uncanny tedium

Posted on Thursday, 2016 November 17 by Anton

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.

Posted in psychology, spam | Leave a comment

To Your Scattered Memories Go

Posted on Saturday, 2016 August 20 by Anton

Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series (which I’ve mentioned before, upon rereading the first volume) begins with every human who ever died waking up on an artificial planet, resurrected as young adults (unless they died younger). Fashions in scientifictional resurrection have changed since 1971, so here’s how I might do it, given a boundless supply of handwavium. Continue reading →

Posted in fantasies | 5 Comments

points problems pointers problems

Posted on Sunday, 2016 July 24 by Anton

Two-fifths of the links in my sphere arrangements page were broken. Ouch! I found new addresses for a few of them, and used the Wayback Machine for the rest.

Posted in mathematics | Leave a comment

next time you hear someone blame Hitler on Darwin or atheism

Posted on Sunday, 2016 June 19 by Anton

Nazi racial ideology was religious, creationist and opposed to Darwinism — long and thoroughly documented

Posted in history, religion | 1 Comment

fun with colors

Posted on Thursday, 2016 June 16 by Anton

Here, have a couple of Python scripts. Each creates an image file, 2^12 pixels square, each pixel of a different color.

colorshuffle.py puts the coordinates of each pixel in Gray code, assigns each bit to one of the color channels, and converts each channel back from Gray code to choose a color. The assignment is chosen at random from 141926400 possibilities.

colorfold.py is my attempt to re-create and extend this: it folds the square eight times to make a cube fitting the color space. The interesting part was maintaining continuity through multiple folds. This one has only 107520 possible outcomes; again they’re chosen at random. I don’t like the result nearly as much as the other, but you might!

You’ll need Python Imaging Library.

On my machine each takes less than two minutes, so with a simple shell script you can whip up hundreds overnight.

Continue reading →

Posted in eye-candy, neep-neep | 3 Comments

SEOperstition

Posted on Tuesday, 2016 May 31 by Anton

I get this comment a lot:

Hello Web Admin, I noticed that your On-Page SEO is is missing a few factors, for one you do not use all three H tags in your post, also I notice that you are not using bold or italics properly in your SEO optimization. . . .

I probably also don’t sprinkle enough chicken’s blood.

Posted in spam | Leave a comment

hilarious title

Posted on Tuesday, 2016 May 31 by Anton

On a private mailing list, a novelist asks for suggestions: what technological hobbies might a bright teenager have, in Oakland circa 1975? Chemistry sets were mentioned, among other things.

I may have had a chemistry set at age 8 or so; memory is spotty. A few years later we got an electronics kit, consisting of a collection of elements in Lego-like blocks. There was a booklet, starting with easy things like a light switch and an electromagnetic telegraph relay. (Maybe I thought the latter was easy because Dad and I had made one, about the same time as the possible chem kit).

Then on the next page was an oscillator or something. No explanation of why it was an oscillator. I thought, well, if I can’t see for myself why it’s an oscillator, evidently I’m not cut out for this stuff; so I quietly abandoned it.

My adolescence in a nutshell.

Of course it never occurred to me that perhaps there was no explanation because I was not expected to understand an explanation; I was expected to treat the oscillator as a black box. (Not that I had the concept of “black box”, either!)

Oh well.

Posted in bitterness, technology | 4 Comments