It is new “technology” like atom technology was some while ago. Atom research gave the army the Atom Bomb.

What will meme technology bring? Is it possible to create a Meme Bomb?

There is no doubt in my mind that Military in all kinds of countries are experimenting with this. And it’s very different than the many secret psychological experiments they did the years before. Previously the focus was on changing the behaviour of 1 person, or finding out ways on how to let someone talk. This time it’s about changing the behavour of large groups of humans!

It is now 32 years after the publication of the selfish gene. What progress had been made not visible to us? Have they found out structures and ways to invoke quick meme reproduction?

One of the things that stroke me is that a new religion surrounding movies/books as “the secret” or “what the bleep do we know” etc… conquered the world very quickly and these new memes got in the minds of a specific set of people who are somehow catchable for these types of memes. It caught Oprah!

Scientifically seen the content of what is in there is uhm… you probably know. It’s rubbish, it’s nonsense. But somehow it caught on. Like a religion, like believing in Thor who waves his hammer to let the lightning start. Despite all scientific reasoning people started believing it and still do. There are a gazillion websites out there devoted to it. Millions of weblogs. Preachers, e-book writers, forums, instructional tapes, you name. All rose very quickly.

They basically took an older cult, the New Thought Cult (which dates far back), and boosted it with meme technology principles to create a leading religion.

The earliest identifiable proponent of New Thought was Phineas Parkhurst Quimby(1802–66), an American faith healer, student of Mesmerism, and practitioner of hypnosis, who claimed he could heal by mere suggestion. Quimby developed a belief system that included the tenet that illness originated in the mind as a consequence of erroneous beliefs and that a mind open to God’s wisdom could overcome any illness. During the late 19th century the metaphysical healing practices of Quimby mingled with the "Mental Science" of Warren Felt Evans, a Swedenborgian minister.

New Thought as a movement had no single origin, but rather emerged along with a variety of religious denominations and churches, particularly the Unity Church, Religious Science, and Divine Science. It was a feminist movement in that most of its teachers and students were women; notable among the founders of the movement were Emma Curtis Hopkins known as the "Teacher of Teachers" early adopter of the phrase New Thought in the 1900s. Melinda Cramer and Nona L. Brooks founders of (Divine Science).

On any given time in history there a gazillion cults, now and 2000 years ago. some of them grow in religions. Noone knew why.

What the experimenters could have done is take one of these gazilion cults, like the one above and experiment if they could turn it into a religion. Which partly succeeded, just do a Google.

Now think: why didn’t it catch on in 1850 until lately? And why was there suddenly out of nowhere a complete meme bomb which directly affected millions of people?

I have only explanation for this: the meme experiments on us have begun. Which is actually pretty interesting. What other meme bombs are visible? And where do they come from? Is it possible to create anti-dotes against it? “The secret” / New Thought is a christian meme bomb. Are we able to protect us from an Islam meme bomb? Or a “surrender” meme bomb?

Post from: Edward de Leau

Is THE SECRET a MEME experiment?

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Dan heb je er als gewone man of vrouw ook nog iets aan, die hele wetenschap en met de complete *absense* van welk wetenschappelijk programma dan ook op TV kan het een leuke boost zijn voor jongeren om die kant op te gaan.

Goed idee? Gaarne commentaar!

p.s. ik heb TED een aparte categorie gegeven op http://video.populair.eu

Toch maar weer even eentje eruit genomen:

Post from: Edward de Leau

Idee: Nederlandse TED Talks

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It gave me some new thoughts after I read the responses and comments (also on the Dawkins site).

Is the biggest mistake of modern religions that they teach people that they are NOT part of nature? Is the animal rights movement and their success a subconscious movement to correct this?

Post from: Edward de Leau

WHAT WE ARE – Brilliant Movie

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From “Het eeuwige bandje – song #1”

Post from: Edward de Leau

Try a little tenderness – Otis Redding

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But please note: automatic version control is not automatic configuration management, which is in the end a little block in this.

Meaning in the end: why don’t we just version anything and everything on any pc, laptop or any device and keep the history forever? Surely the exa-, zetta- or yota age will soon follow afterwards.

Putting meaning to the data, identifying branches etc… could be done by some smart tooling and some configuration files.

Currently you have to pinpoint the stuff that you want to be versioned e.g. some code, some documents, etc… When automatic version control would kick in, it would also register that you installed the little bug fix pack for  tool Y on your system on day 25 and deinstalled it on day 26. IF, for some reason, everything goes down because of it, everyone will know who is to blame… hahaha.

p.s. this list is way cool “(1.25 terabytes) – capacity of a human being’s functional memory, according to Raymond Kurzweil in The Singularity Is Near, p. 126” which brings me to this totally unrelated, but still cool, image:

Which then again makes me think: when are we able to version control humans?

Post from: Edward de Leau

Automatic version control

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Four games I fell in love with and played for a long time (and I need extra accomplishments for all of them so I will play them all again and ongoing):

- Lost Odyessey: the story, characters, the dreams, the spells, awesome graphics, addictive!
- Assassin’s Creed, awesome graphics, history, storyline, sweat in my hands
- Prey, storyline, awesome graphics
- Halo 3, shoot everything that moves, I *wow*ed when I shot my first scarab tank

So… my X-Box automatically downloads demo’s for me from new games, which makes it pretty easy to ongoing play demo’s from new games. 90% of the games are not for me *delete*. About 9% I like but I wouldn’t buy them. And 1% is actually something I would buy. So… what will be my next game? I’ve decided on Fallout 3, which will appear soon.

I tried to order the Survival Edition on Amazon but that gave me: “We’re sorry. This item can’t be shipped to your selected destination." *grmbl* this is quite a shame because it includes a pretty neat version of the Pip-boy 3000. So let’s wait for the regular version.

Apart from “the” game, I will probably also go for Civilization Revolution and some other games that were in the news lately. However I think that Fallout 3 will fit in my “top 5 games” list, which now only contains 4 games.

Post from: Edward de Leau

My next X-Box 360 game: Fallout 3

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