According to Bill Cosby, lack of belts in jail: http://www.nbcnews.com/video/meet-the-p ... 4#21293174

The Wikipedia page agrees with my recollection of first coming across the word in Richard Dawkin's "The Selfish Gene", a seminal popular science book about evolution. Its major theme is that DNA just wants to replicate and survive into the future, by what ever mechanism it chances upon. By rolling its dice extremely large numbers of times it gets lucky very occasionally. The evolutionary mechanism as described is 'never mind the aesthetic quality of the mechanism, if it happens to work, thats fine'.

Then, mainly as an exercise in playfully thinking about his theme, he mused about making an analogy with how some things in human cultural thought also have a tendency to self replicate. It isn't an exact analogy. There isn't a DNA equivalent. It was just a fun thought. So catchy pop songs that have a 'hook' so that some people can't help humming them, flared trousers, or words like 'fab' (60s) or 'Doh!' (90s) are a concept he proposed the word 'meme' for.

So nothing to do with the internet. Things that rattle around the culture by jumping from mind to mind, with no judgement about aesthetic quality, just if it happens to replicate, that's fine.

Then the internet came along and some people deliberately tried to create these things that people will copy to each other. Mostly intended as fun. A clear example is the Captain Picard facepalm. People would copy that picture to each other with a comment about something foolish that someone has done. They would imitate the pose in the office when a colleague has said something that is wrong in so many ways that you don't know where to start, or even whether to try to correct them. So a moment of popular culture that spread both by person to person and by internet mechanisms, such as email, youtube, discussion boards with images. Again, its not a judgement about aesthetic quality, or the replication mechanism, just if it happens to replicate, that's fine, its a meme.

At this point I raise a white flag and retire to DGS.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

This cracked me up. I can't tell you how many times I've thought of the "Y U NO" guy when watching game reviews. Sorry to anyone who finds it even mildly offensive.

...while I am still trying to figure out what all this has to do with culture. Somehow when explaining memes the word "culture" is used a lot, and I really don't get the connection...

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

Probably something to do with yogurt. It turns sour if you don't keep it on ice.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

Internet memes are usually not actual memes, in the original sense of units of culture or of cultural transmission.

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The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

I'm getting the sense that some people on this thread are aware of the related concept of trolling.

Heh, this is one of my favourites, and as two folks on FB pointed out, it has two sides:

• a stronger player watching the 20k guy not extending when in Atari,
• a 20k player watching a stronger player not extending when in Atari,

thus making this sort of a flip-flop image/picture puzzle.

<edit>
BTW, when I got up today I was quite shocked about how many notifications I got on FB and G+ … all about people liking, plussing, and sharing these memes. To everybody who contributed Go memes here and elsewhere on L19 — prepare to see them out there in the wild
</edit>

<edit 2>
A little bit surprised about the meme/internet meme discussion — was my link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_meme that badly hidden?
</edit 2>

<edit 3>
Public Go Memes albums on FB and G+, thanks to all of you!
Go Memes on Facebook (this one I could make a shared album if more people want to contribute … it would be our album then and not just mine.)
Go Memes on Google+
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Greetings, and thanks to all of you!

Tom

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

The idea of a meme was originally as a cultural or other learned trait that is seen as analogous to a gene. An example might be a given feature of a particular religion or, say, the idea that you should wash your hands after going to the bathroom. Successful memes propogate themselves in a presumably evolutionary manner, where traits granted by the memes make them more or less likely to be passed on to new people. In the handwashing example, it may successfully propogate because people think they get sick less frequently. The actual facts of the matter are less relevant unless they actively prevent transmission, as because people are getting sick or dying. Memes in this sense can be helpful or harmful, but only need to continue to transfer to new people and stick around in old carriers to maintain existence. Originally, this was meant as a relatively serious way to think about culture, ideas, and cultural progress or change. Memes could be seen as being in competition with one another for minds with the survival of the fittest culling the unsuccessful ones. A given meme can also be seen to evolve as it is imperfectly transmitted.

As an example, I remember reading one article about a woman who always made baked ham by cutting off the end of the ham before baking it. She finally grew curious about this step, and asked her mother, who said that's how she always made it to do it right, just like her own mother. So the woman asked her grandmother about the practice, and got a straight answer, that she cut the end off to fit the ham in her small oven. The meme of cutting the end off survived even as it lost its original purpose. You can also see the evolution of them with the "10 bajillion words for snow in Eskimo" thing which doesn't even make sense, since Inuit languages don't have the same concept of words that we do, and has a history of increasing in size with every repetition. Early examples claimed maybe 25, and then nearly 50. Another example is the meaning of "meme", as seen below.

This phrase and idea spread through the armchair experts of the internet in the 90s, and came to specify to some degree any idea, fad or subcultural bit that comes to prominence (perhaps for no clear reason), like the "All your base are belong to us" phrase around 2000 or 2001, which is the first one I remember clearly. People would put this phrase on images they found humorously appropriate, and extend them in similar but novel ways. Lolcats are another example of this: an image of a cat, possibly odd in some way, with a hopefully humorous catchphrase or caption on it.

Through this, the word "meme" spread and specified to refer more specifically to the cutesy phrase on an image that's designed to make people want to share it, and now we have the examples in this thread.

Alpha-plus nerd: Yeah, Biff is more her speed.

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The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Found this one on reddit

I had forgotten about the "Get Strong at..." parodies, but I suppose that could be considered a meme originating from go culture:

http://senseis.xmp.net/?GetStrongAtGoParodies

Thanks for the reminder, judicata … I wonder, though, why there are so many cover pictures missing

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

Memes convey a recognizable point of view or joke quickly. They either hit their target or misfire quickly. Seems to fit your posts.

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Occupy Babel!

"When the samurai verifies the presence of his head during fight, the dragon smiles."

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Confucius in the Analects says "even playing go is better than eating chips in front of tv all day." -- kivi

This is just too good not to share here, via Go Oyunu’s post on FB.



The pictured player is Emre Bektore 1k, Turkey (European Go Database player card).

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

Not really a go meme, but somewhat related.