Meme

Today I heard someone talking about a new online catchphrase thing. He couldn't quite describe it. Can you describe it? Here are some examples that have been around for awhile. They are called memes. Here, thanks to wiki:

Examples of memes


* Children's culture: games, activities and chants (such as taunts) typical for different age-groups.
* Epic poems: once important memes for preserving oral history; writing has largely superseded their oral transmission.
* Conspiracy theories
* Factoids
* Recipes
* Fashions
* Medical and safety advice: "Don't swim for an hour after eating" or "Steer in the direction of a skid".
* Religions: complex memes, including folk religious beliefs, such as The Prayer of Jabez.
* Popular concepts: these include Freedom, Justice, Ownership, Open Source, Egoism, or Altruism
* Group-based biases: everything from anti-semitism and racism to cargo cults.
* Longstanding political memes such as "mob rule", national identity, Yes Minister and "republic, not a democracy".
* Programming paradigms: from structured programming and object-oriented programming to extreme programming.
* Internet phenomena: Internet slang. "Internet memes" propagate quickly among users using email, websites, blogs, discussion boards and other Internet communications as a medium.
* Moore's Law: this meme has a particularly interesting form of self-replication. The conviction that "semiconductor complexity doubles every 18 months" became considerably more than a predictive observation; it became a performance-target for an entire industry once that industry extensively started to believe in the "law". Manufacturers now strive to make the next generation of semiconductor technology re-create the growth in performance of the previous generation, and so maintain belief in Moore's Law. Additionally, the evolution of this meme provides details of interest. The original law described growth in terms of the number of transistors on a chip, but people - more and more -- have (wrongly) understood it as describing an increase in terms of performance. This could exemplify how a meme can mutate slowly under the pressure of its environment (partial technical understanding and simplification for use in the mainstream media).
* Metameme: The concept of memes itself comprises a meme.
* Anecdotes: Short jokes or other stories.
* Phrases; A turn of phrase, or expression, like "Whasssssup!" or "Where's the beef?" or the Internet meme "all your base are belong to us!"
* Viral marketing: A type of marketing based on memes and using "word of mouth" to advertise (see the recent example of Snakes on a Plane).
* Chain-letters

Does the concept of memes lend credit to constructionist arguments of international relations? Are memes actively or passively defined? By whom are they defined and propagated?

The National Security Archive maintained at GW University is a fun place to visit. Take a stroll down memory lane - Rwandan genocide, reports of nuclear development in Taiwan and Israel in the 1970s, and other fun facts straight from the front lines and recently declassified.

A Land Before Time

Ah, the amazing Ngorongoro Conservation Area. Think of the DNA combinations of all the life that has felt the breeze while standing in that crater.

The area is also home to the Olduvai Gorge: the "cradle of mankind," which is one of the greatest excavation sites for early hominids.

A true "land before time."

"The Ngorongoro Crater is the remains of a once massive volcano, nearly three million years old, on the eastern border of the Serengeti National Park. Now collapsed and eroded to leave the world's largest unbroken caldera, it forms an extraordinarily fertile ‘bowl’ in the midst of rolling highlands, with permanent water sources and steep sides ensuring that the wildlife that thrives here has little reason to leave."

first up

Here is a perfect case study. Have you had a similar experience? Is the man physically, mentally, and spiritually transported into his daydream? What remains behind? How does he come back, and is he in one piece?

welcome

Time. Space. Distortions and threads, stretching from one origin to multiple endpoints. Where is history? Who is time? How did we find society? These are some of the questions this blog will explore. Posted items are singular but ultimately interwoven pieces of the larger, multidimensional jigsaw puzzle that these questions present.

The idea of "lean," as I see it, is this. Lean is an verb. Anything can lean. You or I may find ourselves "leaned," from time to time.

That stop sign on your morning walk may someday strike you in a particular way - does it seem to lean?

Lean is both affiliated with and disassociated from the idea of some geometric distance from 0 degrees. Being physically leaned over to one side is not a prerequisite to experience leaning in the sense that i use it. Items such as the sign may not be physically leaned, but believe me, that stop sign on Latin Way, on particular times in the morning, in a particular light, I do find it to lean quite hard.