Science doom vs the media

I am a lot of things, but a luddite, I am not. I adore new tech. Even more than that, I enjoy the idea of new tech – the human race’s amazing ingenuity to influence our world and shape our society using the blended fuels of creativity and science.

However.

I get ever so slightly nervous when scientists build an enormous machine that smashes matter together to see what happens. Especially, when what happens can be unexpected black holes and chain reactions involving exotic matter (eg stragelets) which could turn the planet into the proverbial grey goo.

Now, I’m not saying to Mama Science that she shouldn’t go ahead with the May opening of the Large Hadron Collider. Heck, I ride a motorbike, so I’m pretty much an adrenalin-induced catastrophe away from oblivion regardless. However, what I would really really really like is for the mainstream media to care about things like this.

Why is it that the potential extinction of humanity doesn’t rate page one if it contains too much science? Why does the mainstream media think that the the word “quark” is less exciting than the phrase “breast implant”. Have you ever seen the phrase “breast implant” uttered in the same paragraph as “apocalypse”? To prove the point, I did two searches on Google:

Search #1: “breast implant” AND apocalypse
Number of results: 11,600

Search #2: “quark” AND apocalypse
Number of results: 155,000

Point made? As humanity barrel’s down the path of science at ever increasing speed, it is we the people’s responsibility to understand where we are being taken. And it’s the job of the media to help us build that understanding. That means lucid, balanced, page 1 discussion, Media. Ok?

To help you along, I sat down and thought up a nice headline that you can use for your story. Please don’t bother to thank me – I do it because I care.

NEW SCIENCE TOOL COULD BLOW UP PLANET
ALSO SOLVE MYSTERIES OF SPACE AND TIME

The Dot-This Meme

The Dot-This Meme is the name given to a class of internet memes that have the property of being self-referential. The first Dot-This Meme meme was in fact this article, which refers to itself to give itself meaning and truth.

Properties of Dot-This Memes
Dot-This Memes have the following properties:

• They refer to themselves in order to give themselves definition and credibility.
• The self-referentialism is explicit, so the reader knows he/she is not being “hoaxed”, but is rather creating the truth of the meme through the act of reading it.

“Actualised” vs “in-the-wild” status
A Dot-This Meme is said to be “actualized” when it is given credibility as a meme by sources outside of and not associated with itself . For example, once a Dot-This Meme is linked to by an article discussing the meme and created by an independent source, it is said to be actualized.

Until a Dot-This Meme is actualized, it is referred to as being “in the wild” . Currently, the Dot-This Meme meme is in the wild.

Bragging rights
The first person/website that writes an article linking to a Dot-This Meme that is in the wild (and is thus responsible for actualizing the meme) is said to have “bragging rights” over the meme. That is to say, a person who actualizes a Dot-This Meme is able to publicly claim to have actualized the meme .

Naming
The naming of the Dot-This Meme is a geeky reference to the keyword “this”, which is used in a number of programming languages such as C++ and Java to return a reference to the current object. In Java, for example, one may write:

this.x = y;

to refer to a local copy of “x” where it may have an additional context.

Examples
An example of a Dot-This Meme is the Dot-This Meme meme, which is in fact this blog post. The reason the Dot-This Meme meme is a Dot-This Meme is because it defines itself and gives itself credibility. It also is up-front about its self-referentialism. So, it is both the meme and the meme’s definition simultaneously.