The Art of the Meme -- 2012 March excerpts

[Mentifex]

Although I had taken a programming class at the
university, and I had coded some BASIC on my
brother's Trash-80, I was not free to program to my
heart's content until I bought a Coleco ADAM computer
with built-in daisywheel printer and cassette storage-
tapes. I wrote long programs and printed them out on
the letter-quality printer. My favorite program was the
World Lit Language Tutor for learning Latin. Some outfit
back East almost bought the program from me for
publication and marketing, but they wanted me to create
a lot more lessons than the one included with the
program, so we broke off negotiations. I later rewrote
the program for the Commodore Amiga, and it went into
limited circulation. The Coleco ADAM took on for me a
memetic signficance when I purchased the add-on of a
state-of-the-art 300-baud acoustic modem for calling out
to other computers. Coleco had been hoping to offer a
600-baud modem, but it came out as 300-baud. Very
soon other computers were offering 1200 and 2400
baud modems, and the Coleco ADAM was dying on the
vine. The Apple Macintosh was not out yet, and IBM
clones were sweeping the market. I did not care,
because 300 baud was fast enough for me.

Here in Seattle we had a free newspaper called the
Puget Sound Computer User. Each month it had a list of
telephone numbers where you could dial out by modem
to a Bulletin Board System (BBS). Suddenly the
Mentifex AI memes were off and running. Sometimes a
BBS would have a connection to something called Fido-
net, that stretched all the way around the world. I started
posting about Mentifex AI on one BBS after another.
Some people on one BBS invited me to join them on
their own special literary BBS called Invisible Seattle,
which later morphed into an archival Web site. Another
BBS was being run on an Apple ][ by an individual even
stranger than myself, who saw me typing into his BBS
called The Constant Society and broke into the session
to begin a direct on-screen conversation with me about
how to say various things in Latin, like ancilla Dei for the
handmaiden of God. It was very rare that the operator of
a computer BBS would interrupt me and communicate
directly, but each operator had the ability to observe
user behavior in real time. Often a BBS would have a
twit key for bumping any user off the system if he was
acting like a twit. One BBS operator was quite amazed
that I was using a 300-baud Coleco ADAM to
communicate on his BBS. Another operator broke into
my session and demanded to know what I was looking
for, because he was operating a public BBS but he
wanted me to hurry up and log off so that his friends
could call the BBS. It was a mark of great prestige to
host your own BBS that could become the central
meeting place of an on-line community. The operator of
the Constant Society BBS, however, had his own wild
and woolly memetic agenda and he wanted to recruit
me to help him formulate certain memes correctly in the
ancient Latin language that I knew inside-out. I could
read, write, think and sometimes even dream in Latin
after taking Latin for eight years and teaching Latin for
four years. The head of the Constant Society
(membership: two individuals) invited me to come and
meet him face-to-face at the International House of
Pancakes (IHOP) in the University District. KM1, as he
called himself (for Keymaster One), was an eternal
student who lingered on in the math department and
staved off earning his degree as long as possible. His
main haunt was the now gone but then glorious coffee
house called the Last Exit on Brooklyn. He wanted me
to join his tribe of acolytes consisting then of himself and
one other guy, a love-struck undergraduate who wanted
me to help him impress his would-she-be girlfriend by
sending her "Amor Omnia Vincit" as a message in Latin.
KM1 eventually got written up in a book called
Mathematical Cranks by Dudley Underwood, who told
the world about the handwritten (not typeset) book about
mathematical constants that KM1 self-published and
advertised on the back cover of the main academic
journal for mathematicians, with an enomous Greek
letter Pi as the graphic motif of his message. University
libraries ordered copies of the book because it was
advertised in so prestigious a journal, but many
purchasers were disappointed to find out how shoddily
put together the book was.

KM1 interoduced me to the Internet, which he had
access to and I did not. I had to reach into my backstory
as a former teacher of German and Latin at the
Overlake School in Redmond WA USA and enlist the
aid of my former German student, Joe Telco, who had
become an engineer and worked for a
telecommunications company. Joe Telco and I used to
run into each other after Mass at Christ the King. One
day he told me that he had the parts for the very first
microcomputer, the Mark 8, and wanted to build the
device but did not have the printed plans. He looked at
me with extreme disbelief when I informed him that he
could have my copy of the extremely rare Mark 8
construction booklet. Even before the Altaire came out
and made Bill Gates the richest man on Earth, the Mark-
8 was featured on the cover of a computer magazine
that I purchased at the 7-Eleven store across the street
from Seattle Pacific University. You could buy the Mark
8 outright as a bunch of parts to be assembled, or you
could send five dollars away to Berkeley CA USA for
just the plans, which I elected to do. My perusal of the
Mark 8 design document left me with the impression that
the computer would not do much once you had
assembled it, so I held off from purchasing the parts. I
freely gave away the plans to Joe Telco, and he freely
unleashed Mentifex AI Memes for the very first time on
an unsuspecting Usenet AI discussion forum on the
burgeoning Internet.

