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2002.08.11 : 2002.08.17

Saturday, August 17, 2002

Being thus freed of the fetters of my Treasured Readers for some number of days, I was at a loss about how to fill my time.  But I found a couple of rolls of electrical tape, so I tossed Helen in the trunk and retreated to the serene coastline of Maine for a period of observation and reflection. 

When last I was here, WW III began, and I spent the entire time listening to crackly PBS stations on the radio, trying to hear if we, or they, were blown to smithereens yet.

This time, I have similar worries, what with Dubya beating the drums of war eastward towards Iraq. Not this week, though; it's scheduled to be a slow week, with little more in the pipeline than the assassination of Abu Nidal and a silly video of a dog being gassed, which I've told CNN to play over and over again to fill their otherwise vacant air time.

So here I am in Maine, which may be the most relaxed, most placid place in the world. I am without telephone, without television and - it makes me twitch - without Internet access, for a week or so. I am particularly worried about the latter, as there is a major architectural effort going on at work that I am supposed to be leading, and here I am very fundamentally disconnected from it for far too long.

How will I survive? Read about it here.

Friday, August 16, 2002

Plurp. We have noted the spectacular lack of recent reader input, less than a dozen Blabs in two days, and we are required to inform you - and we are really sorry about this - of the mandatory penalties that your actions have precipitated.

Because of your undisciplined behavior, we are unable to Plurp here for some number of days which shall be no less than 2.8 and which shall be no more than 28.

We regret that it has come to this.

Thursday, August 15, 2002

Blab. A reader presents a perfectly plausible theory about why people fall asleep on airplanes.

People sleep on airplanes because they like drooling in public. 

That's certainly why we do it. We had no idea this was the universal reason, though.

Blab. Another reader bows in the direction of physics on this topic.

People fall asleep on planes because planes are pressured to the equivalent of 7000 feet above sea level. Unless you live in Denver, the effect is to starve your brain of oxygen. Writing Perl code on a long plane flight is not a good idea.

Actually, our general impression is that writing code in Perl is never a good idea. But that's just us.

Does this theory suggest that people who live at high altitudes sleep more than people who don't? That people in Death Valley stay awake more? An interesting thought. We wonder if there's an authoritative Web reference.

Blab. A reader assures us that ...

All is explained. 

Let's review.

The U.S. government confiscated secret Nazi anti-gravity technology at the end of World War II, and later may have tested it in aircraft that account for the rash of post-War UFO sightings. Some of that technology has probably made its way into the B2 stealth bomber. Some of it is probably so dangerous that it's buried away in secret government vaults. 

Of course, this is Salon.com, the World Greatest Authority on science and technology. You can read the article, if that captures your sense of scientific mumbletyfrotz. Interestingly, and beyond all expectation, even Salon recognized fertilizer when they eat it.

In the end, Cook's argument boils down to the old proverb he invokes several times -- Where there's smoke there must be fire. But sometimes, someone's just blowing smoke. 

So, see, Cook (the author of the referenced book) is blowing ...

Blab. On our off-hand comment yesterday about readers mistaking that little Blab box in the margin for a search facility, a reader writes:

You mean I can't search the entire web from this box? Terrible!

Actually, you can search the entire Web from that little Blab box. Here, in fact, is the entire Web. Just for you.

You're welcome.

Blab. A reader with a speech impediment writes:

All I can say is "wow".

Synthetic sight for the blind who enjoy having electrodes implanted in their brain. Lord knows we do. But, for them, it's the visual centers.

Anyhow, yeah, pretty astonishing. We are particularly intrigued by how plastic the brain is, repurposing various parts of the cortex to take on new perceptual integration. Cool! Weird, but cool.

Blab. An obsessive copy-editor sends us a correction. Make that two corrections.

drown*ed* in yesterday's Blab flood. -AJL 

world renown*ed* windows backgrounds. Or do you have something against the past tense? -AJL

We'll accept the reader's noogies for improperly present-tensing drowned. We're not sure we require noogies for that second one, though. World renowned gets 10x the Google hits as world renown. Is the latter improper usage?

