The topics:

• We talked a little sports. Michael is excited that the Cubs are still in the running. Phil has enjoyed watching the Broncos. The game on Sunday was exciting down to the last few seconds.

• The loss of life to Ike will, hopefully, remain low. Property damage will be high, but could have been worse - it could have knocked out the oil refineries in the Houston area.

• Sometimes memes perform the important function of doing away with a bad thing.

  A minor example - the webap "Sitemeter" tried to launch a new version of their program yesterday (Sunday). The immediate feedback from bloggers was universally bad. Very bad. Stephen tried to click over to Sitemeter to see just how bad the new system was, but the Sitemeter tech guys were already pulling down the new system and putting back up the old system. Apparently the new system lasted less than a day.

• Some memes we're better off without:
  • Racism

  • Sexism

  • Theocracy

  • Luddism

  • Sally called in opposition to the meme that "the government can run everything." She believes that the meme was responsible for our World Wars and the Cold War. It is a meme, she said, that should die.

    Sally believes that Hyek's A Road to Surfdom began the pushback against the totalitarian meme.

  • Slavery.

    Slavery was the first way humanity leveraged the efforts of others. We discussed how as we've developed as a society advancement has created the opportunity to be better people. One big way - the modern world has abandoned slavery.

• Phil mentioned the book Unleashing the Killer Ap.

  Stephen said that air conditioning was a Killer Ap that empowered the new South. Michael Darling added that parts of the west including Phoenix and Las Vegas would just not exist without air conditioning.

• Phil and Stephen are soliciting ideas for new memes that should be started. The best meme gets a coffee mug.

• The chat room said that the death meme should die. Stephen wrote earlier in the week that there is not much room for improvement in life expectancy by curing traditional disease. According to Marvin Minsky we'll only get about another decade of life expectancy by curing all diseases. In order to continue improving life expectancy we are going to have to address aging directly.

• We have a Teddy Roosevelt connection on the show. Michael Darling was coaxed into telling us that his grandfather was a Rough Rider during the Spanish-American War.

• The meme that Stephen created is Spock's Chessboard - the 3D chessboard as metaphor for technological development.

  The upside of doublings on a 3D chessboard is that good developments are leveraged over and over in positive ways that are often unforeseen by the developers. The bad thing - as our clip from Big Bang Theory demonstrated - is that its possible for bad developments to suck on many levels.

• Michael Darling wants to promote the meme that "creativity is as important as literacy." It is a meme that he caught from a TED Talk:

• Phil stated that in the world of Spock's Chessboard, creativity is essential to navigate the changes.

• Phil's meme is this, "Something's going to happen... Something wonderful."

  With the complexity of Spock's Chessboard, we can't know what is going to happen, but we can be assured that something is going to happen. And, based on our experience with technological adaptations in the past, it seems very likely that it will be something wonderful.

• Commenter "OKDavidRay" suggests that we need a symbol to represent the "Something is going to happen... Something Wonderful" meme.

  Stephen thought an astronaut that looks like an embryo might work.

  

  But there would be trademark problems. After the show the guys thought about it further - maybe Jupiter lit up as a star with its moons as new planets?

  Suggestions would be appreciated.

Our front bumper is a sample of Marginal Prophets' "The Difficult Song."

Our exit music this week is from Susannah Blinkoff. The song is "I Got Lucky."

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