Forgotten Ideas: Twitter, Nov 31-29 2007
52 Jobs; Imposters; Beacon; End of Forgotten Ideas: Twitter Series
52 Weeks, 52 Jobs
One Week Job is interesting as a topic but even more so as a looking glass into information selection and representation within media.
One year is a fairly lengthy time-span and 52 jobs is 10 or more times more than the number of jobs most people have in their whole life. It’s impossible to cover all that information within a 3-minute morning-show opener, a 20-minute TEDx talk, or even a feature-length documentary. So what is selected and what is shown?
Compare these two videos:
The full list of jobs is also interesting: https://www.oneweekjob.com/about-the-project/previous-jobs. Seeing that he was a “Cattail Picker” for a chef, Jean-Philippe Desjardins, makes me wonder how many cattails the restaurant uses. I imagine, with the right 80s hits playlist, one could pick a lot of cattails—even in only an hour.
The pacing is just all over the place. For example, in the film, Sean (the protagonist) takes a job as a pizza maker and we spend a good amount of time on this, but then he takes a job as a film producer and it only lasts for a minute. It feels so disjointed that I got sucked out of the film…
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1664006/reviews
It’s a similar vibe to Frédéric Bourdin; or rather Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr.: an American imposter who people joke about impersonating (because it would be easier to pretend to be a person pretending to be a naval doctor than to be a person pretending to be a naval doctor).
I had come to two beliefs. One was that in any organization there is always a lot of loose, unused power lying about which can be picked up without alienating anyone. The second rule is, if you want power and want to expand, never encroach on anyone else's domain; open up new ones... If you come into a new situation (there's a nice word for it) don't join some other professor's committee and try to make your mark by moving up in that committee. You'll, one, have a long haul and two, make an enemy.
[Form your own committee.] That way there's no competition, no past standards to measure you by. How can anyone tell you aren't running a top outfit? And then there's no past laws or rules or precedents to hold you down or limit you. Make your own rules and interpretations. Nothing like it. Remember it, expand into the power vacuum!
~ Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr.
Facebook Beacon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon
It’s interesting that only 19 people got money from the class action law-suit and the majority of the money went from Facebook to a newly founded, Facebook-controlled charity.
Several class members and advocates opposed the Digital Trust Foundation’s formation, which also received judicial criticism although it was ultimately upheld. The critiques focused on the potential for biased, ineffective grantmaking. But Digital Trust demonstrated that cypres funds can be responsibly and effectively disbursed by an expert-led foundation. Digital Trust practiced a culture of accountability by implementing a strategic, consensus-based grantmaking process;
adopting a conflicts of interest policy; issuing open RFPs; monitoring grants; and releasing this report for public consumption. Compared to standard cy pres, which often results in unsupervised, open-ended gifts to litigants’ favored institutions, the Foundation supported diverse organizations with specific agendas in the promotion of education, digital privacy, and online safety.
You can read their final report here: fascinating stuff.
Google Intranet
Not super interesting but still notable if only to read the comments left by rooglers.
Villemard predictions of the year 2000, circa 1910
http://paleo-future.blogspot.com/2007/09/french-prints-show-year-2000-1910.html
Some ideas are preposterous while others—Correspondence Cinema—are commonplace. It’s interesting to think about the impossibility of video conferencing in the year of film photography. It helps me imagine that maybe some of the other unsound engineering fantasies might be possibilities or commonplace in the future.
Learning by swallowing a pill or connecting electrical diodes to you skull might very well be commonplace in 20 years time. I don’t think there will be enough commercial demand to drive the creation of proper food synthesis in the next 50 years.
Fuzzy Math
https://www.unz.com/author/michelle-malkin//2007/11/28/fuzzy-math-a-nationwide-epidemic/
Cinema is 80% sound and food is 80% smell
https://khymos.org/books/aroma-taste/
So true…
I tried using the Twitter API to make these historical plunges more incremental and thorough but it does not seem to be supported by the Twitter v1 API so this newsletter will likely be the last of the series: .