Later On

Memes are the units of culture, and I find it difficult to separate the concept of “meme” from the concept of “idea.” Wikipedia has:

A meme (pronounced /ˈmiːm/, rhyming with “cream”^[1]) is a postulated unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, and is transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena. (The etymology of the term relates to the Greek word mimema for “something imitated”.)^[2] Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate and respond to selective pressures.^[3] Memeticists have not empirically proven the existence of discrete memes or their proposed mechanism, and memes (as distinct from ideas or cultural phenomena) do not form part of the consensus of mainstream social sciences.

A symbol or practice or ritual is, to my mind, merely one embodiment of an idea, others being words, music, statues, roads, chairs, and so on: the idea is the essential unit, and the idea can be cloaked or realized in a variety of media.

As I sat thinking about memes last night, it occurred to me that some categories of memes—themselves a meme, of course, with children memes—advance rather rapidly over time, in the usual method of variation, replication, and selective pressure.

Mathematics, for example, has evolved quickly since around the 17th century—particularly compared to the slow evolution of, say, social structures. Part of that is that social structures have to become accepted and used by everyone, more or less, whereas mathematical memes can be developed and worked on by specialists (mathematicians).

Another highly successful and rapidly evolving meme is science. Again, not everyone works on this set of memes, so dedicated specialists (scientists) can work intensively to evolve the memes.

For both mathematics and science, progress became more rapid once some basic concepts became clear—i.e., once some guiding memes were developed. Math, for example, works by generalizing and extending existing structures. You can see this clearly in, for example, the development of number systems by extending existing systems: start with the counting numbers and successively extend them to: natural numbers (counting numbers plus zero), integers (including negative numbers), rational numbers, real numbers, complex numbers, quaternions, and other generalizations such as groups, rings, division rings, fields, and the like. Even space gets generalized: consider continuous functions on the interval [0,1]. You can define a “distance” between functions and begin to consider the functions as points in a function space and you’re on your way to functional analysis.

Similarly for science: once people thoroughly understand the notion of critical experiments—posing questions that an experiment can decide—combined with peer review and experiment replication, science began picking up speed.

Music is an example of the meme of art, which is a little different animal. The effort in art (sculpture, dance, music, painting, poetry, novels, and so on) is to create something new, something is unlike previous efforts. In effect, the goal is to create a new meme (idea), which then may or not be widely accepted and serve to inspire later memes. These memes also seem to advance relatively quickly because again specialists devote themselves to the effort.

Social organization memes—which The Evolution of God is currently focusing on—develop slowly since everyone is involved. The steps from extended families to tribes to chiefdoms to states took a long, long time. Indeed, even today many societies exist at earlier stages of social organizations.

One interesting question is what modern communications technology will do to memes. In modern times we have gradually development communication tools that enable a few to communicate to many: the book, the newspaper, movies, radio, and TV are all examples. But with the Internet we have a new tool that provides many-to-many communication. The only early examples of many-to-many communications that I can think of are battles and wars.

Memes can evolve quickly because, unlike organisms, memes (being ideas) have no mass and can be quickly reshaped. But memes that involve having large numbers of people having the same meme (such as social organizations) tend to evolve slowly—acceptance and understanding takes time, and of course the new meme must compete with earlier memes. Still, I would bet that in 3,000 years our species will have new social structures, just as a modern nation is quite unlike the ancient Egyptian empire.

If you make an effort to see the memes in which our thoughts move and among which we live, you will soon be able to identify them, give examples, look for interactions and competition for a particular niche, the local dominance of some memes, and so on. You will quickly grasp the idea, which is of course itself a meme and so far a fairly successful one.

The Eldest suggested calling local vets on the assumption that someone finding the cat might call a vet to see whether a cat’s missing. They were all very understanding and took the information willingly. Apparently, I’m not the only one to have a cat go on walkabout.

I’m having a hard time concentrating or focusing because I keep thinking about Megs—not only the "if only" thoughts, but also just missing her. I suppose that’s the downside of having a pet: if they start to mean a lot to us, then losing them hurts a lot. You can’t have one without the other.

Light blogging again today.