Blab. A reader reminds us that ...

Demosthenes can do is bend, and hold the legs together.

... which is good enough, in our view.

Blab. Everyone is hereby required to go look at the absolutely hilarious ...

Tales of the Plush Cthulhu

... or fear for your sanity. (Or is that and if you do, fear for your sanity? We're not sure.) Anyhow, we wish we had thought of it.

Blab. A reader who wishes to probe our mental state asks:

So what technologies have you excited, lately? Anything?

We recently excited a vague theory of brain organization with such force as to nearly cause it to break apart.

On a more serious note (and this will be the only one in 2002, so read carefully), we recently ran into (but failed to excite) two cool things.

The first was a program that, given a digitized image, extracts regions and edges and foregrounds and background and stuff, then rerenders it as if it were painted in oils by an artist, with only the relevant detail shown and everything else just sketched in. Pretty cool!

The second was a virtual presence system that projects images onto the walls of a room in such a way that you see the intended 3D scene, automatically aligning a whole bunch or projectors to show a unified scene, compensating for the presence of corners so that you don't see them at all, and filling in shadows from one projector with another. It's pretty spooky. And very cool. We definitely want one. (Full body FPS - Yes!)

Yo. Because we were not nearly nervous enough about Really Bad Things happening in New York, the NYT has kindly decided to tell us all about the building in whose shadow we live.

Since Sept. 11, the owners of signature skyscrapers have been trying to find ways to calm jittery tenants and make the buildings more durable if catastrophe strikes.

Perhaps nowhere has anyone thought longer and harder about that challenge than at Citigroup Center, the 59-story tower on East 53rd Street with the distinctive triangular top and a troubled history involving secretive structural repairs, which were begun 24 years ago this month to keep the building from toppling in hurricane-force winds.

Oh, yeah. Great stuff. No problem. It won't topple over on us. Not a chance. They're shoring it up as we speak. They've thought of everything. Just like they did 24 years ago.

We feel much better.

Plop. Why do they call these the Dog Days of Summer? Dogs don't like this weather! They just lay around, trying desperately to sleep, whimpering and panting all day long. It's not a pretty sight.

They should call them the Cat Days of Summer. They also lay around all day sleeping, but they do that anyway. Or the Lizard Days of Summer. Or maybe the Hermit Crab Days of Summer.

But not the Dog Days. Certainly not.

Plurp.

These are the
blue dog days
of summer

Wednesday, August 14, 2002

Blab. Everyone seems to have drown in yesterday's Blab flood, as there's not much today at all. In fact, other than spam and some of you folks trying to use that little Blab box as a search facility (which, by the way, doesn't actually work), there's just this one, from a reader who can't be bothered to send us the URL. Hmph.

I know you only work there, but do you know what this is about?

"IBM, based in Armonk, N.Y., said it will cut 14,213 jobs, mostly in its services business, which had about 150,000 employees as of the end of last year. IBM overall had about 320,000 employees at the end of 2001. Another 1,400 cuts will come from its microelectronics unit, IBM said. The company will be adding about 30,000 workers with its planned acquisition of consulting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers for $3.5 billion in cash and stock."

First of all, what is "services business" anyway? Seems like they got out of the service business when they contracted out for "easyServ". And why, oh why, are they acquiring a "consulting firm," formerly known as one of the big 6 accounting firms?

I still love my thinkpad with it's cute little, wonderfuly efficient trackpoint. And yes, you should have a dual boot machine (it's so easy). All the cool kids have one. (Actually, the cool kids only have linux, but if you need wingdoze for a few apps, why not.) 

That's the media for ya. IBM has reduced its workforce this year. We think that most of this reduction has already occurred. So that's not news. What's news, as far as we can tell, is that IBM recently filed SEC reports saying that the reduction was about 5% of the workforce. Maybe that particular number hadn't hit the media previously? Dunno.

Anyway, BFD. Companies commonly reduce their workforce in tough times. It's unfortunate, and we are sad that some of our colleagues had to leave. But, unlike many of its competitors, IBM is still in business, is not looking to be acquired, and is gaining market share in important areas.

