The Open Source Personal Meme Filter

Memes to avoid:
Memes that people are out to get us
Memes that sections of society are out to get us
Memes that we (the guys in the white hats) are superior to others
Memes that the people of other countries are inferior, dislike us, are plotting against us
Memes that being unkind to people is fun or cool
Memes that its them or us
Memes that to attack the meme is wrong, that to question a meme is wrong, or reject a meme is wrong
Memes that society has been bad to us and we have a right to take revenge
Memes that deny us our free will - our right to choose our path
Memes that justify the unjustifiable

Fear memes, superiority memes, memes that surreder our free will. memes with their own meme defences. Complexes of mutually supporting memes with no substance (houses of meme cards)

In short - memes that bring us fear and give us licence to do bad things to people

Rules: accept only memes that are free standing, testable, cause nobody any problems, bring good to people, and most of all that you believe in

A further observation: This personal meme filter is itself a meme - hopefully one that passes its own acceptance rules. Its okay to attack this meme - but hopefully it is strong.

An open source meme: This meme is published under an LGPL licence. Please feel free to build on it, but do share your results with us all. Together maybe we can build a better world.

Bitcoin - Digital Fortress?

I just thought I'd float this idea: In his science fiction novel of a few years ago Digital Fortress, Dan Brown describes a supercomputer built by the NSA to crack complex codes like public-private key encryption. We know now from the Snowden revelations that they've been doing a lot of funky stuff - some involving code cracking - some more focussed on back dooring, intercepting and hacking.

But Bitcoin - this technology of unknown origin... It involves an ever increasing amount of computer power computing hashes at an exponentially increasing rate. Vast bespoke computers of unprecedented power are now dedicated to this. Its driven phenomenal advances in bespoke computer power - pushing advances in GPU and bespoke ASIC hardware. I guess the two questions that spring to mind are:
1) Who is really behind bitcoin? Anarchists? Bankers? Con Men? Aliens?... The NSA???
2) Could we have helped (lured by a few riches) build a vast Digital Fortress style global computer to help our government security guys crack the most complex codes. I dunno - is this eveb possible?

The Meme Meme

Thought for the day: The term meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. A meme is an idea. Ideas exist within the population (who are their hosts). The point he was making was that strong ideas live and multiply and spread - just like strong (or perhaps more aptly, fit for the current environment) genes.
The idea of a meme is, clearly, in itself a meme. the meme meme (or meme2).
Interestingly common use of the term deviates from the original. It has evolved into something new. The meaning in most quarters is now this. Grotesque image plus big white writing plus bad grammar equals meme. Simples.
But the real meaning is far more interesting. Currently our world is populated by some powerful and dangerous memes. I won't put specific names to them here. There are several - and they generally follow the same pattern. "I believe that my set of ideas is the only correct one - believers in all other sets of ideas are therefore by definition wrong". I disagree with this wholeheartedly. Many sets of ideas can get you through life very nicely and do nobody any harm, and hopefully do some good. There are only a few no-no's in my view, but complete intolerance of a diversity of views, cultures, physical characteristics etc. is definitely high on the list of bads. But why so many bad memes? Compare back against the gene example on which the meme meme is based and you immediately see the answer... Because they thrive in the current environment. That's the thing we've got to understand and do something about... What is it about the current environment that allows these quire damaging memes thrive? The environment is pretty much us, the human hosts, or human society. We need to take a serious look at that.

MtGox and Instawallet AGAIN!?

I really should move on from speculating about MtGox and the murky world surrounding it. But its HARD, with so much still obscure.

In a previous post I showed how Instawallet seems to show up prominently on the transaction trail after the MtGox dog-and-pony-show (by which I mean their "show of coins" back when). Anyway, I just found this thread dating back to when Instawallet nearly folded and got taken over. An interesting piece of history on several fronts. But check out post #19 from Mystery Miner. He seems to be reporting some wierdnes whereby when he tired to use Instawallet to buy ganja on Silk Road, the ganja was actually purchased with apparently stolen coins, while his actual coins got used to purchase a "killer wet job". I have know idea what that is, but that aside it does seem he is reporting some kind of Gox-Instawallet fund confusion or interchangeabilit . although how reliable his evidence is though may be called into question by the fact that he may be judged from his post to be:

a) a self-styled shadowy enigma and international cyber-man-of-mystery
b) a self-proclaimed buyer of illegal drugs and frequenter of the deep web
c) maybe just a bit of a sleaze

... he may have actually been onto something there though!