Joe Telco came to my Wallingford apartment, rang the
buzzer, and I led him upstairs to where I had my 300-
baud ADAM fired up and ready to go. The buzzer thing I
had had to re-connect especially for him. Although I
myself was a merry prankster of sorts, I did not like
being woken up from my deep ambitions of sleeping my
life away by some prankster ringing all the apartment
buttons successively out on the street. The other
sheeple in the building just put up with things that were
starting to happen back then, like car alarms that would
chirp when car-owners approached their cars, or the
installation of intercom buttons in the archway of the
doorway to the Queen City Apartments. Non tulit hanc
speciem Mentifex, and he opened up the intercom panel
to figure out the wiring and to disconnect the buzzer that
outsiders could use to disturb him and summon him. It
was much easier to re-connect the intercom when a
guest like Third Love was expected, than to be
constantly available to whatever idiot pressed the street-
level button. Mentifex even launched a minor meme
right there in the apartment building.

The street level list of tenants next to each intercom
buzzer was an unpardonable sin by the landlord of
blowing the real-name cover of Mentifex Mindmaker. It
was absolutely intolerable to have one's private name
readable out on the sidewalk. Mentifex devised a
counter-measure, that was soon adopted meme-wise by
other residents of the apartment building. On the original
list of names, and each time that the landlord updated
the list of names with new renters, Mentifex snuck down
at night, unscrewed the glass window, and glued a fake
name on top of his real name. The fake name had to
look believable, though, so Mentifex became "O.
Occupante" on the list of names, as if it were an Italian-
style name and not just the word "Occupant". Other
peeved residents caught onto the trick and suddenly
there were three Occupantes all living in three separate
apartments. The landlord must have realized that there
was a rebellion going on and he decided to follow the
advice of the Beatles and Let It Be: no real names were
put back in place of Occupante. I should go there some
time and see if there is still an Occupante or two living
there.

It was much harder to fool the mailman, the telephone
company, and the nationwide publishers of residential
directories. For the mailman I just put up the name
Andrea instead of Arthur, but it did not fool Dmitri von
Hagen who came looking for my erstwhile secret
apartment one day. I had let slip to him one day that on
a Saturday morning I had heard a military band maching
by on the street outside while I slept in, and I had the
feeling that I was being piped out of the Army to my utter
disgrace. I had gone to the window to look out towards
Green Lake, and I had seen the band marching by.
Dmitri already knew that I lived in Wallingford, but he did
not know where. So I was quite surprised one morning
when somebody slid a note addressed to Andrea under
my door. I opened it, and there was Dmitri von Hagen,
grinning from ear to ear in his triumph. He had figured
out that I had to be on the main drag if there was a band
maching by, and the name Andrea had thrown him, so
he wrote a note to Andrea just in case it really was the
wrong apartment.

To fool the telephone company, I had to invent my live-
in significant other named Beta Pictoris. To the phone
company representative it just sounded like a foreign
name, and not like the star Beta in the constellation
Pictor.

The nationwide publishers of residential directories
would leave a query sheet hanging on each doorknob in
the apartment building. I became a female attorney who
lived in the building. Soon I started receiving junk mail in
the name of that attorney, but it was very high-class junk
mail, because I had released a very high-class meme.

It was more difficult to deal with people who had actually
been to my apartment and now knew where I lived.
Besides Joe Telco who visited one single time to help
me publish the Mentifex Tutorial in net.ai on Usenet, I
had met another Vaierre visitor at my part-time job
selling Amiga computers in the Navy Exchange of the
Sand Point Navy Base. He came to my apartment to
use my Amiga 1000 computer to show me his own BBS
that he wanted me to call at every opportunity. He was a
very likeable fellow and I thought that we were friends,
and I guess I still do. We lost touch for many years, and
then one day I recognized him by his voice. I turned
around and re-introduced myself at the all-you-can-eat
restaurant on Aurora where he was working. I gave him
the Web address of the Mentifex AI project, and I
thought nothing of it at the time. Within a year or two, he
had written a major Mentifex-bashing blogpost about
me, full of speculations about my private life and
descriptions of how weird I was. He even mentioned my
abode that he had visited near Green Lake. I did not
hold it against him, because to Mentifex-bash is human,
and to forgive is divine. I did link to his blogpost from
various memetic venues, and I guess he began to
receive traffic that he was not comfortable with. He
started warning people not to leave adverse comments,
and he eventually removed the blogpost about Mentifex.
Meanwhile he had decamped to a foreign country, and I
have not seen him in years. I would not recognize him if
I did see him, but I would know his voice.

