Firstly, I should note that the lab coat situation was resolved without incident. My meeting took all of 10 minutes before it was clear that whoever reported me was somehow confused.

I was able to get the original email reporting me (or at least as original as the person from occupational safety still had) and I present it here in its entirety:

Some JPL employees told me about a person who likes to wear his lab-coat into the 303 cafeteria. It appears to be soiled. You might want to talk to the food-services supervisor and have him/her keep an eye out for this person. There's no telling what chemicals this person is dragging into the cafeteria.

I take issue with several things in this statement. I am greatly irritated by the word choice in "soiled". I take care to keep my labcoats clean and bleach them at least monthly if not more often. Also, there's not "no telling" what chemicals were on my jacket--a five second discussion with me could identify the only possibly dangerous chemical (detergent grade bleach) and recognize that the odds of it contaminating food were nil. Furthermore, who are these "some people"? If this email was on Wikipedia, I would put a [Who?] tag on that in a second.

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I've decided to attempt to use Facebook as a tool to build a map of my life as defined by the people that I knew. In that sense, I've decided to be very liberal in adding people as "friends". This doesn't mean that I'm going to add people who aren't people that I would consider friends, but it does mean that I will seek out people from my past to add. Eventually, I think it would be interesting to use mutual friend graphs along with some sort of autobalancing tool to draw an history of who I knew. Of course, the membership of facebook doesn't represent the entirety of people who I know and have known, but it does provide a large enough sample size to be interesting.

This idea was sparked by me doing a full export of my livejournal (the only was I could find to see posts more than 380 posts ago) and seeing some posts/comments from people who I had not talked to in years. I thus began hunting up people who I knew back in my highschool days on Facebook and found a few. My theory is that by bridging between my social graph and the graphs of people that I have been isolated from, I can build something interesting. We'll see how this goes.

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