Hm, the first two links here have been lying around for five years; guess I ought to shove them out.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry on restructuring the banks

“Zomia”, a large region in Asia that was effectively stateless until recently

James Leroy Wilson on The Limits of Utilitarianism. The payoff is near the bottom.

In the film and TV series Limitless, a drug makes the protagonist temporarily super-intelligent.

In the episodes I’ve seen, it’s not established whether any skills learned with the drug remain when it wears off. I imagine that you’d want to try to develop ways to improve your unenhanced intelligence; in other words, to teach your alter-ego to learn better.

Later: In the third episode he behaves so stupidly that I lost interest.

In a period of 41 seconds on December 21, this site got hits purportedly following links from 75 different pages on scholarsandrogues.com, 21 on russia-insider.com, 21 on www.africaresource.com, 21 on irwinvillagetourzjamaica.com, 20 on jaykeating.com, 18 on *.ox.ac.uk, 17 on www.zylstra.org, 16 on www.nobleprog.de, 13 on ciaplescounreds.me.pn, and 10 pages on 5 other sites.

And then in 33 seconds on December 26: 57 pages on blog.tcmpage.com, 21 on worldpeace.org, 20 on faoumonso.strefa.pl, 14 on hudepajuw.inmart.asia, 13 on www.greendirectory.com, 11 on amary.site90.com, 9 on piratebox.site, 8 on www.strangehistory.net, 8 on masini.00author.com, 7 on lints.atwebpages.com, and 63 pages on 38 other sites.

No site appears in both of these clusters. Some are obvious spammers; some are genuine blogs; fourteen are small Picasa galleries, with no outgoing links.

The requests came from 99 different addresses; again none are in both clusters.

Later: When I finished examining my referral log for December, I decided it’s no longer worthwhile, particularly since Google usually doesn’t tell me what the search string was.

In Marvel/Netflix Daredevil episode 11 “The Path of the Righteous”, [spoiler] drugs [spoiler] and takes her to a secret place. When she wakes up, he sits facing her and puts a large pistol on the table between them, “to get [her] undivided attention.” After he has made his demands and threats, his phone rings: a call that he cannot ignore. She takes advantage of his momentary distraction to grab the gun. He scoffs: “Do you think I’d put a loaded weapon within your reach?”

I thought of a scene in Randall Garrett’s “Lord Darcy” stories. Someone asks the forensic magician Sean O Lochlainn, “If you’re not going to cut anything, why are you sharpening that knife?” Master Sean replies, “The best symbol for a thing is the thing itself. This knife represents a sharp knife. I have another one that represents a dull knife.”

What, then, would be the symbolism of putting an empty gun on the table?

When I repose in the easy-chair, Bramble likes to sit on my heart. Today Rocky got there first and took Bramble’s spot, though he usually prefers my knee. Bramble then came along; after much dithering he settled across Rocky’s back, but soon decided that this arrangement was unsatisfactory.

My busiest comment-spammer is not even trying: stuff like “syycvugmerscztigiejbuzgshfmb”. Come on now!

A month or two ago, the load of junkmail intercepted for me by Pobox suddenly jumped from about one hundred pieces a day to well over two hundred. (The difference, to judge by titles, consists of repeated pleadings from alleged horny women.)

I have long been in the habit of carefully searching the spam reports for false positives, typically finding one every 3–4 days. (Each of these is a mass-mailing to which I subscribed; I don’t recall if Pobox has ever held up genuine personal mail, though Gmail did, back when that was my primary mailbox.) Now that the burden of this chore has suddenly doubled, I find myself wishing Pobox would make more errors, to reward me.

I see an analogy with the uncanny valley phenomenon, and wonder whether anyone has tried to find a psychological optimum in error rates for problems like this.

I once read somewhere that a “teaser” toy for cats should let the cat catch the “prey” one time in six.