Some of you are familiar with referral spam. The spammer issues HTTP requests for pages of yours, giving the advertiser’s address as the source of the link; you look at your HTTP log and say to yourself “whoopee, there’s a link to my site from someone I didn’t know about; what do they say about me?”; you look up their site and find that it sells, let’s say, referral-spam services.

Now I see a change. Previous referral spam has usually been from domains with cryptic names, hitting many different pages; they were easy to spot and ignore. The latest batch has a hundred different domains with clear names like application-card-credit-4u.info, each hitting three or fewer of my pages. I have not bothered to see how many different hands are behind these various finger-puppets.

It’s a much worse nuisance than before; finding seeds among chaff is harder than ignoring chaff among seeds.

Joe Sobran’s view of Lincoln is more charitable than that of (say) Neil Smith or Thomas DiLorenzo, not that that’s saying much, but he still calls the war a tragic blunder.

Given the timing of that column (October 7), I wonder whether Sobran had the same thought as I, that the recent polarization of our politics should make talk of secession more palatable to the mainstream.

Thomas Babington Macaulay, quoted in The Economist Oct.30 p.48

If men are to wait for liberty till they become good and wise in slavery, they may indeed wait forever.

headline of the week: Warriors lock up young veterans

In keying data from handwritten forms, I’m struck by how badly our digits are designed: there are few pairs for which I haven’t seen an ambiguous case.

I do write somewhat defensively. I write ‘9’ with a single stroke, like ‘6’, so that it cannot be mistaken for ‘4’. I usually write ‘8’ as two circles rather than in a single stroke, so that it cannot become ‘5’ by malformation of the upstroke, nor become ‘9’ by rising too early from the lower loop. By some quirk I tend to begin ‘0’ (and ‘Oo’) by rising from the lower right, so it cannot become ‘6’.

In the basement of the Alameda County courthouse, where I’ve been working, there’s a sign announcing that it’s a felony to bring in weapons including knives longer than four inches. Must be an old sign; nowadays I imagine they’d seize the one-inch souvenir penknife that I bought as a child in Toledo. Can I be alone in wondering how a foot-long bread-knife got into the kitchen of the Registrar of Voters?

Saturday morning I was informally admitted to the building before the screeners showed up. “Dang, I coulda brought my guns!”

I’m the gatekeeper for two small mailing-lists. For months now, nearly all the spam submitted to those lists comes from addresses of the form word21word@hotmail.com — e.g. in the latest batch chance21sunbird, church21lorraine, cougars21molly1, pedro21bridge. Why?