In what comes off as a comical act of pandering to those hypothetical repressed middle-American kids who look through the magazine hoping to get a glimpse of titties, National Geographic, of all magazines, has published a swimsuit issue.
When I saw this on the newsstand, it was next to a tattoo magazine. The woman on the cover of the swimsuit issue was underwater, with the ripples tracing pale lines on her. At first I thought I was looking at two tattoo magazines.
Bah. I really like Chimera, and I like the name. Apparently they can no longer legally use it.
Mike Pinkerton says he doesn’t want suggestions for other names. Tough. If they can’t use Chimera, I suggest Kimera. Or maybe Ximera, which has a certain OS-X pun quality. But it looks awful on the page. Or maybe they can write it in Greek.
But not Camino.
Jeremy Hedley discovers this gem of automated commerce.
With all the weird and wonderful vending machines in Japan, its surprising how often, well, you can be surprised by them. You think you’ve seen them all, and then something like this pops up. Two stand out in my mind: A vending machine in an underpass, somewhere around Omotesando. It contained, among other things, a giant Pocky box. Jenny and I wondered “OK…is it a giant box of Pocky, or a box of giant Pocky?” We had to know. So we coughed up the ¥500 (or whatever) and found, to our delight, that it was indeed a box of giant Pocky, each one about 18″ long. The other was a Morinaga vending machine that had a 1920s design to it. I bought a box of caramels, and it played a creepily militaristic song.
One issue that Prentiss has emphasized in the past is the need for adherence to a controlled vocabulary when categorizing information. I’ve wondered whether categories could be an emergent outcome of smushing a lot of data together. Well, perhaps, but we ain’t there yet. The chaos at reversible is evidence of that (which I contributed to with my earlier experiment…sorry). Obviously the option exists to take advantage of a useful hierarchy of categories, but the obligation does not.
Preparatory to the appearance of RSS feeds that all the cool kids will want to link to, I’ve tooled up another CSS button:
reversibleTry Reversible: It’s confusing but fun
Later: Word from Joshua is that this will not duplicate Mark Pilgrim’s cool hack: it just makes it easy to create a sort of ad-hoc directory that points back to whatever pages you want. I haven’t asked him, but I suspect this is really almost a diversion he put together on the trail of something else.
I was checking over my error logs recently, looking for problem pages that should be redirected, and found repeated attempts to load FormMail. Now, I do have a form-to-mail CGI on my web host, but not FormMail. FormMail is by far the most popular of these widgets. I was briefly puzzled by the request to load it: I’ve never had it installed, never had a link to it, so I couldn’t quite figure how it could be a bad link.
Until I read a comment on a story somewhere else mentioning that FormMail had a security flaw that made it available for hijacking by spammers. The flaw has been corrected, but it stands to reason there are lots of old installs of it floating around, ripe for the picking.
I don’t quite get it, but Joshua Schachter’s latest project is reversible. This shows where you’re coming from to reach a certain page, as well as where other people came from to get there. OK, that’s nice, but it’s been done before. This also has some kind of categorization system that I don’t understand. I think the real power will come when he generates customized RSS feeds that people can include in their own pages (if it doesn’t completely swamp his server). That will make everyone as cool as Mark Pilgrim.
Later: Let’s try an experiment: Adam Rice | Adam Rice | Adam Rice.
A discussion over at Macintouch led me to the OS X beta of Ragtime, an integrated app available as a free (but big — 54 MB) download. I’ve downloaded it and will be evaluating it.
Got my first case of comment spam today. The commenter purports to the have the URL “http://www.1heluva.com/cgi-bin/join.cgi?refer=23911” and comes from IP number 81.86.245.111 (which has been banned).
Don’t bother going to that URL. It froze my browser, and damn near gave me a seizure with all its blinky scrolly bits.
James Gleick, the science writer, had an article on spam in Sunday’s NY Times. Like Jon Udell, I found it disappointingly superficial — I could say the same about some of Gleick’s other writing.
Spam will be hard to legislate out of existence, mostly because of the Net’s global nature. I already receive a fair amount of Korean, Chinese, and Japanese spam, and a little in German. Perhaps, sooner or later, all these countries will pass legislation with teeth to crack down on spammers, but right now, even the USA doesn’t have any.
I already use Spam Assassin, and recommend it highly. It catches most of my spam, but about ten pieces slip past every day (I’m not sure how much I get, but I believe it’s about 100 pieces/day). My mail client, Apple’s mail.app, catches about half of the rest. We could do better–especially because I probably have a small number of false-positives, which bugs me a bit.
Here’s what I’d like to see:
Better collaborative filtering: mail.app already allows you to flag a message as spam, which refines an internal spam-filtering algorithm. This could be extended by submitting the offending message to a central database, which would then push out updates on a regular basis. Such software once existed on the Mac, called Spam Blaster. It was effective, but it was put out of business by Sound Blaster for infringing its trademark on anything with “Blaster” in the name. I believe that Spam Assassin also uses a small number of people to feed new spam into the system, but it can’t be as effective as a massively collaborative system.
Pay: I’d be happy to see a system put in place where everyone pays, say, $10 into an escrow account. If you try to e-mail me and you aren’t on my whitelist, one penny is deducted from your account (I don’t particularly care where the money goes — give it to your ISP). After I receive your message, adding you to my whitelist would just require pushing a button. This would effectively end spam, as spammers couldn’t or wouldn’t pay a penny for every piece of mail sent out. For individuals, though, it would take a long time to work down that $10–that’s sending e-mail to 1,000 new people.
The latter scheme would require some pretty basic architectural changes in the way e-mail works. But considering the gyrations ISPs and individuals are going to already, it’d be worth it. A bigger problem is that it is somewhat undemocratic and bureaucratic: it assumes that everyone has $10 to spare, and the creation of an escrow system (though the system could probably be funded on the interest of the escrowed money).
The former scheme would be somewhat less effective, but could get up and running quickly. Services like Spamcop are doing this now, but for a fee, and inconvenient if you don’t want an @spamcop,net address. It would be worth it for companies like AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo to run the back-end of a service like this as a free service, simply because they are so relentlessly hammered by spam.
Saw Rabbit-Proof Fence yesterday. It’s a quiet, quasi-documentary movie about a shameful chapter in Australia’s history where mixed-race children of Aborigines and Whites were kidnapped by the government and raised in institutions. This went on to some extent until the 1970s. (The same kind of thing happened in the USA with Indian and Hispanic children, though not as recently.)
More specifically, it’s the story of one girl, Molly, a real person (still alive, pushing 90) who was taken in 1931 with a sister and cousin to a compound for children like her, 1200 miles from her home, and their flight home — mostly the flight home, a slow-motion chase with her evading an Aboriginal tracker of some renown.
Molly was a gritty, smart, and almost silent kid, but Kenneth Branagh’s performance as Neville, the government “protector” of all Aborigines in western Australia, was particularly interesting. As he played it, Neville really believed that what he was doing was best for everyone, without a hint of malice towards the Aborigines. His was a paternalistic and beneficent form of racism, if that’s possible. The extent of his paternalistic authority was stunning — his secretary comes in saying “so and so has applied to buy a new pair of shoes” “She had a new pair last year” he responds, without missing a beat.