Back when the engineer Joe Telco visited Vaierre at the
dawn of the Internet, he used my Coleco ADAM to log
onto a computer at his place of work in Kirkland across
Lake Washington. Then he had me type in the Mentifex

http://groups.google.com/group/net.ai/msg/3a4429a7b26d40ef

AI Tutorial that I had written down on a sheet of paper in
two parts, one to be published at that time and a second
part that has still not been published. Joe Telco told me
that at midnight the Usenet post would go out from his
company onto the Internet. We said good-bye and I
waited to hear if my first-ever AI post on the Internet got
any reactions.

The reactions were so negative that both Joe Telco and
KM1 were hesitant to reveal the outcome to me for fear
of hurting my feelings and crushing my ego. I was made
of sterner stuff than they thought, but some of the vitriol
unleashed on me was indeed painful. Those who
wanted to give Mentifex the benefit of the doubt were
shouted down by the spitefull know-it-all types who did
not themselves have any solution to the problems of AI
and did not want to listen to anybody claiming to publish
a tutorial of his own AI solution. The brief flurry of
indignant outrage settled down, but Mentifex had made
his mark and had released his meme -- as can you, too,
when you learn the necessary tradecraft put together
here all in one place by Mentifex the memetic
Mindmaker. O fortunatam natam me memetico artem.

Mentifex
--
http://www.scn.org/~mentifex/taotmeme.html

[Mentifex]

On Mar 31, 1:04 pm, Mentifex <menti...@myuw.net> wrote:
> [...]
> http://groups.google.com/group/net.ai/msg/3a4429a7b26d40ef
>
AMIGA MON AMOUR

For a year or two Mentifex held onto a press clipping
about a wonderful new computer being developed
called the Amiga, until he got tired of waiting and
threw the clipping away. A few months later, while
perusing the magazines at a 7-Eleven on East Green
Lake Way, I took sudden notice when the store clerk
casually inserted three copies of the premier issue of
Amiga World right before my nose. It was like a
Gruppenfuehrer moment in the movie of the Blues Brothers,
or the sentence in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina where
"vsyo chto builo nevozmozhno, stalo vozmozhnim",
which carries a mighty impact because the Russian
word for "impossible" changes its very form when it
switches to "possible". Old lurker Mentifex actually
bought a magazine instead of just leafing through them,
and I subscribed to Amiga World the very next day.
A few months later, the Amiga 1000 computer went
on sale at stores in Seattle, and my Latin and Greek mentor,
Doc Naiden of prior service at The Lakeside School,
bought the Amiga immediately. He and I attended a
conference for Latin teachers at the University of Washington,
where I showed off the World Lit Language Tutor on the
Coleco ADAM and Doc Naiden told everybody about the Amiga.
His Ph.D. from Columbia University somehow involved both
classics and astronomy, and Naiden was involved in a local
astronomy group that would set up telescopes at Green Lake
in the summer. Naiden decided to form a Commodore Amiga
Users group in Seattle, and I was quick to join him. He bought
a 25-inch RGB (red, green and blue) monitor to display Amiga
programs during the monthly Amiga meetings at his home.
Most computers back then were in green or yellow or
black and white, but the Amiga could display 4,096 colors.
The most advanced dweebs and geeks in all Seattle went out
and bought Amiga computers to tinker with the Maserati of
home computers. At an Amiga meeting I eventually had to
introduce the son of a Nobel prize winner to the son of a
double Nobel prize winner. When I applied for a job selling
Amiga computers at the Sand Point Navy Base in Seattle,
I was hired immediately over the telephone because I was
the editor of Revista Amigable, our club newsletter which I
subverted for my own AI memetic purposes.