Today's IBM is not the IBM of twenty years ago. IBM Global Services -  which does outsourcing, I/T and business consulting, and the like - is now responsible for around 40% of IBM's revenue and about that fraction of its employees. It's the biggest I/T-related services business in the business.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers is in the process of selling its I/T consulting business to IBM. The number of people this brings to IBM is about twice the recent workforce reduction, so the number of IBM employees is actually growing. PriceWaterhouseCoopers is retaining its accounting business. In the wake of the Andersen debacle, in which their consulting arm and their accounting arm seemed to have a conflict of interest, it would not be surprising to see several accounting / consulting firms reconsider the wisdom of that particular combination.

Plurp. We want to know why people fall asleep on airplanes. They fall asleep on flights in the middle of the day, and on flights that are only a couple of hours long. They often fall asleep within minutes of takeoff. It even happens to us.

These same folks do not fall asleep on their jobs (we hope), or while at home. So why on airplanes?

Yeah, it could be the constraining seats. It could be the white noise. It could be the stress. It could be lots of things. We even have our own wacky theory. But we would love to see an authoritative Web source that states the actual reason.

Readers ... ?

Plurp. As long as there's nothing else to report, we should remind any new readers that happen to be dropping by (nodding off, etc.) that there's more to this fine Web site than Plurp. Well, not much more, but there is our whole Stuff section, including the immensely popular Alien Food Symbols, the enigmatic Mia Chronicles, the inbred Helenisms and Broken Jokes and, of course, the world renown Windows Backgrounds, our very most popular feature after Plurp itself.

We know. Like you care.

Plurp.

The blue dog
fell asleep
in Weblogs

Tuesday, August 13, 2002

Blab. Having recovered from yesterday's mysterious hiatus, in which we exposed no reader Blabs whatsoever, we now open the floodgates and drown our readership in its own words. Our first reader confirms our deepest fears.

Me again, this time concerning factorization instead of primality: factorization is suspected to be NP-Complete (or at least NP-really-really-hard), which explains why no one involved with RSA encryption has as of yet run screaming and raving out of the NSA offices.

Then why are those people running screaming and raving out of the NSA offices?

Blab. A reader sends us vital information about ...

TP Algorithms

How do you determine from which of two toilet paper rolls to take the toilet paper?

• Algorithm Large: Always take paper from the largest roll.
• Algorithm Small: Always take paper from the smallest roll.
• Algorithm Random: Don't think -- select the roll randomly.

An insightful analysis.

Naturally, we now wonder if P=TP. But we encourage our readers to avoid speculating about that.

Blab. A reader whose Blab was no doubt lost in the ether for a few days wrote:

Apparently your email service has installed something called "SpamAssassin".

Yes, and somewhat of a metaphoric misnomer, we think, as we don't usually expect assassins to use Dymo labelers as their weapons of choice.

Blab. A reader who understands our needs sends us a ...

creepy collection of deformed hand casts.

Now we know where to go for new and unusual hands. It was so frustrating when we needed one some years ago and had no obvious source. We ended up doing it all ourself, which we do not recommend.

Blab. A highly politicized reader writes:

We here at the society for the politicization of everything and for the end to shirts with contrasting collars, think that the Plurperd of the world might well profit from printing and affixing to their automobiles, bicycles, brief cases and lap-top cases, the enclosed art, free of charge, and with proper credits to a fine corporation.

Thank you for your attention in this matter.

Apparently, the society also promotes critical misspellings, as the following follow-up might indicate.

The society made a typo.  (It is a lower case society so that is not the problem.)  It should read Plurpers, not Plurperd. 

Thank you for your attention in this matter.

Curiously, our mail system hinted that there was some attachment to said mail, but wouldn't show it to us. It's almost certainly us being stupid, but in an unfamiliar way.

Blab. A reader protests our lack of attention in this matter:

No no no no no no, they're not *advertisements*, they're the *subject lines of advertisements*.  So they don't actually advertise the product (since they don't have contact information or brand names or anything), but they advertise the fact that the wearer () has an email address, and () is hip and postmodern enough to put SPAM subject lines on his T-shirt in a deadpan ironic XXIth cent sort of way.

