{"id":1148,"date":"2005-08-12T13:57:10","date_gmt":"2005-08-12T04:57:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/?p=1148"},"modified":"2005-08-15T12:25:51","modified_gmt":"2005-08-15T03:25:51","slug":"lets-do-a-little-experiment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/08\/12\/lets-do-a-little-experiment\/","title":{"rendered":"Let&#8217;s do a little experiment!"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>One thing that nearly all people have in common is that they like to know when another person send them something. Using a variety of sources, I think I have a pretty good handle on finding other people who send me stuff. In fact, I think I find about 90% of all packages sent to me &#8212; but I may be wrong.<\/p>\n<p>This is an experiment to see how &#8220;findable&#8221; my house is. Put me to the the test, fellow <s>retarded monkeys<\/s> <s>bloggers<\/s> science-inclined readers.<\/p>\n<p>All you have to do is send a $100 bill to this particular postal address (i.e., the one I&#8217;ll email you privately). Just call it Dr Dave Postal Tracking Experiment or something like that. After a few days, I&#8217;ll post a list of every people I found have sent me a $100  bill. If you&#8217;re not on the list, I&#8217;ll invite you to send me your tracking number. I&#8217;ll report these unfound bills to the Post Office, and we&#8217;ll try to figure out why I didn&#8217;t get them.<\/p>\n<p>By the way, this is not just a cheap way to get some money (although it won&#8217;t hurt). I really think it will be a useful experiment. I&#8217;ll reveal all of my sources and, hopefully, learn about some new ones. I think other people and the postal tracking companies may benefit from the results.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Inspired by Mr. J-Walk and his brilliant <s>scheme<\/s> <s>idiot-trap<\/s> <a href=\"http:\/\/xrl.us\/g39d\">Blogger Experiment<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->&#8220;A cheap way to get some linkage&#8221;? God forbid anybody would have such debasing thoughts&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>But why, of course, you would have to be extraordinarily cynical not to see this for the unique scientific opportunity it represents.<\/p>\n<p>Even more hilarious were friends&#8217; reactions when I pointed this very poor attempt at exploiting the naturally extra-sensitive Stupid Meme Bone of the blogosphere to generate some cheap Google Pagerank:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/somethingunpredictable.com\/\">Robert<\/a>: &#8220;Ha! What an idiot! I will immediately link to his site to prove him wrong&#8221;.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bleakgeek.com\/\">Jonathan<\/a>: &#8220;Heh. I will blog his entry&#8221;.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cosmicbuddha.com\/blog\/archives\/001478.html\">fish<\/a> in a <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/search\/j-walkblog.com\/\">barrel<\/a>&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><strong><em>Update<\/em><\/strong>: Oh, <a href=\"http:\/\/xrl.us\/g5bh\">irony<\/a>&#8230; sweet, sweet irony&#8230;<br \/>\nSomething tells me he hasn&#8217;t been quite reading the entry before assuming a new participant.<br \/>\nAnd btw, all URLs above are, in fact, not links to his site: they use redirection (they don&#8217;t give him any unnecessary PR but are still easy to spot as an incoming link by a simple look at one&#8217;s referrers).<br \/>\nStill, that&#8217;s a lot of compliant lemmings there&#8230; How comes none of them has sent me my $100 bill yet?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One thing that nearly all people have in common is that they like to know when another person send them something. Using a variety of sources, I think I have a pretty good handle on finding other people who send me stuff. In fact, I think I find about 90% of all packages sent to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek","category-le-sigh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}