I reread my last letter and decided that it did not flow as smoothly as I would like. (It was getting late and I was hungry.)

If you think it worthy of the GZ, then please incorporate the following tweaked version.

Rationalist Please!

I like the European map on Mark2. When I had my going away party at work I was glad I brought a map along because "Where is Lithuania?" would not be an easy question on a geography quiz in America. (Unfortunately, neither is "Where is the Mississippi River?")

Looking back, at the very beginning of "Letters" (the browsers "name" of the page is still "Letters to Mark") you said that the discussion began in August 8. At that time I was still in the states. I responded on August 20, to your posting of the "Maggie Simpson Model" on August 13. My deduction is that you wrote the "MSM" in response to the 8/8 posting by LondonRiot@webtv. In that case your statement that "This one began on the 8th of August 2000. In response to a post on alt.memetics." is technically correct.

Since you're telling Russian jokes, I'll tell you a Scottish joke (Since Lithuania used to be part of Russia and Scotland used to be part of England (not really for either, but close enough) .

I don't feel guilty sending a joke like this over the internet because I have actually told this to several folks in person (real time), and I don't tell a lot of jokes.

THE SETTING: A Scottish old timer in Scotland, in a bar, talking to a young man.

Old Man: "Lad, look out there to the field. Do ya see that fence? Look how well it's built. I built that fence stone by stone with me own two hands. I piled it for months. But do they call me McGreggor-the-Fence-Builder? Nooo.."

Then the old man gestured at the bar. "Look here at the bar. Do ya see how smooth and just it is? I planed that surface down by me own achin' back. I carved that wood with me own hard labour, for eight days. But do they call me McGreggor-the-Bar-builder? Nooo..."

Then the old man points out the window. "Eh, Laddy, look out to sea. Do ya see that pier that stretches out as fer as the eye can see? I built that pier with the sweat off me back. I nailed it board by board. But do they call me McGreggor-the-Pier-Builder? Nooo..."

Then the old man looks around nervously, trying to make sure no one is paying attention. "But ya fuck one goat . . . "

Theism is an important issue to take a stand against, but it shouldn't be the *defining* issue. It is a subset of the larger issue.

ooo000ooo

Smokers

followed a little of the smoking thread. They're a feisty bunch. At least when you troll Christian groups most of them try to be nice. They did give a good response to your point about no smoke flavored candy etc. (No cream cheese and lox candy either.) My opinion is that the flavor and the nicotine addiction complement each other. We evolved to crave sweets, salts, and fats. We are naturally "addicted" to these flavors because they usually package essential nutrients. Smoking hooks us because the nicotine causes a craving and the smoke provides the flavor associated with the craving.

Was there any pun intended with the statement that the smokers did not yield enough new hits?

I must apologize for not helping out with your hit count. I am embarrassed to say that I haven't told anyone about the site. I guess I am a shy non-exhibitionist. Maybe I am afraid that people will think that I spend too much time on the internet and not enough working (maybe they're right).

If you want to drum up some more controversy, try pushing nuts and avocados to diet groups. The avocado is one of the most healthful fruits available. According to http://www.avocado.org/nutrition/ "They're nutrient dense in dietary fiber, vitamin B6, vitamin C, vitamin E, potassium and folate and are a good source of monounsaturated fat." Similar story for nuts, but add protein. Unfortunately, dieters just think "fat" and ignore these foods. They limit their fat intake to the minimum and fill this minimum with animal fat. This can be worse than the diet that got them fat in the first place. Our society is in its steep learning curve portion of the S-curve for (among many other things) diet. There are many studies and many results and many conflicting signals about what is the proper diet. We went from the "eat to survive" mentality to the "eat what we want" mentality.Like I said above, we naturally craved the sweets, salts, and fats because they were relatively scarce, but had the nutrients we needed to survive. Now that we can produce all the sweets, salts, and fats we crave (breakfast sausage, mmmm mm) we over indulge. Be skeptical of diets that eliminate food groups. I predict the balanced diet with exercise will win the day.