Despressingly few pornspams again; the only possibilities today:

Teens and Farm Animals26597

Hello friend , 100% FREE TEEN ACTION!

Dirty Knickers n Lollipops

Hey!! What's Up? I'm *Monica* 20/F/Arizona/Webcam & Pics

none of which are really perfect.  A couple good non-porn ones (both with that "Friend" tag):

Friend, Is Your Health At Risk?

Friend, We Found Your Money, Oprah Winfrey show

and the rather questionable:

Liquidation Blowout!

(We shudder to think.) 

 Any of which would make a rather memorable T-shirt.

Always anxious to help our Treasured Readers, we donate the subject line from a pornspam we received just this morning.

DRIPPING WET CHEARLEADERS (FREE FOR LIFE)

While we think this would make a good T-shirt, for reasons that we hope are obvious, it does make us curious about mechanism. How, exactly, do they keep them wet for life? Really big spray bottles? Moving them to the Amazon rain forest? Drip irrigation? But none of those seems to be free, and certainly not for a long period of time.

Yes, we do wonder about things like that. Why do you ask?

Blab. A reader worries about those spiders.

What are Rubbish Even spiders? Are they those symmetrical types, cos I can't stand that symmetry stuff. -AJL 

We wondered that same thing, but we were too fearful to ask. We're severely arachnosymmetriphobic.

Blab. Going for the award for the World's Longest Sentence, a  reader writes:

A Helenism, or I don't know if it's really a Helenism but it might be, that I used myself just this morning (without thinking "oh, I should make up a Helenism for this situation"): "apologies if I'm beating a dead hornet's nest".  A combination, of, of course, "beating a dead horse" and "stirring up a hornet's nest", with the richly nuanced meaning of "I hope I'm not bringing up something that was already dealt with before, but only dealt with to the extent that it was quiet, but still sitting there sort of vibrating to itself, and everyone's been hoping that the pretense of resolution would remain intact until they'd moved on to something else, or at least until after vacation".

"We have to listen to our children, and let them know that we're taking them seriously.  Maybe your child really needs to tell you something.  Maybe your child has a giant beetle, a beetle the size of a VM microbus, sitting on top of his head." (They say that on the news on TV.) 

Yikes. How incredibly complicated! We're not sure if those two constituent phrases mean the same thing or something different. Naturally, we seek the sage council of our readers.

(Must be hard to pay attention to children, though, what with all those hornets buzzing around that dead horse.)

Blab. A reader informs us that

Sandy Petersen Speaks

Sandy's the guy who wrote the Call of Cthulhu RPG for Chaosium way back when. We played a fun though partial campaign several years ago, in which we played a nosy writer looking for background material. And boy, did we find background material!

No word yet, though, on the computer version.

Blab. An unexpectedly large volume of readers responded to our stimulus of asking them to donate descriptive phrases are never associated with certain professions. This has been noted.

The first such response is rather large.

- An outspoken mime
- An unflappable IHOP cook
- A tintinnabulating tubaist
- An interpretationally uncontroversial signing gorilla
- A beatific Plurp reader
- An uncowardly terrorist
- A blameless Enron executive
- A duly elected 43rd President of the USA

We particularly like that first one! Along similar lines, a reader who should be shot sends this: 

A budding florist.

We seem either to be exploring a new genre here, or generating oxymorons. Our penultimate reader today wants to be in the latter category.

A courteous telephone operator!

How rude! Finally, a reader sends us one that we simply do not understand.

A humble web host.

Blab. Apropos of which, our Web host writes:

We are now running the latest FreeBSD 4.6-STABLE, complete with the very latest OpenSSL.  Apache, sshd, and SSL-enabled mail applications have been stopped and restarted.

we continue;

gjvc

Courage.

Blab. Two readers have similar, but subtly different, theories about our puzzle, Which of these does not belong?
 

