nem sirok csak 65ezren belementek a szemembe

A crowd of 65,000 sings ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ perfectly while waiting for a Green Day concert

THIS. IS. PERFECTION.

@catwinchester

Amazing! 

1. how the fuck did Green Day follow that

2. you know, we have fun here, with the word “meme,” but according to meme theory, which is an actual thing pioneered by reptilian human impersonator Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, most of what we call memes are very unsuccessful memes. A meme, in the scientific sense - if one is generously disposed to consider memetics a science on any particular day - is an idea that acts like a gene. That is, it seeks to replicate itself, as many times as possible, and as faithfully as possible.

That second part is important. A gene which is not faithful in its replication mutates, sometimes rapidly, sometimes wildly. The result might be cancer or a virus or (very very very rarely) a viable evolutionary step forward, but whatever the case, it is no longer the original gene. That gene no longer exists. It could not successfully reproduce itself.

The memes we pass around on the internet are, in general, very short lived and rapidly mutating. It’s rare for any meme to survive for more than a year: in almost all cases, they appear, spread rapidly, spawn a thousand short-lived variations, and then are swiftly forgotten. They’re not funny anymore, or interesting anymore. They no longer serve any function, and so they’re left behind, a mental evolutionary dead end.

This rendition of Freddie Mercury’s immortal opera Bohemian Rhapsody is about the most goddamned amazing demonstration of a successful meme I’ve ever seen. This song is 42 years old, as of 2017. FORTY TWO YEARS OLD. And it has spread SO far, and replicated itself across the minds of millions of people SO faithfully, that a gathering of 65,000 more or less random people, with nothing in common except that they all really like it when Billie Joe Armstrong does the thing with the guitar, can reproduce it perfectly. IN PERFECT TIME. THEY KNOW THE EXACT LENGTH OF EVERY BRIDGE. THEY EVEN GET THE NONSENSE WORDS RIGHT. THEY DIVIDE THEMSELVES UP IN ORDER TO SING THE COUNTER-CHORUS. 

“Yeah, Pyrrhic, lots of people know this song.”

Listen, you glassy-eyed ninny: our species’ ability to coherently pass along not just genetic information, but memetic information as well, is the reason we’re the dominant species on this planet. Language is a meme. Civilization is a collection of memes. Lots of animals can learn, but we may be the only animal that latches onto ephemera - information that doesn’t reflect any concrete reality, information with little to no immediate practical application - and then joyfully, willfully, unrelentingly repeats it and teaches it to others. Look at how wild this crowd is, because they’re singing the same song! It doesn’t DO anything. It’s not even why they showed up here today! If you sent out a letter to those same 65,000 people that said, “Please show up in this field on this day in order to sing Bohemian Rhapsody,” very few of them would have showed up. But I would be surprised to meet a single person in that crowd who joined in the singing who doesn’t remember this moment as the most amazing part of a concert they paid hundreds of dollars to see.

And they’re just sharing an idea. It’s stunning and ridiculous. Something about how our brains work make us go, “Hey!! Hey everybody!! I found this idea! It’s good! I like it! I’m going to repeat it! Do you know it too?? Repeat it with me! Let’s get EVERYBODY to know it and repeat it and then we can all have it together at the same time! It’s a good idea! I’m so excited to repeat it exactly the way I heard it, as loudly as I can, as often as possible!!”

This is how culture happens! This is how countries happen! Sometimes a persistent, infectious idea - a meme - can be dangerous or dark. But our human delight at clutching up good memes like magpies and flapping back to our flock to yell about them to everyone we know is why we as a species bothered to start doing things like “telling stories” and “writing stuff down.”

“That’s a lot of spilled ink for a Queen song, Pyrrhic.”

Man I just fucking love people.

In 1944, Harold Fisk had been following ghosts for three years. His ghosts were of the meandering Mississippi. In a report for the US Army Corps of Engineers, Fisk completed a mammoth effort entitled, “Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River”

I worry that at some point in time when self driving cars are popular, cars will take a specific route just to ensure you see certain stores, billboards and/or advertisements. The real world equivalent of pop up ads.

The fact that the humans inside can be distracted without the car crashing is just gonna up the ante on the sort of ads we’ll be getting. And the computers in our cars will be able to interface with the computers in the ads and the computers in our phones. We are talking some back to the future 3d full sensory ads. About time an augmented reality shark tried to eat me on the way to work. But with full “personalization” like in Minority Report, or this [x] I wouldnt be surprised if there’s some gamification mechanic that “rewards” you for interacting with the ads as you pass them to prevent everyone from just sleeping or staring at some other device that the ads cant override yet. Like a book.

But don’t worry too much. I’m sure there will be a premium package you can pay for monthly for no ads at all.

Not to shoot down anyone’s interpretation of this blog or the phenomenon associated, but I just really like sound design. I like that we have the ability to recreate very specific feelings, experiences and atmospheres exclusively through sound.

For the record, I’ve done a lot more with songs than just making them sound like they’re playing through the wall - I’ve also recreated the effect of abandoned/dead malls, being played down a corridor, or from a really old radio. And of course, I also enjoy making them sound a little more dreamlike or creepy. This particular effect just happened to gain a lot more popularity than others.

tldr; i just really love music and sound design and i wanted to share this with others

Customers who get angry when I read them their total cost are so compelling to me. Take charge of your narrative, Janice. Be the hero of your own story. You are the one who is purchasing $113.67 worth of adult zen coloring books, Janice. It’s not me you hate, Janice. It’s not me.

me: [walks into a psychic’s shop and slams down my tarot cards] it’s time to duel

i typed “horg” into the search bar and found this site which taxonomically categorizes those little plastic clips you find on bread bags

this is blowing my fucking mind

Our D.C. office building got a security robot. It drowned itself. We were promised flying cars, instead we got suicidal robots. by @bilalfarooqui

Autonomous Trap 001

“What you’re looking at is a salt circle, a traditional form of protection—from within or without—in magical practice. In this case it’s being used to arrest an autonomous vehicle—a self-driving car, which relies on machine vision and processing to guide it. By quickly deploying the expected form of road markings—in this case, a No Entry glyph—we can confuse the car’s vision system into believing it’s surrounded by no entry points, and entrap it.”

-James Bridle

of all the things i expected to read in the news today, hobby lobby being busted for smuggling 5,500 ancient mesopotamian artifacts including cuneiform tablets and clay talismans into the united states was not one of them

an arts n crafts superstore chain has been illegally smuggling ancient biblical relics LIKE THIS

out of the UAE, in falsely labelled packages delivered to some hobby lobby stores in oklahoma.

You should all read this cause it’s honestly incredible.

Watch This College Student Get Pwned By His Two-Year-Old Son

- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

What makes this funny is that in the actual novel once the creature learned how to speak he was actually very articulate and could indeed talk circles around Victor.  He wasn’t just physically stronger, he was smarter.

Could This Two-Year-Old Be Smarter Than A College Dropout?

“UNDERNEATH Lieth the Body of ROBERT Comonly called BONE PHILLIP, who died July 27th, 1793, Aged 63 years, At whose request the following lines are here inserted. Here lie I at the Chancel door; Here lie I because I’m poor; The forther in the more you’ll pay; Here lie I as warm as they.“

This is the best epitaph ever

Perfect

Hotel on Vimeo

A raven stretches its wings as it sits on a post inside the 30 km (18 miles) exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor near the village of Babchin, Belarus on December 23, 2009. The sign reads: “Radiation hazard”.