Blinking lights

How did the meme begin where you blink your lights to the oncoming traffic if you just passed a cop with a radar gun? I was infected by my father ("Why did he blink his lights, dad?" "There's a cop up ahead, son.") Surely, the first guy who saw someone blink his lights didn't know why the other guy did it. The first blinker probably did so as a general warning. No verbal communication was involved. Driver's ed classes surely didn't teach the practice. This meme apparently required a small puzzle to be solved in order to survive.

Split personalities

Back to our original topic. We were searching for a way to test whether the selfplex was an illusion. I should have remembered that most advances in brain research come from the study of the exceptions. If the selfplex settles in to some hardwiring in the brain's structure, then perhaps people with multiple personalities have a defect in their wiring. The defect might be difficult to tease out, but my hypothesis predicts its existence. It reminds me of one of my son's friends. Most people's scalps have a single swirl in the crown around which their hair grows. The swirl can be clockwise or counter-clockwise. I was giving the friend a hard time about his "bad hair". He said it was because he had two swirls and his hair didn't know which way to grow (he has since started cutting his hair very short). He said he knew of another kid who had six swirls. I can imagine a mutation of the "swirl" gene where it could cause the formation a cascade diminishing splitting swirls. A similar mutation in the selfplex gene could produce multiple personalities.

Harsh Winters

I guess weather is relative. The oil men here from Louisiana complain about harsh winters. Growing up in the Northeast, I am used to snow and cold. That's what winter is supposed to be. How else could you have the fun of building snowmen, snow forts and snowball fights? I just hope they clear the stuff off the roads so I can drive safely (I am getting obsessed by this driving business).

The winters here wont be an harsher than the ones I was used to in Pennsylvania. The latitude will make them darker and longer, though.

Site

Thanks for the improvements to the site. Now I have to figure out how to keep the colors from changing after 20 or 30 days. (Time flies.)

Mark

Smokers

Methinks they doth protest too much.

Of course it is addictive and of course there is a taste to it, one that is pleasant enough to allow smokers to smoke before they become addicted. The "no lox and cream cheese flavor" bit was a bit thin. There are prawn crackers, prawn cocktail flavoured crisps, sour cream and chive Pringles (just finished a tube, once you pop you just can't stop...)

They were just being deliberately ignorant. One or two of them did accept my point. They did get a bit personal and abusive at times. Their trick of quoting me out of context inspired me to put the "I am whatever you say I am.." quote on the Politics Zone. From Eminem. Do you get to hear new music in Lithuania?

Your analysis of tastes and evolution seems right. The relish with which I enjoy the taste of crispy roasted chicken skin is not random. Any of my ancestor's tribe who didn't like fatty meat would probably have died of hypothermia in some bog in Denmark or Saxony. Or probably died of starvation before that in the African rift valley. I am quite comfortable with my liking for nutrient rich food, and the well nourished wife as well.

I think I might reverse your suggestion about avocados. I'm not in the mood at the moment but one day I will have a crack at the double standards in nutrition. The idea that the skins of animals (which taste nice) contain pure evil while the skins of vegetables (which taste like wallpaper) are full of life giving nutrients is inspired by lesbians. Women do not think about food with the right bits of their brains. There are value judgements involved with everything and colour and symbolism. Cottage cheese is bland tasting and white, so it is good food, the opposite of evil food. Beef is 125% fat and 150% cholesterol, worse if in the form of a burger. They have the figures. There are no male nutritionists. Well, no straight male nutritionists anyway.

Beef is bad because it is

a) animal protein

b) tasty

c) liked by men and

d) red

Sausages are worse, they are made from testicles and shaped like penises, need I say more.

Yeah, I think I could pull that one off. I'll send you a copy when I post it.

Blinking Lights

Spot on. Flashing your headlights is a general non-specific warning to slow down and take care. Common courtesy to do it, a random act of kindness.

