Thomas Midgley, Jr., creator of leaded gas and Freon refrigerant

Derek Muller looks at Thomas Midgley, Jr. the creator of leaded gas and freon, and the harm done by his Midley's creations. 

 "The Man Who Accidentally Killed The Most People In History"

 

Spotify playlist: 1940s blues (piano). Playlist by Alistair martin

Make tweets by Chuck Baggett appear in search results again.

 I first reported the problem of tweets missing from search results in 2019, three years ago. 

There was a problem back then that resulted in my account being suspended. I supplied what @TwitterSupport wanted and my account was unsuspended. A few months after my account was unsuspended, I noticed my tweets prior to these events were no longer visible in search. I think they should have been, both from a moral or ethical point of view, and I suspect normal procedure in that situation includes restoration of all old tweets to visibility in search, but they were not reindexed due to an error, an oversight. 

Twitter needs to restore my tweets to normal complete visibility in search results

Nearly all of my tweets have been deindexed by Twitter, either as the result of a glitch, or as punisment for an alleged infraction of Twitter rules that I have not been told about and can thus not defend or explain or beg forgiveness for. 

Email to Chanel @Twitter support, Support@Twitter.com, @TwitterSupport, re reindexing @ChuckBaggett's tweets

Thanks for your reply. 

I'm having great difficulty in getting Twitter to make my tweets show in search results. As part of this misery, Twitter sent me this email:

Hello @chuckbaggett, 

Thanks for your response. We do apologize but we only display a certain amount of Tweets in the Tweets tab and in the Tweets and reply tab.

In your Tweets tab, we display 800 of your most recent Tweets. In your Tweets & replies tab, we display 3,200 of your most recent Tweets and replies.  Anything over that will go into your Twitter archives. You have 308,573 Tweets.

The reason for this is because of indexing capacity restrictions by Twitter.

Thanks, 

Chanel

Twitter Support

I responded as follows:

The problem I asked for help with is not about how many tweets show at https://twitter.com/ChuckBaggett or at https://twitter.com/ChuckBaggett/with_replies, so the information you gave about limits of 800 or 3,200 is not relevant. 

I am talking about tweets showing up or not showing up in Twitter search or Twitter advanced search. 

Here are pictures of how one accesses regular twitter search and Twitter Advanced Search.

Regular search:

You get to Advanced Search after making a regular search by opening a menu like this:

And when you click the Advanced Search option shown above you get the Advanced Search Dialog, which looks like this:

The problem is that my tweets don't show in search results like they ought to, because they have been deindexed. 

They did show properly, normally, for over ten years; then something went wrong. 

 They can and should show normally in search results again, if only I can get someone to understand what I am saying who cares enough to help me out.

Twitter's search system can return results from when a person first started Twitter up till now. I know this because I've used Twitter search many times a day nearly every day since I started Twitter in October of 2008. 

You can demonstrate this easily just by searching yourself. 

As an example, I did a search using Twitter's advanced search page at https://twitter.com/search-advanced. 

I found Jack Dorsey's earliest tweets, the oldest one still visible to the public, nearly or actually the first tweets ever posted on Twitter, shown here. 

Below is the search syntax Advanced search produces to see these results from 2006: 

(from:jack) until:2006-03-22 since:2006-02-19 

Here is the url that is produced when one does this search:

https://twitter.com/search?q=(from%3Ajack)%20until%3A2006-03-22%20since%3A2006-02-19&src=typed_query&f=top . 

I created my @ChuckBaggett account a bit later than @Jack, in October of 2008. 

I will now do a search in Twitter Advanced search dialog, which does the search by generating the following search syntax: (from:chuckbaggett) until:2008-10-31 since:2008-10-01

The url produced by such a search is https://twitter.com/search?q=(from%3Achuckbaggett)%20until%3A2008-10-31%20since%3A2008-10-01&src=typed_query 

Here's what that search produces:

If Twitter search was behaving properly toward my tweets, it would display some tweets from then, because I made some. I know I made some because they are in my Twitter archive.

Here is a screenshot of Twitter not returning any tweets for my first month. 

No Twitter search produces any results for me from when I first started until sometime in 2021. 

This is abnormal. 

It is a malfunction on Twitter's part, and it can and should be corrected. 

Here's a search for my tweets for the year 2010, for example: 

Advanced Search syntax :(from:chuckbaggett) until:2010-12-31 since:2010-01-01 

The url produced by the search: https://twitter.com/search?q=(from%3Achuckbaggett)%20until%3A2010-12-31%20since%3A2010-01-01&src=typed_query 

Here is a picture showing how it returns nothing when it should show many tweets. 

Not returning results when there are tweets that match the search string is not normal. It is not how Twitter is supposed to work. There is a problem that is fixable and should be fixed. 