The first picture on the left because every other picture has a picture of Britney Spears on its left 

The third picture from the left is different from the rest as all the others are either 'NOT a picture of Brittney Spears OR they have a picture of Brittney Spears to their right' 

We wonder how many theories are consistent with our sparse data, and what the complexity of the algorithm might be that generates all such theories (in general).

Blab. During our blackout, the other half of our schizophrenic self wrote:

A couple of corrections.  We spent the day in Tiburon and dinner on Sunday night was in a former Colonel's home. God forbid Majors ever lived on Simonds Loop!

No, it was Sausalito, you dummy! We oughta punch you in our mouth.

And as to Colonels and Majors, we never could tell those Navy guys apart.

Blab. An eagle with a time fetish writes:

When i saw it was 10:20 PM PST and no Plurp, I was going to twit you for missing Monday. Clever of you to fly to the West Coast where you barely made it in under the wire. No liver plucking ofr you, I suppose. 

The things we'll do to avoid missing that deadline, eh?

Yak. From a PhoneMail message:

I think this will be a low brain-damage, high impact session.

Sounds painful nonetheless.

Plurp. Tagline from email we received at work.

There is a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness."

-- Dave Berry

Surely he didn't mean ... ? Nah!

Yak. From our conference today.

We're building a peer-to-peer wireless nose network.

The speaker works for Cyrano Sciences. Honest.

Yo. Ever wondered how they catch escaped prisoners? Here's one piece of it, according to a guy from AT&T Labs.

AT&T provides telephone calling cards to inmates. AT&T then records who the inmates call and when. (Actually, they record who everybody calls and when. They have records on every call made thought their system in the past 18 months.) This profile turns out to be pretty unique to each person.

When one of the inmates escapes, the government subpoenas phone records (and the inmate's profile) from AT&T. They look for people who are making phone calls that match the relevant profile. Then they predict where and when the escapee is going to make the next phone call, show up ahead of time, and yank him back to prison.

Neat, right?

Now imagine if they wanted to find you.

Plop. In previous years, our conference talked all about how everyone was going to get Internet access via satellites and cable modems, all sorts of cool technologies from Web-based startups, and how to provide technology to people who still use oxen for power.

Not so this year. This year, there seem to be more talks on military technology, on surveillance technology, on technology to guess what you're up to by examining how often you send email. Stuff like that.

We don't like the trend.

Yak. Again, from our conference.

In that same vein, I've been waiting for a Martha Stewart - Iron Chef Smackdown, but it looks like we'll get a Martha Stewart - SEC Smackdown instead.

Aren't computer scientists fun?

Yo. Some games from our conference.

Plurp.

The blue dog
was
a giant beetle,
a beetle the size of a VM microbus.

Monday, August 12, 2002

Plurp. Imagine our surprise when we received more Blab today than any other day we can remember. And we have no idea why!

Now imagine your surprise when we delay posting all of it until some other time. And we have no idea why!

Plop. Arriving in our hotel in San Francisco on Saturday, we saw a woman whose face was the color of cooked lobster. What kind of idiot gets a sunburn in dreary San Francisco?, we thought.

Yesterday, we had all sorts of fun going to Sausalito with friends, poking around hat shops and craft stores, then steaming back across the bay on a ferry. It was a fabulous day - warm, bright and windy enough to make for exciting sailing for the hundreds of sailboats on the bay.

Today, our face is the color of cooked lobster. So we answered our own question. And that's a plus.

Plurp. San Francisco turns out to be a city stuck in the 1970s. We lived here, briefly, in 1977 or so. Almost nothing has changed. With the exception of a few new skyscrapers downtown, the buildings, the streets, the colors, even most of the signs, haven't changed at all.

The mechanism, it turns out, is political. The city government and local neighborhood organizations are extremely conservative, and restrict anyone from changing anything. The internal hallway of a temporary WWII army building can be declared historic (and, in this case, was), preventing anyone from taking it out or changing it in any way. The general social tenor is that anything that went before, no matter how new or old, is historic, and hence unchangeable.