We had a young guy called the Amiga Mole who would
come over and have dinner at Doc Naiden's house, then
sit at a word processor and type up the latest hot gossip
about emerging new technology. Doc Naiden had a
photocopy machine in his basement, and I would run off
not only enough newsletters for our membership but also
another fifty copies or so to mail out at my own expense
to other Amiga clubs across North America. They sent
reciprocal newsletters to us and they republished the
tantalizing articles by the Amiga Mole, who knew the
main computer magazine writers and spent hours on
the phone with them trading titbits of information.
By that time, Mentifex was becoming known by those
who kept their ear to the ground in the valley of the
thundering hooves, and one guy back east actually
asked the Amiga Mole if he knew Mentifex. It was a
wild shot, but the Amiga Mole casually answered in
the affirmative and tried to convey the impression that
Mentifex was just one more of the privileged phenomena
to which the Amiga Mole was privy. Amiga stuff was not
even his main bag, but rather alternative energy sources
and advanced computer architectures like a new company
called, I think, Micro-unity.

Doc Naiden of the Seattle Amiga users group had played
a part in the founding of Microsoft. While teaching Latin
at The Lakeside School, Naiden observed that kids in the
middle school were especially interested in computers.
The Mothers Club held a rummage sale every year at
the Seattle Center, and Doc Naiden asked for and got
one thousand dollars from them to use for educational
purposes on computers. Two boys in the middle school,
Bill Gates and Paul Allen, quickly ran through the entire
one thousand dollars in paying for computer time-share,
but apparently they learned enough to go on and establish
careers for themselves in the computer industry.

One day Doc Naiden came down into his basement and
had a royal fit when he saw me running off far more copies
of the Amiga newsletter than we really needed. I tried to
explain to him about our reciprocal relationship with fifty
other Amiga clubs, but Naiden could only see that his
photocopier was overheating and about to give out.
I had to switch to using two-cent photocopy coupons
to run off the newsletter in the University District.
It was a good meme while it lasted. For a year or two,
the library at the University of Washington Academic
Computing Center, down the street from the Last Exit
on Brooklyn, sent us letters pleading for new issues of
Revista Amigable or for a final word on whether so
important a journal was still being published. Unfortunately,
both the newsletter got shut down, and the library at the
Computing Center got shut down.

Mentifex
--
http://www.scn.org/~mentifex/taotmeme.html

[Mentifex]

On Apr 1, 2:24 pm, Mentifex <menti...@myuw.net> wrote:
> On Mar 31, 1:04 pm, Mentifex <menti...@myuw.net> wrote:
>> [...]

PANIC

At the height of the Amiga phenomenon, panic seized
Mentifex because he had been out of college for twenty
years and had not yet created the True AI that he was
put on this Earth to accomplish. He was in danger of
truly living down to his family's expectations of him.
Although I had not yet heard of memes as such,
I decided to go into maximum memetic overdrive
during the twentieth anniversary year of my graduation
from the University of Washington with a B.A. in ancient
Greek and Latin. Si quaeris monumentum, circumspice.
I looked around and saw that the field of artificial neural
networks (ANN) was looming large on the AI scene.
I decided to use the awesome powers of the Amiga computer
to publish a paid advertisement in the journal Neural Network
Review [?] at a cost of one hundred U.S. dollars for a whole page.

Desktop publishing had been pioneered on the Apple Macintosh
and was now available on the Amiga. In my Amiga sales job at
Omni International Trading, I had free access to all the Amiga
software tools. I learned how to use the Symbol font for Greek
letters and I quoted a major line from Aristotle's De Anima
in ancient Greek as part of my ad. Then I wrote ad copy offering
to send people the details of the Mentifex theory of mind for
artificial intelligence. Watch out, world! You will be assimilated,
and resistance is futile.

When the Mentifex AI ad hit the readership of the journal,
all the most ambitious go-getters immediately got in touch
with me and tried to determine if I was bringing anything new
to the table of the virtual seminar in neural networks.
I had not, they concluded, because I had only the design
for something and not an actual product. The excitement
died down, but the memetic ad campaign took on a life
of its own. I started mailing the ad itself out all around
the world. It was republished in seven or eight print
publications, including AI journals in Canada and Finland.

One educational outfit, run by a bunch of women, sent
the Mentifex AI ad back to me with a Post-It note and the
word "garbage" on it. What was that supposed to mean?
My feelings were hurt. Had they asked around about
Mentifex AI and gotten a negative endorsement?
Why would they go to the trouble to insult me?
Gradually I was learning that women, especially in
Seattle, would go out of their way to hurt the feelings
of any guy whom they perceived as a worthless dweeb
and a useless geek who did not fit into their worldview
of how men were supposed to serve their female purposes
in life. It was bad enough when I would call up Second Love's
house and her brother would tell me that she could not
come to the phone because she was washing her hair.
At the time I accepted the rationale meant to be an insult
and I did not recognize it as such, or I would have been
crestfallen.

