Meme Watch: "East African Plains Ape"

I am no longer the only person on the Internets talking about the East African Plains Ape:

Achenblog: Daily Humor and Observations from Joel Achenbach : ...I am happy knowing that some of my fellow East African Plains Apes are making that trip into space... (comment by md)

And:

crshalizi: ...the primate visual cortex is a remarkable thing, and does a marvelous job of analyzing the kinds of patterns needed to get East African Plains Apes through their natural life-cycles, but it was never supposed to cope with massive collections of high-dimensional multi-variate data...

Far may the meme spread!

Comments

[shah8]

Oh geez and very well...just wait and see what happens with that meme, and sooner or later you'll be going "let overwrite, let override"

[paul wolfson]

Have you seen "The Evolution of Our Preferences: Evidence from Capuchin-Monkey Trading Behavior" by Chen, Lakshminarayanan and Santos?

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2005/08/the_evolution_o.html

I'm reading it now, so cannot give you much of an impression, but I like the motivation for the study.

[paul wolfson]

Have you seen "The Evolution of Our Preferences: Evidence from Capuchin-Monkey Trading Behavior" by Chen, Lakshminarayanan and Santos?

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2005/08/the_evolution_o.html

I'm reading it now, so cannot give you much of an impression, but I like the motivation for the study.

[paul_wolfson]

Oops. Sorry about that

[Ottnott]

Brad wrote: "Far may the meme spread!"

Kansas has already posted guards at the border to keep it out.

In some of the radically evangelical states, the meme will pass through without interacting with any human minds, like a neutrino passing through brain matter.

[Derelict]

Yeah, well, one meme I wish would STOP spreading is the "internets" nonsense. Bush in his stupifying ignorance and pre-verbal word skills spits it out, and now people like you, DeLong, and Atrios and Drum are actually giving it currency and legitimacy.

Isn't it bad enough that Bush has lowered the national IQ by 25 points in just five years? Do you have to help him reduce our intelligence still farther? At this rate, by 2008 we'll be a nation of drooling idiots. Indeed, our intellectual capacity will have been reduced to that of real East African Plains Apes--the first ones to walk upright, at any rate.

So knock it off with "the internets."

[MTC]

Campaniapithecus africaorientalis?

[Mike Molloy]

Since "internets" has caught on at Fark I'd say any efforts at restraint by Messrs DeLong, Black and Drum are futile. "Intarwebs" anyone?

[donna]

I still remember when it was Arpanet and all the silly people weren't allowed near it... sniffle!

[wkwillis]

I wonder how far the "Aquatic Ape" meme has spread, and where...

[P.M.Lawrence]

I like the appeal of the Coastal Swamp Ape variant theory. For that, adults don't need to swim, but they do need to be able to stand, and their habitats would have been destroyed by rising coastal waters and so not readily detectable now. You can imagine them arranging ambushes for perennial small prey and canging up in pursuit of migrating herds, before being driven onto the plains in serious concentrations when their habitats vanished.

As for "internets", that's just the usual crass Americanism of making spurious plurals like "woods" and "commons". In the latter case it is actually a serious thing, since the whole point of the Tragedy of the Commons was a blurring of the interests of each and all, of singular and plural - and, before the breakdown of the system, each common was only a resource for its OWN commoners under a traditional system of regulation by custom and usage. It really is important to distinguish individual commons.

[P.M.Lawrence]

Drat. I meant spurious singulars, of course. "Commons" is plural.

[Kimmitt]

Chen went to my high school. I bask in reflected glory.

[Auros]

I wonder what Brad thinks of the theory that our hairlessness relates to a love of swimming, which says that we're not so much "plains apes" as "shoreline apes". (The full-on "acquatic ape" theory seems to have been discredited, but still, I know _I_ for one do very much like being submerged to the neck in water, and I doubt any critter with a fully-furred body would enjoy that, or the bedraggled aftermath.)

[Auros]

Ah, I see WKWillis, above, mentioned the same thing I did...

[md 20/400]

The juxtaposition of the EAPA and the space program was too 2001 to pass up.

BTW, I think 2001 is a great meditation. Who knew the Blue Danube Waltz was that LONG?!

[md 20/400]

An old thread, but appropriate. So ...

Latest use (a variant) seen over on Making Light:
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006724.html#93458