I have the archive for my tweets, so I can use that to find the exact words of a tweet I made, and do a test search using those words. I tried a Chinese virtual world called Hipihi back then. "Hipihi" is a distinctive word. It's in the first tweet I posted that still exists. Here's that url: https://twitter.com/ChuckBaggett/status/952214882 and here's the text: "I am writing a blog post at my blogger blog, and I'm going to try to fire up the Hipihi virtual world and get some screenshots." Here's a screenshot of the tweet. 

If I search for the word "Hipihi" from October 3rd through October 12, my tweet should be in the search results, but it's not, because nearly all of my tweets are missing from search results, because they have been deindexed. https://twitter.com/search?q=hipihi%20until%3A2008-10-12%20since%3A2008-10-03&src=typed_query&f=top 

I feel like I'm pulling teeth trying to get across something that is easily understandable and extremely trivially easy to test. 

If you can't get my tweets restored to normal visibility in search results, please help me get in touch with someone who can. 

Thanks in advance for your potential help in getting my tweets to appear in search results like they should, and did over 10 years, and should now, like every other Twitter users' tweets. 

Chuck Baggett

Ukraine Quiz On Sporcle

 I like taking quizzes. This seems like a good time to take a quiz on Ukraine.

I got about half right, and that only because I'd just taken another quiz on Ukraine's neighbor. 

Sporcle is a great quiz site. Its at sporcle.com.

Making All Of @ChuckBaggett's Tweets Visible: The Never Ending Story

I got an email from Twitter about my reports of nearly all of my over 300,000 tweets not being visible in search results, by paging backward on my tweets on my profile page, or in a  normal fashion in threads where I'm replying to other people or they are replying to me or linking to my tweets. 

Hello @chuckbaggett, 
​​

We appreciate you reaching out to us about your account's Search visibility on Twitter. We also understand how important it is to have your Tweets available for everyone on the platform. No worries, we took a look at your account @chuckbaggett, and we were able to find it while searching publicly. We can also see your Tweets.

Would you please send us the Tweet URL address that isn’t showing up so we can troubleshoot?

Please let us know if there's anything else we can help you with. 

Thanks, 

Mara
Twitter Support

---------

 And this is my reply to that. 

​​You are wrong about my tweets all being visible in search and all being visible using other methods of seeing tweets. 

I joined Twitter in 2008. I have made over 300,000 tweets. That's over three hundred thousand, and they started on the day I started in October 2008 and continued until now.  Up till a few months ago, when your system with decided to punish me by hiding nearly all of my tweets, or had a technical error resulting in hiding nearly all my tweets, every tweet I ever made was visible in search, which is what is normal for normal twitter users. 

Using Twitter's advanced search page, at https://twitter.com/search-advanced ,

and putting my username ChuckBaggett in the from: field and October 1 2008 in the from field and December 31, 2019, in the to: field (aka until field), and doing the search, zero tweets are returned. 

This is how you fill in the fields in Twitter's advanced search page to see my tweets starting from when I joined in October 2008 until the end of 2019 - eleven years during which time I wrote many tweets. 

When you do the advanced search as shown in the picture above, you are doing a search like this:

(from:chuckbaggett) until:2020-12-31 since:2008-10-01 

and that shows in the browser address bar as 

https://twitter.com/search?q=(from%3Achuckbaggett)%20until%3A2020-12-31%20since%3A2008-10-01&src=typed_query&f=top

 

This is what the result of search for my tweets starting 10-1-2008 through 12-31-2019 looks like: 

I'm not saying that my account is not returned by search. 

I'm not saying that absolutely none of my tweets are visible or that absolutely none of my tweets are returned in search results.

I am saying that over a quarter million tweets are not returned in search and can't be accessed by starting at https://twitter.com/ChuckBaggett/with_replies and paging backward. 

This might get resolved faster if we could talk over the phone, possibly doing remote screen sharing, and possibly get someone in Twitter involved who is familiar with how to use Twitter search.

Resolving this will having someone who knows how to use Twitter search and who is able to distinguish between saying "nearly all my tweets do not appear in search results" and "all my tweets do not appear in search results" and "my account does not appear in search results at all". Those are three different things, and I'm only saying the first of those three, that "nearly all my tweets do not appear in search results".

I have recently found out that I have stage 5 prostate cancer, and I don't know how much longer I have to live, and I'd to get all of my tweets restored to appearing in search results, by starting at the most recent and paging backward in time, and where they are linked to in other people's tweets in threads, while I'm still alive. 

Thanks for your help. My phone number is 555-555-5555.

@TwitterRetweets @TwitterSpaces @TwitterCanada @TwitterBlue @TwitterSupport @Twitter