A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture—often with the aim of conveying a particular phenomenon, theme, or meaning represented by the meme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.
Memetics is the study of information and culture based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution. Proponents describe memetics as an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer. Critics regard memetics as a pseudoscience. Memetics describes how an idea can propagate successfully, but doesn't necessarily imply a concept is factual.
The Namib-Naukluft Park is a national park of Namibia encompassing part of the Namib Desert and the Naukluft mountain range. With an overall area of 49,768 km2 (19,216 sq mi), the Namib-Naukluft is the largest game park in Africa and the fourth largest in the world. The most well-known area of the park is Sossusvlei, which is the main visitor attraction in Namibia.
Bait-and-switch is a form of fraud used in retail sales but also employed in other contexts. First, customers are "baited" by merchants' advertising products or services at a low price, but when customers visit the store, they discover that the advertised goods are not available, or the customers are pressured by sales people to consider similar, but higher priced items ("switching").
The brown hyena, also called strandwolf, is a species of hyena found in Namibia, Botswana, western and southern Zimbabwe, southern Mozambique and South Africa. It is currently the rarest species of hyena. The largest remaining brown hyena population is located in the southern Kalahari Desert and coastal areas in Southwest Africa.
A steel mill or steelworks is an industrial plant for the manufacture of steel. It may be an integrated steel works carrying out all steps of steelmaking from smelting iron ore to rolled product, but may also describe plants where steel semi-finished casting products are made, from molten pig iron or from scrap.
Pearl millet is the most widely grown type of millet. It has been grown in Africa and the Indian subcontinent since prehistoric times. The center of diversity, and suggested area of domestication, for the crop is in the Sahel zone of West Africa. Recent archaeobotanical research has confirmed the presence of domesticated pearl millet on the Sahel zone of northern Mali between 2500 and 2000 BC. Cultivation subsequently spread and moved overseas to India. The earliest archaeological records in the Indian subcontinent date to around 2000 BC, and it spread rapidly through Northern Indian subcontinent reaching South India by 1500 BC, based on evidence from the site of Hallur. Cultivation also spread throughout eastern and southern parts of Africa. Pearl millet is widely grown in the northeastern part of Nigeria. It is a major source of food to the local villagers of that region. The crop grows easily in that region due to its ability to withstand harsh weather conditions like drought and flood. Records exist for cultivation of pearl millet in the United States in the 1850s, and the crop was introduced into Brazil in the 1960s.
An Internet meme, commonly known as just a meme, is an activity, concept, catchphrase, or piece of media that spreads, often as mimicry or for humorous purposes, from person to person via the Internet. An Internet meme usually takes the form of an image, GIF or video. It may be just a word or phrase, sometimes including intentional misspellings or corrupted grammar. These small movements tend to spread from person to person via social networks, blogs, direct email, or news sources. They may relate to various existing Internet cultures or subcultures, often created or spread on various websites. Fads and sensations tend to grow rapidly on the Internet because the instant communication facilitates word-of-mouth transmission. Some examples include posting a photo of people lying down in public places and uploading a short video of people dancing to the Harlem Shake.
Memetic engineering is a term developed by Leveious Rolando, John Sokol, and Gibron Burchett based on Richard Dawkins' theory of memes.
Sossusvlei is a salt and clay pan surrounded by high red dunes, located in the southern part of the Namib Desert, in the Namib-Naukluft National Park of Namibia. The name "Sossusvlei" is often used in an extended meaning to refer to the surrounding area, which is one of the major visitor attractions of Namibia.
Tourism in Namibia is a major industry, contributing N$7.2 billion to the country's gross domestic product. Annually, over one million travelers visit Namibia, with roughly one in three coming from South Africa, then Germany and finally the United Kingdom, Italy and France. The country is among the prime destinations in Africa and is known for ecotourism which features Namibia's extensive wildlife.
The Namib Desert Horse is a rare feral horse found in the Namib Desert of Namibia, Africa. It is probably the only feral herd of horses residing in Africa, with a population ranging between 90 and 150. The Namib Desert Horse is athletic in appearance, resembling the European light riding horses from which it probably descends, and usually dark in color. Despite the harsh environment in which they live, the horses are generally in good condition, except during times of extreme drought. The horses have been the subject of several population studies, which have given significant insight into their population dynamics and ability to survive in desert conditions.
Yahoo! Meme was a microblogging site launched by the Yahoo Latin America team in August 2009. The platform was conceived as a mash up of functionality derived from Twitter and Tumblr. Its beta version was originally launched to a Brazilian audience with later versions expanding into Spanish, English, Chinese, and Indonesian audiences.
Omeyantalala is a village in the northern part of Namibia, in the Oshikoto Region about 70 km from Onyuulaye Constituency center of Okankolo constituency, stretching out 20 km from the main road. The village is in the Ondonga kingdom and under the leadership of Headman Tate Ananias. Many of the villages inhabitants are commercial farmers farming with small livestock and mahangu as a farm crop. The village has about 54 households.
Doge is an Internet meme that became popular in 2013. The meme typically consists of a picture of a Shiba Inu dog accompanied by multicolored text in Comic Sans font in the foreground. The text, representing a kind of internal monologue, is deliberately written in a form of broken English.
The Ted Cruz–Zodiac Killer meme is a mock-conspiracy theory popularized on the internet during Ted Cruz's candidacy for President in 2015–16. The internet meme facetiously suggests that United States Senator and former 2016 presidential candidate Ted Cruz was the Zodiac Killer, an unidentified Californian serial killer of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Cruz, born in 1970, could not have committed these murders, which began before his birth. Circulators of the meme do not genuinely believe that he was the Zodiac Killer, citing the absurdity of its premise; NPR wrote that the meme captured "a feeling they have about Cruz: they think he's creepy. And they want to point that out, as clearly as they can."
Tide Pods are a line of laundry detergent pods from Procter & Gamble's Tide brand, which can be deadly if ingested, and which have been labelled as a health risk by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There have been numerous media reports discussing how children and those with dementia could endanger their health or life by consuming the pods, mistaking them for sweets. Between 2012 and 2013, poison control centers reported over 7,000 cases of young children eating laundry pods, and ingestion of Procter & Gamble laundry pods had resulted in six deaths by 2017. In response to the dangers, Procter & Gamble changed Tide Pod containers to an opaque design, introduced warning labels and added a bitter tasting chemical to the pod contents.
Flex Seal Products is a company specializing in adhesive bonding products, encompassing the Flex Seal, Flex Shot, Flex Tape, Flex Glue, and Flex Mini products in the US. The company is owned by Phil and Alan Swift. Phil also serves as the brand's television spokesperson.
