Let’s be very, very clear: this guy is nuts, running a scam, or both. I won’t dwell on that unless there’s interest in a technical explanation as to why this will never ever work (and there may be interest—I don’t mean to discourage it!). I will point out that this is a textbook scam/crackpot idea, though. The guy makes tons of claims with zero evidence to back any of it up, insists that there’s some conspiracy to cover up some magic truth, and will reveal all of his secrets to you if you give him money in some non-refundable way.
Drew and I were walking from the T today when the subject of his current status with the MITMedia Lab came up. We joked that he should set his Facebook relationship status to “It’s complicated” with the Lab. We talked a bit about the practical challenges for doing so, and decided that the best way to pull it off would probably be to create the [fake] Media Lab account himself and then play both accounts as a puppeteer.
Drew observed that it seemed strange that more people didn’t already do this sort of thing (some definitely do, but it still seems novel when it happens). We figured that the next big thing was probably for people to create fake accounts and stage elaborate fake relationships with them, complete with ceiling-to-floor photos and wall-to-wall (get it?) drama. Then things got out of hand.
We figure it would be totally awesome to stage a full-blown Face-opera. You’d need a bunch of willing actors to drive the accounts, appear in photos, and generally make noise. From there, you could use the natural flow of things on Facebook to tell a story. The characters could post on each other’s walls, add and remove friends, appear in pictures, move, and interact with the non-fictional world. Since Facebook preserves a record of all these things, it could be both the retrospective account of the story as well as the real-time narrative.
In a very real way, this would be like a new kind of theater. Things would take place on a much longer time-scale (weeks or months for a Face-opera as opposed to hours for a theatrical production), and the involvement of the audience could be very different. People in the audience would come in late, would miss details, might have a different set of “friends” in the cast, and would generally have different understandings of what was going on. Maybe some of the characters would have very public profiles. Maybe others would be more reserved and have more restricted profiles and fewer friends. Maybe some would refuse friend requests from members of the audience if they were already friends with a dramatic rival.
I really, really like this idea and think it has the potential to be pretty awesome. Now all we need is a ton of creative talent, an army of actors, and some way to grab the attention of millions of unwitting (or at least not-yet-witting) audience members. Let’s get rolling.
(For our readers: I’d really love to hear your thoughts on this. Also, Drew tells me that we need to come up with a better name that’s less evocative of a space opera.)
“I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,” said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.” (Members of theatlasphere.com, a dating and fan site for devotees of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead,” might disagree.)
I should always carry multiple books, so I can accessorize my reading with the social situation.
There is an Ayn Rand Fan Dating site and it has almost 8,000 “dating profiles.” I especially like that it’s only for fans of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. If you liked We the Living, they don’t want you.
I am awfully fond of this song. It’s not that great musically, but there’s something about the lyrics that is super tight and evocative and it just draws me in. There’s also a wonderful live version of it on Fabchannel.
I need to fix up this template so there’s a place for song names. It’s The President’s Dead by Okkervil River.
The Media Lab Grad who did the design work on the Minority Report is turning the basic interaction strategy into a real product. This video shows a bit of how it works. The interaction vocabulary seems a bit strange still, but the platform is super exciting.
All campaign operatives are, to some extent, geographers, and the map of the United States, endlessly studied, is the object of their pieties and contains their own compulsions. Every operative has his own map, weighted by income, by ethnicity, by the practiced habits of ideology, but each believes his map is determinative and that elections do not contain surprises but more precise revelations of the map, of tendencies buried deep.
I love this imagery. This is totally my feeling about election results, too – that political maneuvering works to a point, but ultimately we’re revealing some hideously complicated game board that everyone is striving to understand. This is totally unrealistic, but I kind of want it to be true.
I have invented another word: isopageism. Noun. The ideal of having all parties involved in a discussion achieve a common understanding. Derived from the colloquial expression “to be on the same page.”
Example: “In the interest of isopageism, should we expect to eat dinner before the party?”
Hah, neat. I never thought to actually check those example.com urls in RFCs. I don’t know why I think it’s so awesome that this is reserved, but I do. It’s apparently up for renewal in 2011, though. Get ready to snipe!
Today’s piece of engineering excitement: progressive cavity pumps!
Progressive cavity pumps have a helical rotor and a stator with a helical cavity. The phases of the helices are different, and that somehow makes geometric magic happen such that little pockets are created in the pump and get pushed from one end to the other. The geometry also works out such that there’s a line seal from one end of the pump to the other, so there’s (theoretically) no possibility of back-flow.
Progressive cavity pumps are really handy when you need to pump really viscous stuff at very controlled rates. I gather that they’re used a lot in the food service industry for things like pumping dough and in the chemical industry for pumping adhesives and urethanes. It seems that they’re also becoming increasingly common for bioethanol sorts of things in the renewable energy world, too.
It’s cool stuff. Bear these in mind the next time you need to pump ultra-viscous liquids/slurries in a highly controlled sort of way, as I’m sure everybody does every few nevers.