2006-04-10 - 6:53 p.m.

Rufus Leaps Upon A Wagon

A meme taken from meli-mello.

The meme in question:
Go to Wikipedia and look up your birth day (excluding the year). List three neat facts, two births, and one death in your journal, including the year.

November 20th

Three neat facts:
1820 - An 80-ton sperm whale attacks the Essex (a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts) 2,000 miles from the western coast of South America (Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick was in part inspired by this story).
1910 - Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero denounces President Porfirio Díaz, declares himself president, and calls for a revolution to overthrow the government of Mexico.
1945 - Nuremberg Trials: Trials against 24 Nazi war criminals start at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice.

Two births:
1889 - Edwin Hubble, American astronomer (d. 1953)
1939 - Dick Smothers, American comedian - member of the Smothers Brothers duo

One death:
1910 (N.S.) - Leo Tolstoy, Russian novelist (b. 1828)

And since I have wikipedia open already, a short note on the word 'meme.'

It's funny how the English language rolls along. Meanings are expanded and contracted. Words become archaic as they pass into disuse. New words are invented all the time. With the advent of the internet (as with the advent of the printing press), this process has only become faster and more convoluted. If you are like me, you will have been familiar with the word meme from it being much discussed and cast around in science fiction magazines and evolutionary biology articles in the last 15 years. Dawkins came up with it back in 1976 (my birth year, by the way), but it took a few years to filter down into the popular consciousness of academia.

The idea (as I understand it) was that a meme is supposed to be the fundamental unit of social evolution just as the gene is the basic unit of biological evolution. Any piece of information that could be transmitted by any means from one mind to another can be considered a meme. 'Memetics' is still a pretty controversial idea; Dawkins based the idea on some pretty general observations, and (unlike biological evolution) there is no agreement that social evolution is a real process, and certainly no agreement that it can be divined from a simple point-for-point analog of proven biological theory. But it does make a lot of sense. And the hypothesis -- that cultural ideas, beliefs, and preferences can be replicated, transmitted, and mutated on a massive scale -- is pretty cool. Indeed, the idea of memes, and its associated discipline, called memetics, proved to be a kind of well-replicated meme in itself.

Of course, there is this other meaning to the word meme, which is now well-established in the blog community. About.com identifies this other definition in this way: "In the world of blogs and bloggers, a meme is an idea, question, statement or project that is posted in one blog and answered to in many other blogs. Memes are used to propagate ideas in the blogosphere." This is clearly a form of the Dawkins-style meme, but it is a much more specific definition. A meme, as understood by a student of memetics, can refer to any piece of information that can be transmitted from from one mind to another. For example, an obvious fad like wearing blue jeans would be a widespread meme (indeed, a cluster of memes: the cotton meme, the zipper meme, etc.), but something as simple as a smile could also be considered a particularly effective, if shortlived, meme (in that it can be quite infectious).

Anyway, I am only writing about this because I was confused when I first started seeing the specific blog-meme sense being bandied about. My first reaction was to think that the word was being "misused" (a completely unjustified attitude, I must underline), but I am increasingly of the opinion that there's no such animal as a "misused word." The gravest error in diction still provides more information than silence. For that matter, all silences are pregnant, as well. Furthermore, it seems that the universe obeys a law of conservation of information. Kip Thorne has pointed out that if one burned a book, a physicist with access to the right equipment could analyze the resulting smoke, light, and ashes, and recreate the information that was printed on the pages. Information is neither created nor destroyed, but only changed in form. In fact, Stephen Hawking has provided mathematical evidence that even information sent into a black hole is not lost, but is eventually released in a very different form.

Well, I'm sure that only a reader entirely inured to boring blog reflections will still be paying attention at this point. I go now.