(See the original demos announcement at the link).
We have added more algorithms to the website to try out and tweak.
The Gallery has now been renamed “Demos” and split into Nature and Human.
We’ve moved the Crowd Flow one over to the Human gallery and added:
- the mathematical spread of rumours, and
- the spread of memes. We are considering a third one, which is:
- the historical spread of the Black Plague from the good ol 1300s
Where did these come from?
Understand that this website is itself growing organically, in conversation between people and ChatGPT. There is a good chance that this line of study will be removed or morph in the future, since it is more about information theory than the mission of understanding how Nature communicates. For now:
The spread of rumours is a tip of the hat to an old university housemate Roy who was studying this in his Mathematics program. Seemed esoteric at the time, it now seems modern. A rumour is started and if it is interesting and somewhat believable, it spreads to others or to a mass media outlet. The retelling may change the rumour and it will eventually die out and be replaced with something else from the news cycle. A long lasting rumour may cement itself as part of local folklore.
Memes are similar, but the key part of a meme is the remix. Initially thought-provoking (usually funny) and then reapplied as news items appear. “Memetics” were captured in the early 2000s by two defining books:
The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore - This is widely considered the bible of early memetics. Blackmore, a psychologist, took Richard Dawkins’ original footnote concept of the “meme” from The Selfish Gene and turned it into a full biological framework. She argues that humans are essentially meat-puppets built by two competing replicators: our genes (biological) and our memes (cultural).
Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme by Richard Brodie - If Blackmore’s book was academic, Brodie’s was the pop-science warning label. Written by one of Microsoft’s early lead programmers, it looks at culture through the lens of cognitive epidemiology. Brodie explicitly treats memes as “mind viruses.” He breaks down how things like mass media, structural bureaucracy, and religious dogmas act as infectious pathogens that bypass our rational immune systems to alter our behaviour.
Still to come
Although world events are being changed by asymmetric warfare with intelligent drone swarms, we will try to stay closer to the original remit of returning to Nature for inspiration. There is an underlying “manifold” based on geometry to explore.