[Mentifex]

On Apr 2, 1:26 pm, Mentifex <menti...@myuw.net> wrote:
> [...] At the time I accepted the

> rationale meant to be an insult and I did not
> recognize it as such, or I would have been crestfallen.

Little did I know that my divergence from the normal bourgeois
path in life would expose me to the extreme cruelty that only
bitter women can inflict upon luzer men.

GENDER

Men and women breathe the same air but believe in different
memes in life. Men believe that it is cool to work at a job that is
valuable for its own sake and brings intellectual excitement.
Women believe in making money. Men want to make their mark
on the world and gain prestige among their peers. Women
believe in making money. Men want to climb the highest mountain
and solve the most difficult challenge. Women want to make money.

With Second Love I made the mistake of answering truthfully
one day when she eagerly and expectantly inquired of me
how much money I thought I would be earning per year
after I got my future career going. Since I had given the
matter long and careful thought and had tried to be both
conservative and realistic about my future earnings, I
quoted the figure to her that that was my goal at the time.
The Commissar Lady (my code name for her because we
had met in Russian class) got visibly angry and spat out,
"That's not much!" But there was no further discussion of
the matter. The Kommissarin (a German variant of her
codename) did not let me explain that I was picking a figure
between what Professor Rosenmeyer was paid in the
Classics Department at the University of Washington
and the higher figure that he later earned at Berkeley.

I have explained earlier in The Art of the Meme how
women in the Health Sciences Library made the assumption
that any man studying brain journals must obviously be a
high-income doctor whose ugliness must be disregarded
in pursuit of the central meme in a woman's life. If you take
that same ugly brain-dweeb and plunk him down in a
Starbucks where he looks not like a doctor but like a
misfit intellectual and a toxic bachelor, Seattle women
adopt a different set of memes to endeavor to make his
life just as miserable as their own life among the twisted
systyrs of the wymyn of divorce and of failed relationships.
Take for example what happened to Mentifex one day
when he happily tried to enjoy an Americano coffee at
the Starbucks above the Whole Foods on Roosevelt.

I had first visited the Rising Sun produce stand where I
bought a ripe advocado. Then I walked into Starbucks and
asked a Seattle woman if the other armchair beside her
was available. She nodded affirmatively at this techno-dweeb
who had dared to ask her such a question, and the memes of
revenge against men in general started spinning in her head,
giving her a sweet taste of anticipatory satisfaction. She did
not know, and I myself did not know, that of all the coffee joints
in all the towns in all the world, Daffodil herself would walk into
mine just an hour later. Instead, the Seattle woman tracked my
movements as I stood outside to devour the advocado and
stood in line to order my coffee. Then, just as I came over
and sat down in the available armchair, the Seattle woman
chose that exact picosecond to rise to her feet and depart
out the door. Two plain-jane college girls studying across
the aisle from me marveled at how expertly the older woman
had executed the in-your-face timing aspect of the psychological
put-down of the hapless male who deserved it because her life
had been ruined by some male and therefore all other males
were sure as hell going to pay for it.

Half an hour later, I looked up to see the sweet young presence
of Daffodil stopping to smile down at me and waiting for me to
stand up in semi-pre-arranged greeting, because after our initial
dinner-date at the restaurant that replaced the Honey Bear, I had
told the Dutch-American girl that I would often read the Sunday
New York Times at the Roosevelt Starbucks. Now it was the
plain-jane college girls' turn to marvel at how the luzer Mentifex
dweeb was enjoying the company of the peaches-and-cream
sociology grad who was about to enter a nursing program. Still,
the amour propre of the innocent walk-into-my-parlor Mentifex male
had been wounded by the wiles of the vindictive Seattle woman,
and it took several more episodes of the same memetic maiming
for Mentifex to figure out the memetic countermeasure, which I
will now reveal to friend and foe alike.

[Mentifex]

"The Art of the Meme" has been published as a Kindle e-book at

http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Meme-ebook/dp/B007ZI66FS/

and the AI4U textbook of artificial intelligence is now available at

http://bookstore.iuniverse.com/Products/SKU-000540906/AI4U.aspx

as a Mobi e-book for the Kindle and the Kindle apps; and as an
ePub file for Sony(R) eReader, Kobo eReader, Nook(TM), iBooks.

Mentifex (Arthur)