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April 26, 2004
Tracking the meme
My close personal savior, Chun the Unavoidable, may protest and eviscerate the "meme" meme, but I think the self replication exhibited by this particular "idea" fits the description.
Here's my post contribution to the meme.
I've been tracking this through the various blogs that I monitor with RSS feeds and today a rather good one popped up on my radar.
Actually, I cheated. The nearest book was Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming Vol. 2. on semi-numerical algorithms. But I lack the skills to typeset the 5th sentence from page 23 in HTML, actually I lack the skill to typeset any sentence that appears on page 23 (and most other pages) in HTML. But I thought it is OK to cheat on this one as I feel it is not really my fault that HTML can't complex math stuff in a decent way.Vogels is a gem.
One of the reasons why I think this meme propagates is that it appeals to our penchant for fortune telling. There's something strictly magical about randomly selecting structured information based on proximity. The event is random in that the timing of the request is unpredictable and the precise sequence of instructions to be followed. Same thing happens in tarot cards. Produce random, complex symbols with a well defined structure and interpret them in your context. It can tell you a lot about what you want to know.
In any event, that's just the religious leverage the meme is using to propagate itself. The major hook the meme uses is vanity. Everyone loves showing off their awesome book collections.
Update: Been meaning to post a link to this. Check out Vogels' ongoing analysis on RSS Feeds. Very interesting data, if your interested in that kind of stuff.
Posted by Azael at April 26, 2004 07:29 PM
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Comments
is "close personal savior" anything like the dobbsian "ShorDurPerSav"?
Posted by: r@d@r at April 29, 2004 01:51 PM
Chun is a longer duration personal savior, and by close I mean far.
Posted by: Hal at April 29, 2004 03:10 PM
