The other day I was listening to an interview with Sarah Vowell, who had written a book about Catholic Missionary programs to Hawaii and other Pacific Islands in the 19th century. Vowell's book explored why the missionaries were so successful in converting the islanders to Christianity. There were all sorts of "maybe this was the reason," and "maybe that was the reason," but neither one ever ventured forth with a modern explanation, which is simple: maybe the islanders' belief system was memetically weak.

Christianity has spent most of its existence defining itself in opposition to something else: Judaism, Roman paganism, continental animism, Crusader-era Islam, and so forth. It has evolved an enormous collection of public rituals and private rites that inhabit the brain of the believer, putting up defenses and inoculating the mind against alien ideas.

In contrast, there's little evidence of any kind of zealous proselytizing for one faith over another within the Pacific Islands. The abstract animism and power worship of the Islanders had never evolved the kind of defenses Christians had, and certainly had never been so evangelical to devise either offensive strategies or active countermeasures.

Christianity wiped out isolated island faiths in the same way that rats wiped out isolated island species of birds and reptiles, and smallpox the locals.

There's a meme going around to analyze your writing in the belief that somehow you write "like" someone else. I'm suspecting some trivial keyword magic: the word "robot" automagically gets you Asimov, for example.

( Many and varied. )

Dan Brown? Really? That's sad. I'll buy Palahniuk for Fortune Cookie, but I suspect it was "gasp" and "rope" that did it there.

The Megalomaniac

Ambitious, Intelligent, Calculating

Take The Supervillain Archetype Test at HelloQuizzy

Instructions:

• Take a picture of yourself right now. Don't change your clothes, don't fix your hair - just take a picture.
• Post that picture with NO editing.
• Post these instructions with the picture.

Because all the cool kids are doing it. I didn't edit it at all; I just have an excellent flickr-posting toolchain. The photo was taken at 9:20 this morning at the office.

Where do I begin to describe just how massively, incompetently wrong this result is?

( Memes go behind cuts... )

One thing that especially annoyed me about the photographs? I'm being judged by my reaction to a flat, still image. The one image of the mountain really brought it home to me: in the photo, my eye was drawn to the old shack in the foreground; in the field, however, I'd be looking at the mountain, and wondering how to get there. Other images were similar: in the photo, the lights on the radio telescope were interesting; in the field, I'd be wondering what they were looking for.

Must be all those darn video game reflexes.