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Fort's NNDB Entry

Mighty_Emperor

Gone But Not Forgotten
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I have been stumbling across NNDB entries in various places and (while they might be better off going for some kind of wiki) it does seem interesting - here is an explanation from the front page:

What is NNDB?

NNDB is an intelligence aggregator that tracks the activities of people we have determined to be noteworthy, both living and dead. Superficially, it seems much like a "Who's Who" where a noted person's curriculum vitae is available (the usual information such as date of birth, a biography, and other essential facts.)

But it mostly exists to document the connections between people, many of which are not always obvious. A person's otherwise inexplicable behavior is often understood by examining the crowd that person has been hanging out with.

and I thought as it is only in beta it won't mention Fort but it does:

Screenshot 2023-02-14 at 11.55.52 PM.png


http://www.nndb.com/people/893/000031800/

Although it is a little scanty and I think he might be amused (or not ;) ) about:

Occupation: Scientist

Although I'm unsur eif they have a good category for him - iconoclast?

Anyway just a little side note - although if anyone were sufficiently interested they could submit a larger entry.
 
"Mostly harmless"
:rofl:

An interesting idea, but it looks like they need to flesh it out. From the looks of it, currently, all the entries and relationships are hand-written? I'd be very interested any automated system to derive "circle of friends" relationships. (errr... aparently NNDB doesn't produce relationship diagrams.)



As far as the Fort entry, they don't even list his books.

Looking at some of the categories of data tracked, it really does look like they're doing a Freindster look-a-like. But just removing the assumption that the person is currently living. Please note that there are some people who made some interesting travels after their death. (Geronimo, for instance :devil:)
 
Fort's entry

Interesting that ''NNDB is an intelligence aggregator that tracks the activities of people we have determined to be noteworthy, both living and dead'' - unless they employ a small force of genuine mediums, tracking the activities of the dead might be a slightly daunting task.

And again, it is ''much like a "Who's Who" where a noted person's curriculum vitae is available (the usual information such as date of birth, a biography, and other essential facts)'' - without mentioning that Fort was an author, wrote four unique books, and even that there is a magazine and an institute named for him! ''Essential facts'' boils down to...scantiliness.

Perhaps it's a pseudo-Fortean mission: '' to document the connections between people, many of which are not always obvious. A person's otherwise inexplicable behavior is often understood by examining the crowd that person has been hanging out with'' - as Fort would remind us, in barbershop science, a ''trimmer of circumstances'' [Lo III, 1] can snip and shear data enough to make any data correlate to another. My uncle used to do this with Rubik's Cubes; do as much as he could, and then, faced with defeat, peel off the coloured stickers to make it work. Anomalies and irresolvables, ''Clipped from events, by barber-shop science'' [Lo III, 1]

Or, maybe NNDB is understating its abilities in order tod eflect our concerns from it; ''Eventually, we will have synopses and analyses of creative works by the people in the database, including their books, films, and recordings'' they say, and we reply, ''Not any time soon!'' - but maybe they've already done it, and what they show is only a very weak sample of their fortified mass: false intelligence: make out your strength to be less than it is, to invite an attack - it comes - battle, explosions, violence - the attacking force vastly overcome - and destroyed.

I think I will continue to get my information on Fort from resologist.net and forteana.org :)
 
I was browsing the imdb for a bit and found a Michael Palin film called 'The Missionary' whos main character was the Rev Charles Fortesque.

Apparently the film was bollocks.
 
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