[updated 2009-03-03]
The core thrust of making memetics a respectable science with falsifiable claims and other tell-tale signs of ‘rigour’ has been the idea of replication.
As I wrote in a much older post about memes, there have already been some interesting replicators posited as possible memes. Unfortunately, this path hasn’t yielded the big breakthroughs that would firmly establish memetics as a discipline. Too bad, cos it would have meant that real-life, genetic replication of the deoxyribonucleic kind, with its attendant body of knowledge and tried-and-tested paradigms, would have been the perfect model for the fledgling science of memetics.
Bruce Edmond‘s article here neatly sums up the problems of the replicator-based model, and why memeticists have… well, disappeared into the ether. Continue reading
So apparently, the word ‘Frak’ is fast becoming everyone’s favourite swearword. The ingenuity of the word Frak lies in its phonetic similarity to its grosser cousin. It wouldn’t work half as well as the other word if it didn’t sound so completely like it. And yet it isn’t that other word… a fact that has allowed it to slip deftly through the usual censorship nets. 
(updated 2009-10-11)