It is so different from Manhattan, where everything changes all the time. There's simply no such thing as a block that remains unchanged for ten years, or even for one year. Manhattan is a life form, in which all of the parts are replaced metabolically, yet the organism adapts to changing needs while retaining its basic form and function.

San Francisco is oddly nostalgic, much like the MGM Studios park at Disneyworld, in which the world is stuck in the Los Angeles of the 1950s. But this is an actual city. People live here, work here, raise their kids in a cultural stasis field that shows no signs of ever ending.

We wonder what San Francisco will be like in a hundred years. Will it be a quaint anachronism, an odd social experiment that occasionally appears in human interest stories in the news, the Amish Country of the Left Coast? Will the stasis field become more forceful, and prevent cars built after 1977 from entering the city? Require dress and makeup from that curious era? Ban cell phones and laptop computers? Will it be an urban museum of the Disco Age, in which certain eccentric people nevertheless choose to live? 

Plop. One social thing that has changed: Lombard Street, "the crookedest street in the world." Oh, not the street itself, or the houses on it - that's not allowed (see above). It's the traffic. The tourists, the now thousands of tourists, all of whom feel compelled to drive down the windy, windy hill, just to say that they did it.

Lombard Street has become such a tourist attraction that there is now a permanent traffic jam everywhere within a ten block radius of it. Cars sit in the middle of intersections, in classic gridlock, for minutes on end. It must take an hour to traverse a few blocks.

What do the unfortunate residents do? Can they possibly drive for hours from their houses to the store, to work, to anywhere? And then drive for hours back again? Or have they abandoned cars altogether and instead always walk ten blocks to where they can find public transportation outside of the traffic jam?

Maybe San Francisco is already a theme park, and these are just the long lines of a popular attraction.

Plurp. So here we are at yet another conference about the future of computing. You'd get the impression that we like this topic!

This one is being held in the Presidio in San Francisco. The Presidio used to be an army base, right in the middle of the city. It's now public property rented out to businesses and individuals, many of whom now get gorgeous views of the city.

The weird thing is that Helen used to live here, back when she was a bratty teenager. We had dinner last night at Brewster Kahle's house, formerly the quarters for a Major and his family, which is maybe 100 feet from where Helen used to live. Helen thought it was pretty spooky.

Plurp.

The blue dog
was just the long lines
of a popular attraction

Sunday, August 11, 2002

Blab. A reader reminds us that ...

You have the best readers, too. 

Ain't it the truth? And there is no better evidence for this than the outpouring of fervent knowledge and opinion on the part of our gifted readership - on a weekend, even! - on subjects as diverse and challenging as breast milk, bird brains, and the odd things we find in our mail headers.

So today, we celebrate you, our Treasured Readers. Yay!

Blab. On the topic of that woman who had to drink her own breast milk from the bottles it was in, so as to get through airport security, a Treasured Reader suggests a clever workaround.

Breast milk has a small percentage of fat component. Because the fat is added to the milk from the milk cells by a process that surrounds the fat globule with a portion of the cell wall each fat globule is kept separate from the others. However, churning mother's milk will break the surrounding cell components, thus allowing the fat globules to join and congeal, making butter. check with your local cajun for the exact recipe. expect butter pats for christmas. carry them thru airport security on a bagel.

dorian

When breast milk's on a bagel, you can have breast milk any time, eh? Pretty clever.

Blab. On Friday, we reported the results of a study in which some Oxford "scientists" amazed themselves by finding a crow that made tools. They concluded that it was the first animal other than humans to understand cause and effect.

Breakthrough or hogwash?, we asked. Naturally, our Treasured Readers answered.

It's neither. It may however freely be used as a nice encouragement-type occasion to try & go figure out some more about what the frigg is going on in brain-like substances; also what (if any), is the connexion between said substance and those apparent phenomena some people like to flatter themselves by calling it: "consciousness".

Your continental correspondent (Yurp).

Heck, and we thought we had asked a hard question! The problem of consciousness is one that we have, in fact, thought a lot about. It is one that lots of smart people have thought about for centuries. So far, no one has gotten very far on it, despite mountains on writing on the topic.

