{"id":483,"date":"2004-07-25T12:04:16","date_gmt":"2004-07-25T16:04:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theoreti.ca\/?p=483"},"modified":"2004-07-25T12:04:16","modified_gmt":"2004-07-25T16:04:16","slug":"grey-goo-meme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=483","title":{"rendered":"Grey Goo Meme"},"content":{"rendered":"

When does a meme get a life of its own? Nanotech guru turns back on ‘goo’<\/a>, by Paul Rincon for the BBC, is a story about how Eric Drexler’s concerns about the phrase he coined in 1986 in Engines of Creation for a disatrous epidemic of nanobot replication which turns everything into “grey goo”. Stephen Strauss in The Globe and Mail (Sat. July 24, 2004, p. F9) writes about how the meme travelled – A far-fetched theory that won’t come unstuck<\/a>. Prince Charles and others at the ETC Group in Winnipeg are trying to divert the meme away from disaster to questions that need to be asked now about biotechnology. (See Nanotechnology Publications, ETC Group<\/a> – these include briefs on the Nonotech and the Precautionary Prince<\/a>.)
\nThis meme could get a big boost in popular culture when the movie version of Michael Crichton’s Prey<\/a> comes out. Prey is one of Crichton’s better works (books like Timeline seem written as movie scripts, not science fiction to be read) and it dramatizes an out-of-control nanotech development with interesting implications for identity. When it comes out as a movie we could see Grey Goo go Global. So lets track the meme with some Web stats. Below are the stats for today (July 25th, 2004). After the movie comes out I will repeat the queries and compare.
\n
\nGoogle search for “Grey Goo” (in quotes) generated 9,080 results with Grey goo – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia<\/a> as the first.
\nAltaVista found 26,000 results with The First Church of the Grey Goo<\/a> at www.greygoo.org as the first.
\nI then ran “Grey Goo” through the TAPoRware Googlizer<\/a> asking for the top 20 links and passing those pages to get a frequency sorted word list. Here are the content words with a frequency of 30 or more.
\nGoo\t170
\nNanotechnology\t129
\nPhysics\t85
\nGrey\t84
\nMolecular\t80
\nReplication\t76
\nCarbon\t75
\nSelf\t71
\nNano\t71
\nReplicating\t67
\nEnergy\t67
\nJournal\t65
\nEarth\t65
\nTime\t62
\nManufacturing\t58
\nDrexler\t57
\nGlobal\t56
\nBiomass\t52
\nScience\t49
\nGray\t45
\nMachines\t44
\nMaterials\t38
\nNanorobot\t38
\nMass\t36
\nSystem\t36
\nSurface\t35
\nNatural\t34
\nMicron\t33
\nPopulation\t33
\nLife\t33
\nResearch\t32
\nEngineering\t31
\nTechnology\t31
\nWorld\t31
\nRunaway\t31
\nBody\t30
\nRelated\t30
\nScenario\t30
\nPaper\t30<\/p>\n

I then used the Googlizer to get the top 10 pages and give me a frequency sorted list of the collocating words within a 5 word span of Grey Goo. Here are the results, The – 44, Is – 15, Of – 14, A – 12, And – 10, To – 8, In – 6, Be – 5, About – 5, Nanotechnology – 5, Drexler – 5, Church – 4, Which – 4, All – 4, Could – 4, That – 3, Into – 3, Term – 3, This – 3, June – 3, Runaway – 3, As – 3, First – 3, Category – 3, Or – 3.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When does a meme get a life of its own? Nanotech guru turns back on ‘goo’, by Paul Rincon for the BBC, is a story about how Eric Drexler’s concerns about the phrase he coined in 1986 in Engines of Creation for a disatrous epidemic of nanobot replication which turns everything into “grey goo”. Stephen … Continue reading Grey Goo Meme<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy-of-computing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}