It became a successful meme because you don't need to understand the message to respond correctly. If you slow down in puzzlement you see the danger and get the pay-off and so you spread the meme. If you don't understand the message until it is too late then you will certainly remember the significance "So THAT'S why he flashed!" and so you again become a vector.

There is no way a meme for, say, beeping your horn to indicate that there is open road ahead, could be passed on. You would need to know the code and how could it spread? Except perhaps by a radio station or something similar doing it deliberately.

Split personality

Interesting. I don't know enough about the condition to comment. You could be on to something. You could study people with a split personality and log the effects, then if any have strokes you could see if the condition was affected. Classic proof would be a stroke that killed one personality and left the other one(s) unscathed. I doubt that is what would be found but it certainly is an interesting idea. Of course if we had no morals we could have our answers much quicker. "Fascinating case we have here, classic symptoms, sit down there a moment. Nurse! Fetch me my scalpel, and the big drill!"

Graphics

I like the pictures and graphics on the page. I walked right past the buildings in the photo on the top of Mark3 the afternoon you posted it (insert Twilight Zone riff here)! Keep that scanner smokin'.

Pop Music

I suppose I get to hear pop music in Lithuania, but I am usually not sure whether it is pop or not. I wouldn't be able to tell Eminem from 'N Sync. One of our family jokes is that whenever we heard a male country singer, I would say, "You know...that just might be Garth Brooks." I am a late sixties, early seventies rock and roller. In my early twenties, I realized that English keyboards were the common thread in most of my favorites. My vast record collection was left in the states--we took over only CDs. I tended to fill in the gaps with my CD collection rather than replace records. The exceptions are The White Album, The Yes Album, and Led Zep 2. All my Pink Floyd and Steely Dan were left behind. I do have a full set of Doors CDs, since I didn't appreciate them until later. Ever since watching one of those History of Rock and Roll shows, I started collecting old blues, like Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker (music history is a great subject for memeticists). My latest favorite album is Exile on Main Street. I don't know how I went so long without appreciating that album. It was encouraging to know that there was a great album from my era that I was able to really hear for the first time. I hope I there is another one like it out there.

Meaning of Life

In your page of that title, you say, "There is no meaning or purpose to your life."

I beg to differ.

Very simple. Sort of circular, but so it is. 'Nuff said.

Church

My wife was Catholic when we met. I told her I believed in God, but that my definition of "God" was very unconventional (see spiral discussion above). She thought I was a little (maybe more than a little) weird, but not weird enough to dump. We went to church together, but I refused to get married in a church. We got married by a judge in the Canton Bank Building (the Canton Men's Club was on the top floor--President William McKinley was a member). She did get the kids baptized, etc, mostly for her mother's sake. She is a practical person (as women go) and eventually my rational arguments of the why and wherefore of the Church won her over. I had her imagine a church board meeting in the dark ages with one of the bishops showing a chart of how revenues had picked up after the recent implementation of holy water. She has backslid into hell along with me. Even my boys joke about our family's destiny in the Lake of Fire.

Went to a Lutheran church service a couple of weeks ago because a lot of the other ex-pats go there before going out for Sunday breakfast. I was reminded of one of the institution's practical purposes (other than a place to meet before breakfast). The weekly pep talk. The pastor (it's an English service) gave a nice sermon about raising children and overprotective parents. Yes, the pep talk is one of those memetic hooks that attaches on to religion and helps it survive. In these days of mass media, there are many alternatives to the weekly pep talk (most not so inspirational), but for millennia, it was the only show in town. It doesn't hurt to be reminded about the various axioms of the Golden Rule every once in a while. In the church venue, you just have to filter out all the hocus-pocus nonsense. Fancy buildings with nice statues and paintings too.

Food

Go for it with the feminist nutritionists (didn't know they had a news group).

I've had several arguments with vegetarians (mostly women, but at least one straight male) who say that their way is the "natural" diet. I respond by saying that the most likely reason humans survived as a species was because of the transition to an omnivorous diet--probably as scavengers using rocks as tools to break open bones and suck out marrow.