Maybe we're the birdbrains.

Blab. This Treasured Reader disputes the whole thing. Hogwash, it says!

Rubbish Even spiders understand cause and effect, by going a long way backward on an elevated maze that thev'e never seen before and had to check out totally visually, to get their prey. Gorilla's that score 80+ on a Human 'culture free' intelligence tests, Chimpanzee's that greet people after 10 years (With (in ASL) 'You here , good now'), or when offered a box by an experimenter (to reach the hanging bananas), drag the experimenter under the hanging bunch, and climb on his shoulders to get what they want, are all common.

Species that use tools on this planet I dumnno 50 species?. Species that make tools in the sense of shaping or changing items in their environment, I dunno 10 species?

Its really neat if its as reported, but just what you'd expect if the reporter (and experimenter) weren't a speciest like most hairless chimps.

In fact probably the only species that seems to deny cause and effect even exist are hairless chimps (and perhaps cats for their own strange reasons)

Hmm. We're not sure that spider behavior demonstrates an understanding of cause and effect. (But how would one test that experimentally anyhow?) We thought the gorilla sign language experiments were still surrounded in interpretational controversy. Has that now been resolved in the gorilla's favor?

We asked several cats about this, but they kept changing the subject back to tuna.

Blab. Speaking of birdbrains, another reader writes:

Oh yeah, and what's so great about bending a bit of wire to get food, now, if we could get them to clean up their crap after them, then I'd be really convinced that there's intelligent life out there. I don't suppose there's much hope though, most managers can't clean up their crap after them either. -AJL 

A good point!

Blab. Let's take a bit of a recess from difficult intellectual pursuits and revisit the issue of the progenitors of Plurp.

Dave says in that case, you owe him child support. You know, you can't just go spawning things and then abdicating all responsiblilty! -AJL 

Other way around. Plurp is, in our way of thinking, the bastard child of Dave and Ian. And even if it's not, we still blame them.

Blab. A reader puts forth an intriguing theory about yesterday's puzzle, Which of these does not belong?
 

The second picture from the left, because all the others are adjacent to exactly one picture of Brittney Spears.

Entirely possible, and certainly consistent with the available data. We await further theoretical ruminations.

Blab. A reader puts forth an intriguing theory of the origin of the spam-labeling headers in our email.

Looks like you've had SpamAssassin installed.  Mazel tov!

How'd that get there?

Blab. A second reader checks in with a similar theory.

Simple: Ian installed Spambuster. Now, all you have to do is set up your filter....

Blab. Finally, a synthesis of the above two theories, by an apparently authoritative source.

Re: Those lines in your email headers.

Those lines are added by your helpful email provider and web host.  You may have noticed a note on the subject a while ago (back on June 25, to be precise).  Or you may not have noticed such a note...

To summarise: all mail passing through extremis.net's mail servers is passed through the über-wonderful SpamAssassin, and its response is placed in the mail headers.

You may now configure your mail client to process mail based on the value for the:
   X-Spam-Status:
header starting with
   Yes

Or, as seems more likely in your particular case, you may choose to do nothing :).

Ain't it cool?

-- Extremis Technical Support (aka inw).

That's too cool! It is a great boon in our life to have a Web hoster that (a) provides flawless performance, (b) proactively adds spiffy techie stuff like spam labels and (c) is too busy doing (a) and (b) to figure out how to charge us for the service.

Plurp. This here Iraqi war that Dubya seems so intent on starting? It finally dawned on us (and we admit to being pretty slow recently) that Baghdad is situated where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers come fairly close together. Our dim memory of Sunday school is that the Tigris and Euphrates were also supposed to flow through the Garden of Eden.

So, uh,  ... ?

Plurp. Why is it that some descriptive phrases are never associated with certain professions? For example:

• An aspiring hairdresser
• A genius at filling Coke machines
• A talented jewelry counter clerk
• An unheralded donut maker

Readers are invited to contribute better examples than this.

Plurp.

The blue dog
did the standard
Happy Dance of Joy Joy
to celebrate
Treasured Readers

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