Decibel #14
Here’s some things from around the internet I consumed this week and found interesting:
- Job Search Love Letters (short series of small letters)
- Polyphonic Overtone Singing with Explanations
1. Job Search Love Letters
I found the idea of writing love letters to our about about the companies you are applying to during the course of a job search to be rather endearing and quite wholesome.
2. Polyphonic Overtone Singing with Explanations
Overtone singing is not my favorite sound in the world, but it certainly is cool. It’s especially cool to see it the harmonic tones visualized. I found it to be much easier to build an understanding of what was going on with the voice when I could visualize the emphasis on the various harmonics. Especially after the sound explanation from last week I thought this was a cool follow up.
3. Joke Police
The new additional context feature certainly can be used to push a specific narrative or show context that is not actually true maybe just fairly partisan, but I actually think that a “joke police” feature is a useful idea. I never really understood why explaining a joke made it less funny. Humor, as it seems to me, flows from mutual understanding of the situation. If no one gets your joke, then no laughs are had.
In person, in a one-on-one setting, I think it makes sense to explain jokes. I know I’ve sincerely laughed out loud after people have explained a joke to me. Of course there is nuance. Some jokes are timing specific and it’s taxing if someone doesn’t understand all of your jokes. But in general, I’m pro joke-explaining.
One of the big downsides I see of joke-explaining is in larger public settings with many people around. It’s not funny for the rest of the audience to sit around listening to an explanation of the joke if they already know it. On the internet however, people can just scroll past a joke explanation if they already got it, so an actual joke police feature seems like it would just be positive value to me.