Death panels are not part of the health reform bills, but they do exist among healthcare insurance companies. Mike Madden at Salon.com:

The future of healthcare in America, according to Sarah Palin, might look something like this: A sick 17-year-old girl needs a liver transplant. Doctors find an available organ, and they’re ready to operate, but the bureaucracy — or as Palin would put it, the "death panel" — steps in and says it won’t pay for the surgery. Despite protests from the girl’s family and her doctors, the heartless hacks hold their ground for a critical 10 days. Eventually, under massive public pressure, they relent — but the patient dies before the operation can proceed.

It certainly sounds scary enough to make you want to go show up at a town hall meeting and yell about how misguided President Obama’s healthcare reform plans are. Except that’s not the future of healthcare — it’s the present. Long before anyone started talking about government "death panels" or warning that Obama would have the government ration care, 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan, a leukemia patient from Glendale, Calif., died in December 2007, after her parents battled their insurance company, Cigna, over the surgery. Cigna initially refused to pay for it because the company’s analysis showed Sarkisyan was already too sick from her leukemia; the liver transplant wouldn’t have saved her life.

That kind of utilitarian rationing, of course, is exactly what Palin and other opponents of the healthcare reform proposals pending before Congress say they want to protect the country from. "Such a system is downright evil," Palin wrote, in the same message posted on Facebook where she raised the "death panel" specter. "Health care by definition involves life and death decisions."

Coverage of Palin’s remarks, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s defense of them, over the weekend did point out that the idea that the reform plans would encourage government-sponsored euthanasia is one of a handful of deliberate falsehoods being peddled by opponents of the legislation. But the idea that only if reform passes would the government start setting up rationing and interfering with care goes beyond just the bogus euthanasia claim.

Opponents of reform often seem to skip right past any problems with the current system — but it’s rife with them. A study by the American Medical Association found the biggest insurance companies in the country denied between 2 and 5 percent of claims put in by doctors last year (though the AMA noted that not all the denials were improper). There is no national database of insurance claim denials, though, because private insurance companies aren’t required to disclose such stats. Meanwhile, a House Energy and Commerce Committee report in June found that just three insurance companies kicked at least 20,000 people off their rolls between 2003 and 2007 for such reasons as typos on their application paperwork, a preexisting condition or a family member’s medical history. People who buy insurance under individual policies, about 6 percent of adults, may be especially vulnerable, but the 63 percent of adults covered by employer-provided insurance aren’t immune to difficulty…

Continue reading.

From MoveOn.org:

Lie #1: President Obama wants to euthanize your grandma!!!

The truth: These accusations—of “death panels” and forced euthanasia—are, of course, flatly untrue. As an article from the Associated Press puts it: “No ‘death panel’ in health care bill.”⁴ What’s the real deal? Reform legislation includes a provision, supported by the AARP, to offer senior citizens access to a professional medical counselor who will provide them with information on preparing a living will and other issues facing older Americans.⁵

Lie #2: Democrats are going to outlaw private insurance and force you into a government plan!!!

The truth: With reform, choices will increase, not decrease. Obama’s reform plans will create a health insurance exchange, a one-stop shopping marketplace for affordable, high-quality insurance options.⁶ Included in the exchange is the public health insurance option—a nationwide plan with a broad network of providers—that will operate alongside private insurance companies, injecting competition into the market to drive quality up and costs down.⁷

If you’re happy with your coverage and doctors, you can keep them.⁸ But the new public plan will expand choices to millions of businesses or individuals who choose to opt into it, including many who simply can’t afford health care now.

Lie #3: President Obama wants to implement Soviet-style rationing!!!

The truth: Health care reform will expand access to high-quality health insurance, and give individuals, families, and businesses more choices for coverage. Right now, big corporations decide whether to give you coverage, what doctors you get to see, and whether a particular procedure or medicine is covered—that is rationed care. And a big part of reform is to stop that.

Health care reform will do away with some of the most nefarious aspects of this rationing: discrimination for pre-existing conditions, insurers that cancel coverage when you get sick, gender discrimination, and lifetime and yearly limits on coverage.⁹ And outside of that, as noted above, reform will increase insurance options, not force anyone into a rationed situation.

Lie #4: Obama is secretly plotting to cut senior citizens’ Medicare benefits!!!

The truth: Health care reform plans will not reduce Medicare benefits.¹⁰ Reform includes savings from Medicare that are unrelated to patient care—in fact, the savings comes from cutting billions of dollars in overpayments to insurance companies and eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse.¹¹

Lie #5: Obama’s health care plan will bankrupt America!!!

The truth: We need health care reform now in order to prevent bankruptcy—to control spiraling costs that affect individuals, families, small businesses, and the American economy.

