamlet

6. Dr. Frankenstein's Monster

7. Siegfried

8. Sherlock Holmes

9. Romeo and Juliet

10. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

11. Uncle Tom

12. Robin Hood

13. Jim Crow

14. Oedipus

15. Lady Chatterly

16. Ebenezer Scrooge

17. Don Quixote

18. Mickey Mouse

19. The American Cowboy

20. Prince Charming

21. Smokey Bear

22. Robinson Crusoe

23. Apollo and Dionysus

24. Odysseus

25. Nora Helmer

26. Cinderella

27. Shylock

28. Rosie the Riveter

29. Midas

30. Hester Prynne

31. The Little Engine That Could

32. Archie Bunker

33. Dracula

34. Alice in Wonderland

35. Citizen Kane

36. Faust

37. Figaro

38. Godzilla

39. Mary Richards

40. Don Juan

41. Bambi

42. William Tell

43. Barbie

44. Buffy the Vampire Slayer

45. Venus and Cupid

46. Prometheus

47. Pandora

48. G.I. Joe

49. Tarzan

50. Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock

51. James Bond

52. Hansel and Gretel

53. Captain Ahab

54. Richard Blaine

55. The Ugly Duckling

56. Loch Ness Monster (Nessie)

57. Atticus Finch

58. Saint Valentine

59. Helen of Troy

60. Batman

61. Uncle Sam

62. Nancy Drew

63. J.R. Ewing

64. Superman

65. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn

66. HAL 9000

67. Kermit the Frog

68. Sam Spade

69. The Pied Piper

70. Peter Pan

71. Hiawatha

72. Othello

73. The Little Tramp

74. King Kong

75. Norman Bates

76. Hercules (Herakles)

77. Dick Tracy

78. Joe Camel

79. The Cat in the Hat

80. Icarus

81. Mammy

82. Sindbad

83. Amos 'n' Andy

84. Buck Rogers

85. Luke Skywalker

86. Perry Mason

87. Dr. Strangelove

88. Pygmalion

89. Madame Butterfly

90. Hans Beckert

91. Dorothy Gale

92. The Wandering Jew

93. The Great Gatsby

94. Buck (Jack London, The Call of the Wild)

95. Willy Loman

96. Betty Boop

97. Ivanhoe

98. Elmer Gantry

99. Lilith

100. John Doe

101. Paul Bunyan