#memeengine

Do you think it's possible those were just the colors of fridge-magnet letters that were around when you were a baby, or is it somehow deeper?

It's possible, I don't know. Supposedly, a lot of people have some letter-color association, and the vast majority of people associate A with red and B with blue and G with green and so on. A lot of those children's books which teach you the letters have A for apple, so that could explain why A is red. The others are obvious because the word blue starts with B and the word green starts with G.

Sometimes, I try to explain this to people, and they just give me the strangest look and they have no idea what I'm talking about. Others can draw an association, but they've never thought about it before.

If you have a strong association like that, you're still considered a synesthete. You're an "associator" synesthete. 

I'll give you one very strong example from music. I explained how timbres have colors (giving a literal meaning to the term "tone color"). In my head, a guitar playing with a chorus effect is always blue. it's one of the strongest associations I have with timbres. A chorus effect adds a blue hue to almost any sound. That's its job in my head, to make sounds bluer.

That may be one reason why I like eighties music so much, because it has a lot of bright blue colors from the chorusy guitars. 

Reverb adds a silvery shimmering shine to things.

Metal distortion sounds like black mud.

Some music has a strong tactile association too. For me Autechre is the most tactile artist out there. I can almost feel Autechre's music on my fingertips.

Sounds also have shapes. A thick drum machine snare is very square-shaped. 

I love synthesizers because synthesizers are the most colorful instrument out there. You can produce any kind of colors and shapes with synthesizers. 

There's some songs with such strong visuals in my head, I could draw you a picture of what it looks like. 

Usually drums are on the bottom of the image moving across as time passes. It's like the base upon which everything else is built, but some drum sounds can hover around the image. Melodic lines are literally like lines or ribbons that kinda wave in and out depending on the sound and the melody. The cumulative effect of the full mix of a song can just have it's own textures. It's hard to explain.

my version of quality dropping is complete absence. It's great - you don't have to decide whether to apologize.

No. Your blog is good and you should make a script to automatically apologize every day that you don't post something, because I get personally offended. 

Net memes are a subset (and I would argue the fastest growing subset) of Dawkin’s memes. I’ll accept the other two defenses. Though they’re weak by vice of being made on a site which is in effect an engine for memes — or a meme engine, if you will.

Hey, since we're arguing, I'm not sure I'd want to say that Internet Memes are actually a subset of "Dawkins Memes".  I mean, I'll go ahead and call them memes, because that's the dominant usage, but for the most part, I don't know if they'd be included in what Dawkins intended when he coined the term.

The things we call Memes now - let's call them "Net memes" if you want - just seem a little too specific.  Or maybe, too embodied, like they'd have trouble living in a human brain.

I'll give you some examples of what I think of as genuine, (internet-spread) Dawkins memes:

"I can't even"

COMMENTS IN ALL CAPS

Sharing pictures with funny, out-of-context captions

Yeah, that's right.  I think the idea of a "Net-meme" is a "Dawkins meme".

But, take any particular sharable item (like the 2048 game or a specific pic with a specific funny caption), and I'm just not sure if *that* counts as a meme, er, a Dawkins meme.  Maybe it's a little too hard to spread, as it usually relies on a pretty specific framework.

I just realized you remind me, somewhat, of Sherlock Holmes. Though, he'd say you've learned way too much impractical knowledge.

Yeah I never really liked that feature Doyle wrote in, and I wish Moffat hadn't adopted it, but at least Moffat sort of made up for it in the same episode it was referenced. 

Smart people are just kind of more likely to pick up on things, and it's really pretty absurd to pretend someone can actively try to forget something they didn't even notice learning. 

So basically what Doyle did was drop Holmes from genius to specialist. That is, apparently Holmes didn't just pick up on things, he put a lot of effort into learning the right things. I mean you can forgive Doyle given he lived in a time where next to nothing was known about memory or intelligence but you can't really forgive him for just randomly adding that weird handicap that never actually serves as a plot device.

I just spent like half an hour looking for an excellent lecture I saw once on g-factor but it seems to have disappeared from the internet :(. 

memeengine replied to your post: Okay yes

For brain apathy, I’ll sometimes take a longish walk to complete some menial task (buy x, mail x, drop off x, etc). Doesn’t seem to have any effect until suddenly it does.

Even for math-lovers, lin-alg is just a little bit boring. At best, it's sort of pure, like a flat desert.