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So Mo bought be this book, The Electric Meme, and it talks a lot about brains and memes (virus-like ideas.) His basic ideas is that Memes are less like viruses and more like prions (the kind of protein-folding thing that, for example, causes "Mad Cow") in the way they work with the existing material of the brain, and actually makes arguments that take memes away from being vague, poorly defined "ideas" to something tangible, if difficult to perfectly isolate. So the reading gets pretty difficult at times, and I can't say I'm following every sentence, but I just read a part where he's talking about how memories are changed from short term to long term, that the two types of memory are very different, and sleep is an important part of that. And for some reason I suddenly feel less bad about having to go to bed at night, now that I have a kind of mind-centric explanation for it. If that makes any sense.

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Funny Link of the Moment
Back to ZUG: laugh-out-loud funny How To Draw The Nipples Back On Victoria's Secret Catalogue Models Using Adobe Photoshop and less funny but still clever, a collection of pranks: for office-life, campus-life, and general things with a computer.

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Anecdote of the Moment
Went for a haircut, local BestCuts or whatever it is. Kind of an amusing exchange with the lady cutting my hair, who had just asked her coworker to pick her up some cigarettes at the store, (two for one special,) I was just making smalltalk:
"I haven't smoked since my Russian girlfriend in college, and not very much at all then, like 1 a day at most."
"Yeah? You're not going with her anymore?"
"Nah, I got married to someone who's more...Germanic, I guess."
"Germanic?"
"I dunno...short, blond spiky hair...looks kinda...Aryan? Cute."
"Mo?"
Turns out she's the one Mo generally asks for there. Kinda funny that that description let her make the connection.

But what I find really clever is how the aprons they put over you have "BestCuts" printed on them...backwards, so you can read it when you're getting your haircut. (Makes more sense for a haircut place that probably struggles with name recognition (too many ____Cuts places out there) than for, say, an ambulance. "Thank god that Ambulance had what it was printed backwards in front of it! I never would have known what that big white truck with all the sirens bearing down on me was without that there for me to read in my mirror!")