Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id AAA27330 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Sat, 26 Jan 2002 00:17:39 GMT Message-Id: <5.1.0.14.0.20020125184452.0352dec0@pop.cogeco.ca> X-Sender: hkhenson@pop.cogeco.ca X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 5.1 Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 19:15:12 -0500 To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk From: Keith Henson <hkhenson@cogeco.ca> Subject: Re: sex and the single meme In-Reply-To: <3C51E984.23823.2165D8@localhost> References: <F113SXNCt6mIIjWjydK0000d195@hotmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
At 11:25 PM 25/01/02 +0100, <salice@gmx.net>
wrote:
snip
>Remember this "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US"-crap?
>Well that probably was a mistake the person who originally wrote it
>in the video game wasn't aware of. But the fact that this sentence
>spread throughout the web and tv was a result of people putting it
>on websites and tv-shows. The meme didn't lay itself inside the
>html-code, right?
No, but it did exist there and in every mind that wrote the html-code or
used it as a joke reference in conversation. The example is not far from
the minimal meme of "you know' that litters so much speech and is a hard
one to clean out of your speech.
*Why* your example snippet of a meme propagates is interesting in
itself. If is, of course, funny to that majority of us who have seen poor
translators make a mess of Japanese instruction manuals. As to why it is
funny, and why jokes are propagated, consult Minsky on humor.
Errors of a funny sort propagating are not uncommon. To jump to computers
for an analogous example, the Amiga computers of the mid 80s did not have a
battery powered clock. You had to set it every time you turned it on. It
would also take a higher date/time it saw on whatever disk was inserted as
a better idea of the current time and date.
A surface glitch on a disk made an reading error higher than any date (gave
some odd combination of characters). If you had a disk with this on it,
the operating system would update your clock to something useless and write
the same date on every disk you put in the machine. (Amigas ran on floppy
disks rather than hard drives in those days.). So this error kept
spreading out as people exchanged disks. I don't know what stopped it from
spreading, if anything other than the limits of the number of machines ever
did.
Keith Henson
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