…wherein I more formally announce my schemes for the next 4 months.

First off, what I’m most excited about:

the MemeHacking branch of NotaCon

I’m co-organizing a separate branch of NotaCon this year dealing specifically with memetics. You can read more about it on the MemeHacking Conference page.

The call has gone out to specific persons and to the general public for interesting presentations and panel ideas. So far, the response looks utterly fascinating.

If you’re interested in memetics — i.e. the study of thoughts and ideas capable of self-replication and evolution by natural selection — check out the MemeHacking blog. We’re writing essays about recent scientific research through the lens of memetics.

MemeHacking gives damn good tweet.

You should should totally follows us on Twitter (@MemeHacking of course). We get retweeted by @Richard_Dawkins. You know, the guy who invented the word “meme” in 1976.

Relatedly, you”ll want to check out our sister site…

MemeWeaving.com

On MemeWeaving.com we’re collecting videos, papers, slideshows, podcasts, and all other content related to neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, cognition, behavioral economics, marketing, and the like. Why? Because we want to make it easy for people to surf through the stuff that’s influenced us and given us hope that we can discover the memetic operating system: US.

MemeWeaving has a little social networking doodad built in that we’re experimenting with. I added it because I think it will be useful for the Memetics Conference — people will be able to link up with and discover more interesting people who appreciate thinking about information, human brains, and culture through the memetic perspective.

Feel free to grab a free account!

It’s about time to completely revamp this site.  It’s been about 3 months, right?  Yeah, it’s about time.

Expect the worst.  In the meantime, enjoy the earworms of 2009.

“You’re metastasizing nicely!”

CriticalMass.org posted a blurb about a study in the UK showing how women cyclists are more likely to get run down than men cyclists, apparently because they are far more likely to stop at red lights and stop signs and follow car traffic laws.

A commenter named Elijah responded by asserting that he felt safer for following the same rules as cars, and lambasted fellow cyclists for feeling to be “above the law”.

Sensing there was a point to be made regarding rules and practicality, and the actual point of traffic systems, I ended up writing kind of a long reply, so I’m reposting it here:

Elijah, you may personally feel comforted in obeying the laws, but that doesn’t mean you are actually any safer. And if this study was well-conducted, your sense of entitled protectedness may actually work against you statistically in the long-run.

The issue at hand is not whether bicyclists should be able to “get away with” breaking/bending traffic laws. The issue is whether, in practice, having bicyclists actually follow traffic laws results in safer conditions.

Traffic rules work not because they are correct, and certainly not because we as a society tested their effectiveness in simulated conditions before deploying them on American roads. They work because they establish shared expectations of how others will behave, so that each individual is able to make predictions about what other individuals will most likely do under a certain set of conditions.

Drivers do not expect bicyclists to follow the same traffic rules as cars. That perspective may be changing in some cities (perhaps in SF, where I too spend a lot of time dodging cars whether or not I follow the car traffic rules), but the fact is that bicycles have different capabilities and safety concerns than cars, and thus will always act differently than cars in various traffic circumstances, and thus will cause all traffic participants to make different assumptions about the behavior of bikes in traffic than for cars in traffic.

If ladies in Britain are getting run down because they’re not being seen by cars, it’s because cars don’t expect to have to look there. Right or wrong, the bicycling culture has produced a situation in which bikes are expected to jump the light rather than wait like sitting ducks among a mass of cars who can’t see them.

Traffic laws are guidelines, not declarations of absolute Truth. Many different systems will work in the same situation. The question is what combination of written rule and cultural convention which are closest to the current status quo will maximize safety.

Welcome to yet another installation of Wordpress on nthmost.com.  Let’s hope this one sticks, shall we?