Their best arguments are:

1. Yeah, but most of our early ancestors died by the time they were 35 anyway, and

2. Meat is an inefficient source of food. It takes lots and lots of grain and lots and lots of water to produce little bits of meat.

In fact, grain is an "unnatural" food from an evolutionary perspective. It didn't become popular until agriculture and technology made it practical. Then, of course, its success started us up the S-curve. Hunter-gatherers, by definition, did not cook bread (although at some point they started frying up some pita like substance made out of grain or root paste on some hot rock).

By the way, in my opinion, all food nowadays is unnatural except for water, wild roots, and berries, and game (land and sea). Everything else has been molded by artificial selection. Barley, corn, apples, potatoes, broccoli, potatoes, chickens, eggs, sheep, Black Angus.

My definition of cattle is "the ones that didn't run away." We have been genetically engineering our food since the dawn of civilization.

All this talk (write?) of food is making me hungry. I think I'll have some of the Lithuanian mutation of pizza (pica).

The locals put ketchup on their "pica" at the table. I haven't tried that yet.

Mark

You have heard that copying out of a book is plagiarism, copying out of three or four is research. Some of the pictures on my site have been researched from my stack of encyclopaedia CD ROMs, and the odd titbit I find stuck in my cache.

The scanner I have got is a cast off, like the computer. It is a little sheet fed 16 greyscale jobbie, really cut out for copying and faxing text documents. The only way I can get decent scans from it is by scanning large pictures from newspapers, I keep as much information as I can, then run it through software to boost up the apparent colours before resampling it, with anti-aliasing. It sounds complicated, it is. I have found that if I can capture 1200 pixels of 16 colours from a dithered newsprint picture, run it through an "impressionist" filter then reduce it down to 250 pixels or so I can get the impression of full greyscale. Then I have to crop the image and often get rid of unsuitable backgrounds, reduce noise to aid compression, touch up errors caused by the scanner and counteract the problems caused by creases in the original newsprint. The best pieces of such hard work are my picture of Bjork on the 100 miles of thought and one of Alice Cooper which I have yet to publish.

I simply can't get good results from regular photographs.

Most stuff in colour is borrowed from somewhere, I am just hoping to get away with borrowing from so many separate places that nobody gets too cross, or at least nobody gets cross enough to do anything about it. I strongly suspect that many of the places I borrow images from didn't originate them anyway. Anyway, fair's fair, if they want my picture of me in the shop for their CD ROM they can have it.

If you come across any suitable images I won't object to you sending them in to me. Keep in mind that I only need about 400 pixels square, anything more is a waste of bandwidth.

As I put on my site I am not a big music fan. I know what I like, and it is usually singles, but I will never buy them. So I am stuck. Music is something I can live without for a long time. I like a lot of the stuff you mention, I am strongly tempted to buy the new Doors compilation.

I hear what you are saying about the meaning of life. But I disagree, there is no intrinsic meaning of life. You can give your life a meaning, for yourself, but your life will run without one just the same.

Church.

I got married in a church. It didn't matter much to me where I did it. Pep Talks We have a problem in Britain. It is called Radio 4 Thought for the Day. Every morning a five minute slot of pep talk just before 8 am. Anglicans, Catholics, Methodists, Sikhs and Jews all have a go. (One of the best ones is Lionel Blue, a gay Rabbi) But no atheists. I demand fair representation, our numbers justify us having a crack at it once a week, every week. But if you follow that line you give the "there must be something it, but I'm buggered if I know what" lot a slot twice a week.

Nutrition

That one is stewing away. I will have a go some time soon when the mood takes me. I will have to search through the newsgroup listings for food, diet, nutri$ etc. Then do a batch job, copy to alt.deposit, probably.

