memes

Ok so we all know about memes. Memes are very important in the evolution of ideas and behaviours, evolution it should be noted is not always positive, like a massive game of chinese whispers, the memes can mutate into something that might not seem related to or as beneficial as the original meme.

The characters display a basic principle of memes using the me me's routine. This is a meme of  monkey see monkey do. A subject close to one characters heart might be taken up and used by another character, albeit in a different context. By using feedback, the character can mutate an idea. A thesaurus definition of a subject is used to give another (related) word to work from, A product on amazon might be decided on by searching one product and looking what other customers bought, or by looking up other products of the same weight. the effect is to give the characters a related, shared system of archetypal words, even though to the characters these might have little meaning, the words develop meaning through association.

Here is a bit more about em ,reprinted from wiki.

A meme is a unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate and respond to selective pressures.
The British scientist Richard Dawkins coined the word "meme" in The Selfish Gene (1976) as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. Examples of memes given in the book included melodies, catch-phrases, beliefs (notably religious beliefs), clothing fashion, and the technology of building arches.[
Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual meme's reproductive success. Memes spread through the behaviors that they generate in their hosts. Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, and (for better or for worse) mutate. Theorists point out that memes which replicate the most effectively spread best, and some memes may replicate effectively even when they prove detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.
A field of study called memeticsarose in the 1990s to explore the concepts and transmission of memes in terms of an evolutionary model. Criticism from a variety of fronts has challenged the notion that scholarship can examine memes empirically. Some commentators question the idea that one can meaningfully categorize culture in terms of discrete units.


Here is an example of a meme map, tracing the history of the idea of organic farming. The mid point is when the meme cross's over into mainstream society. A simular technique can be used to show how the characters (such as Mr Akers grenade-type personality) develope an dislike for a subject. the croos over point being the point other characters start using and associating the term.






the koch curve

This is reprinted from "From Hell" by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell.


 In it the  Koch Curve is explained an how its can be used to show how information can evolve, albeit in an inward direction.
Imagine, a circle as a plot of all the information known about a subject, the generations of the koch curve join the known pieces of information together into new information points, then the next generation joins the new information points, and so on.
You get an infinate shape, but with no more information in it, instead you get all the pieces of information, and future generations of information cross referenced.
 This has resonance with such ideas as post modernism, you can see how with music and fashion the same points of information get referenced and cross referenced. An inward feedback loop, forever evolving but with nothing new being added. The character use this technique in order to relate information together to produce art works. From word lists, produced when collecting information about a subject, serveral words are joined together to search for images and sounds, giving a more complex search criteria.

the following definition comes from the Computational beauty of nature, by Gary Flake

The Koch curve was created by Helge von Koch as an example of a curve that has no tangent at any point.  The construction starts with a single straight line (which is not shown, and is understood to be unit length) and iteratively applies the following transformation: Take each line segment of the Koch curve from the previous step and remove the middle third. Replace the middle third with two new line segments, each with length equal to the removed part. The two new line segments are inserted into the curve such that had the removed piece been left in place, the three segments would form an equilateral triangle.    

  If one could repeat the process forever, the final Koch curve would consist of no line segments at all but instead would have a corner coincident on every point in the curve. In other words, the curve consists entirely of corners. This is the gist of the earlier statement concerning the fact that the Koch curve has no tangent anywhere, and it is why many have characterized the Koch curve as a mathematical monster.

here is the koch curves wiki page