Just to let the very few people who still visit this blog [1] know, I’ve created a Google Buzz profile on which you can take a peek at my more random mutterings. However, please be warned, these posts tend to be not only very random, but also extremely mutteringly, which isn’t even a real word.

Linkage: Murray’s Google Buzz Profile

Footnotes:

1.	Despite my inexcusable neglect of it over recent months! Seriously, it amazes me that anyone still visits…
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When you think about dangerous jobs, you probably think of someone who defuses bombs, or astronauts, or perhaps even accountants [1].

You might not, however, immediately think of dentists.

And yet, according to a popular piece of ‘common knowledge’, dentists apparently suffer a suicide rate several times higher than any other profession, making dentistry one of the most dangerous professions out there, and not just because you spend all day with your hands in the mouths of people with questionable oral hygiene.

But is there any truth to it?

Read the rest of this entry »

Footnotes:

1.	Obviously I’m not being completely serious here. After all, what’s dangerous about being an astronaut?
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Just a quick heads-up that Pop Culture Zoo has published an interesting interview with Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, of MythBusters fame.

I guess it was inevitable that a tragedy such as the loss of Air France 447 under mysterious circumstances would spark an interest in other stories of planes and vessels that have also been lost or disappeared without explanation.

It came as no surprise, then, that a quick Google search this morning for "Air France 447 Bermuda Triangle" turned up a number of hits, including some from reputable news sources.

Of course, many of these posts and articles are simply drawing a comparison between the mystery of Air France 447’s crash and other famous aircraft losses, including those that happened within the region of the Atlantic Ocean known to us today as the Bermuda Triangle [1].

But there are other sites drawing more than a casual connection between the tragedy of Air France 447 and the shadowy forces some believe to be behind the Triangle’s history of loss and disaster.

Which left me wondering — is there anything really to the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle?

Footnotes:

1.	Or, even more chillingly, as the Devil’s Triangle!
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Slate.com has an interesting article examining the way internet chain emails  and web content work.

Writer Chris Wilson focuses particularly on the ‘25 Things About Me’ meme in Charles Darwin Tagged You in a Note on Facebook, providing some in-depth analysis of the way chain content spreads across the Facebook network, and likening its progression to the same way a disease operates when infecting new hosts.

While this may seem a little dramatic, Wilson is by no means the first to draw a comparison between chain emails and other web content to the way viruses work in evolutionary biology.

In fact, the field of Memetics is devoted to exploring the way informal information spreads among groups of people, modelling this spread along evolutionary lines.

Much as Chris Wilson writes, in Memetics a new idea, custom or belief  — a meme — must be transmissible to a large group of people or it will be unlikely to survive. The implication isn’t that the meme itself wants to survive, but that the people who accept or participate in it want it to survive to varying degrees. In this way a meme can be thought of to work exactly in the way a virus might – to survive, the meme must spread, often mutating [1] in the process to become more adaptable to other hosts.

Some memes are much more efficient at ‘infecting’ new hosts than others. For example, chain content that is both alarming and at least a little believable [2] can often spread across huge groups of people, working on the ‘just in case’ principle. Other memes might work simply by being appealing in some way to a wide number of hosts, while still others operate on an implied obligation and reward basis.

Why this is interesting in the study of Urban Legends and folklore is that it helps us understand the very human process of wanting or feeling obligated to be ‘involved’. The motivations of each individual who forwards or changes a chain email might be different from person to person, but across groups of people we can begin to see that memes communicate because they are suitable in some way to each individual who participates.

To read the original article, visit: Charles Darwin Tagged You in a Note on Facebook

Footnotes:

1.	I.E. developing new details or attributes, as a virus might, as people refine the meme before sharing it on with others.
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2.	Though often not true!
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