I agree with your analysis of food. Meat was a prime reason for our development. Our plant eating relatives don't share their leaves, but early man did, and chimpanzees still do, share their meat. Vegetarians are selfish, meat eaters share and co-operate.

On the subject of the ones that got away, how soon before those West Africans descended from people too fast to be caught are out sprinting their cousins in red white and blue?

(Just in case you thought I had gone soft on controversy!)

Martin

Blinking Lights

Well guess what. I got a speeding ticket. I was taking a passenger with me on my weekly trip to Vilnius. We just entered a little town. The oncoming driver blinks his lights. My passenger said, "Did you see that? Do they do that in the States too when there is a speed trap?" I said yes and started philosophizing on and on about how such a custom might have started. In the mean time, some radar waves had my name on them. He showed me the gun. 52. The limit was 40. He knew just enough English to do his job. "I must punish you 100 litai..." I did eventually talk him down to 50 Lt ($12.50). I even got a receipt.

Moral of the story is keep your mind on the road and the philosophizing on the email.

Radio Rabbis

Go for it. Be the spokesman on Radio 4 for England's atheists (or Rationalists--are you one of my disciples?). You don't have to be a good public speaker. You can read your own writing can't you? Just bring five minutes of words on paper to the radio station. I don't know, however, if your format is "pep talk". Your topics are more political/social. If the format is truly "Thought for the Day", you can do that.

Music

I had read your comments on music in your "advice" column and was a little hesitant about telling you my musical preferences. But then you did ask the question about pop music. Anyway, I began to wonder whether I should feel guilty, as a rationalist, about liking music. (Should a rationalist feel guilty about anything? Yes, I think, but that is another question for another time.)

Why do we like music? Is it hard wired in our brains? Is it learned? Did the brain evolve to like music or coevolve with musical memes? What is the reason for the satisfaction we get from listening to a beautiful melody? Is music purely a memetic infection? Does it survive for its own sake using our brains merely to propagate itself? If we think it makes our life more pleasant, isn't that okay?

Religions have been called viruses of the mind. One of the reasons they survive is because they hook on to other memes that are linked to genetic survival such as preaching a tit-for-tat strategy for dealing with others. We talked earlier about how our dietary preferences might have evolved. What are the hooks in our brains that musical memes attached to? Is music appreciation simply a byproduct of how our brain was put together?

Sound is a basic sense necessary for survival. Those who hear the predator or the prey, will live to hear another day (kind of catchy--I should put some music to that). Animals use sound to communicate. Crickets chirp, dogs bark, and whales and birds communicate by singing. There is a social survival benefit to humans to having an ear tuned to distinguish different sounds and voices made by others--and the different tones of other's voices. Different "tones" are associated with different emotions. It all begins with a mother cooing to her child.

In to this medium enters a sound that somehow resonates. It is liked because its "flavor" is similar to one that helped our survival. It is more like candy in that it gives pleasure without apparent nutritional benefit. We may feel guilty if we eat too much candy, but if it is part of a balanced diet, it will do no harm. Likewise, music may fit right in with a balanced diet of emotions and might even help by evoking an emotional release or stabilization effect when needed.

Before the invention of writing, history was passed down by story tellers. Their often long tales were hard to remember. By transforming them into poems, the rhythm and rhyme gave the stories mnemonic devices that would make them more memorable. Adding music to the words would help memory even more. These story tellers would travel from village to village. This gave them a better opportunity to pass their genes around along with their memes. Thus, wanderlust and proficiency in music making would both spread together more widely than other characteristics.

So keep playing that rock and roll!

Do you ever think that Mac users are like militant homosexuals? A small minority that likes to portray itself as much bigger than it really is and in the process probably stirs up more animosity than there was before they started to make a fuss. Mac users are 2% of my visitors according to my counter. 2%, you would not assume that if you listened to them.