Right now, we spend more than $2 trillion dollars a year on health care.¹² The average family premium is projected to rise to over $22,000 in the next decade¹³—and each year, nearly a million people face bankruptcy because of medical expenses.¹⁴ Reform, with an affordable, high-quality public option that can spur competition, is necessary to bring down skyrocketing costs. Also, President Obama’s reform plans would be fully paid for over 10 years and not add a penny to the deficit.¹⁵

We’re closer to real health care reform than we’ve ever been—and the next few weeks will decide whether it happens. We need to make sure the truth about health care reform is spread far and wide to combat right wing lies.

Sources and substantiation for the above:

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One unintended consequence of using Tasers is, of course, the death of the person being tased—it’s not exactly rare, either, with hundreds of deaths mounting up. The other unintended consequence is that since the Taser is promoted as non-lethal, police are using it much more than necessary—as Marcy Wheeler writes, "There is ample evidence that police often take no more than 30 seconds to talk to citizens before employing the taser, they use them while people are already handcuffed and thus present no danger, and are used often against the mentally ill and handicapped."

Read the entire column, which begins:

Like Glenn, I write a lot about civil liberties, which have been at the heart of the national conversation since the beginning of the War On Terror and the expansion of the national security state. But my interest in civil liberties predates 9/11 and until then was usually pointed at the far more prosaic issues of police and prosecutorial misconduct (and the inevitable conclusions any study of those things brings to the issue of the death penalty). Nowadays, the theme of civil liberties seem to be a sub-plot to a James Bond flick rather than "To Kill A Mockingbird." And yet, I think the two are intertwined much more closely that we think. In our apparent acceptance of torture as a legal method of interrogation, the bar of civilized official behavior has been lowered to the point where we are accepting torture in everyday life as if it’s nothing. Indeed, we are using it as a form of entertainment.

I’m speaking of the ever more common use of the Taser, an electrical device used by police and other authorities to drop its victims to the ground and coerce instant compliance. The videos of various incidents make the rounds on the internet and you can see by the comments at the YouTube site that a large number of Americans find tasering to be a sort of slapstick comedy, the equivalent of someone slipping on a banana peel, with a touch of that authoritarian cruelty that always seems to amuse a certain kind of person. "Don’t tase me bro" is a national catch phrase.

Tasers aren’t benign however. They kill people. Nobody knows exactly why some people die from being tasered, and they certainly don’t know how to tell in advance which ones are at risk. But there have been hundreds of deaths similar to the one below, which nobody can adequately explain: …

Continue reading.

I know of aioli, of course, but allioli was new to me. It sounds delicious: a stabilized emulsion of just olive oil, garlic, and salt. Read about it here.

The Wife read an interesting lost-cat suggestion in a forum she frequents: Go out after midnight, when everything is still, and call to the cat, while making noises that the cat responds to: rattling the food pan, or (in this case) clicking the switch on the laser pointer, which used to bring Megs running from anywhere in the apartment.

It was indeed very quiet, and the sounds would carry well. No Megs appeared, but I’m going to try it again tonight, and for a longer time.

While waiting, I watched a good bit of The Soloist, with Robert Downey, Jr., and Jamie Foxx. One particularly interesting scene is when the two of them watch a rehearsal by the Los Angeles Philharmonic of Beethoven’s Third Symphony. The Foxx character goes into a reverie as he listens, and we are treated to something like what a synesthete might experience, one who transforms tones to colors and lights. Indeed, the scene is so compelling that I suspect that they found an actual synesthete who provided the description and, for all I know, reviewed and refined the footage. At any rate, I felt I was getting something of the experience of synesthesia. (My previous posts on synesthesia here; Wikipedia article here.)

I haven’t really explored synthetic brushes, an oversight I intend to remedy. This morning I tried one of the Omega Syntex brushes—one that’s near the top of the line: the Omega 46151. It did a very fine job with the Kell’s Original Aloe Blend Lavender shaving soap. Indeed, I see from this brush that the synthetics can be very good indeed, and not just for vegans.

As I worked up with lather, the brush did spill some excess water from the base, which was fine: Kell’s Original doesn’t like too much water. Lots of lather, more than adequate for a multiple-pass shave. I used my Elite Razor with the gold-laced black onyx handle, still with the Astra Keramik Platinum blade, and it did close to a perfect shave. The New York aftershave was a great finish.