Re: Social facts and snowball effect

From: Chris Taylor (chris.taylor@ebi.ac.uk)
Date: Tue 11 Apr 2006 - 16:12:20 GMT

  • Next message: Douglas Brooker: "Re: Social facts and snowball effect"

    So living a (teeny tiny) bit like the Innuit (i.e. surrounded by snow a lot) drives you to expand your snow-related vocab...

    Does mental swamping by an aspect of life always predispose us to subdivide? In this case I suppose long exposure makes for greater opportunities to observe and subclassify, and a more prolonged favourable environment for such words to demonstrate their fitness. I know what you mean by powdery snow and may even have used the phrase, but I'm not sure I have an equivalent to packing snow...

    Cities make people eh...

    Cheers, Chris.

    Douglas Brooker wrote:
    > Keith Henson wrote:
    >
    >> At 04:51 AM 4/11/2006 +0200, you wrote:
    >>
    >>> A ball of snow rolling down hill and picking up more and more snow is
    >>> not different from a typical avalanche.
    >>
    >>
    >> Actually, I think it is. It takes rather special conditions where the
    >> snow is close to the melting point to result in this kind of "pick up
    >> more snow as it rolls" behavior. I can think of only a few times I
    >> have seen it.
    >
    >
    > in Canada as kids we'd call it 'packing snow', i.e. it made good snow
    > balls. other snow is dusty and dry, the stuff of snow drifts, perhaps
    > a competing model.
    > ===============================================================
    > This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
    > Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
    > For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
    > see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
    >
    > 

    -- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  chris.taylor@ebi.ac.uk
  http://psidev.sf.net/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit

    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue 11 Apr 2006 - 16:33:23 GMT