I love your radar story. Too clever for your own good. It is probably a form of proof that evolution will never let Homo sapiens evolve to be any brighter than we already are, geniuses do not have a breeding or survival advantage. There is an optimum level of intelligence for a community, a few extra bright people help their community, but I struggle to recall any heroic geniuses of the past bringing up huge tribes of children. The world in which Marx is a common surname is in fiction, a Brave New World. How many children did Edison or Einstein have? Or the Curies? Being smart often helps the community at large more than it helps you as an individual. (That is probably bullshit but it makes me feel better!)

Thought for The Day

Your innocence is quite sweet. The BBC does not work like that, I cannot expect to march up and get a go. You have to be asked, you have to be known by the in-crowd.

Music

Interesting questions. Memes are obviously a big part of it. The young person who would beat you up over the differences between nu-metal and thrash-metal is obviously heavily influenced by sets of memes. Liking one whole genre of music and hating another is not rational. Liking music is obviously deeply buried within us and it is a basic taste that has been refined by culture, refined and changed. I work with young people who are under the influence of very powerful memes, driven by sex and tribal bonding type forces. I have to point out to them that loud, fast, heavy, grungy and raw are not synonyms for good. They seem to have very stereotyped tastes and like to go for extreme stimuli. I think I remember reading about some beetles that were in danger of extinction because they find discarded bottles or cans of a popular local product to be such a turn-on that they mate with those in preference to females of their own species. This seems similar behaviour. Super-stimuli. If loud is good loudest is best. If incoherent shouted obscene lyrics are good the more obscene and incoherent the better. If making mom angry is good whoever mom hates most is the best act to follow, Marilyn Manson rules, 'til mom hears about Slipknot.

I don't know how far back musical appreciation goes. Palaeolithic sites sometimes show up small bone whistles and the like. I suppose early drums would perish in most archaeological sites except perhaps peat bogs. Even if we could find the conclusive earliest instrument we would not have the answer as it would be very difficult to prove how widespread the musical appreciation was, the existence of an instrument doesn't prove widespread musical appreciation, just think about bagpipes and violins, there are probably more instruments than people who enjoy them being played.

Just to follow up that digression have you ever watched The Candidate? There is a scene in that in which a child says to some old politico something about voting for him and he says "Get this child to a violin!" The implication being that the child was obviously a genius and so should play the violin. I have often wondered how much human talent is squandered on massacring music on this instrument of torture. I would like to see every parent of a violin-playing child held to account, any child that showed general high ability beyond the confines of music should be banned from playing. Violins kill talent and soak up time. Get that child to a PC, or a microscope, a telescope or a construction set. Violins do not need the finest brains of each generation to be sacrificed to them any more.

I like your analysis of the wandering troubadour. In a way rock stars of today are doing just that. Darwin might have had quite a few children in his long life but if the stories are true Jimi Hendrix had far more. But perhaps the heyday of such genetic advantages is over, just ask Mick Jagger how expensive a mistake can be. In the middle ages being a wandering minstrel or troubadour was the ideal job for a randy young man. Who knows how much misery has been prevented by their selfless acts against the scourge of inbreeding? I suppose that is one reason to tolerate country and western singers, but only in rural areas, obviously.

Have you heard anything about this new theory that rock music has its origins in Saxon battlecries? It is an interesting idea to consider. I have noticed that heavy rock seems to be very much a white phenomenon, even the exceptions seem to confirm it. Any "black" people in rock seem to be superficially at least 50% European, by that I mean they are no blacker than what you would expect for the child of a native black west African and a typical white northern European. Is there any kind of genetic basis to this or is it simply that white children grow up in a white culture? I am not at all sure but there is certainly no obvious evidence that I can think of that would squash the idea that there is some degree of genetic predisposition to certain types of music. It is not what the pc lobby would want you to believe but then I never have cared what they think. Such a theory would seem almost impossible to prove, genetics and culture are so heavily intertwined, I suppose the place to start trying to do it would be among children adopted by other "races", but even then it would be difficult to prove. I can imagine that a black child brought up in an all white community would still seek out or be offered extra exposure to black culture, more than a white child in the same situation.