A method has been demonstrated for determining skin and feather colors from dinosaur fossils.
This article is about travel and should have nothing to do with the Media Lab, but there’s “Reed Martin, a graduate student at the M.I.T. Media Lab in Cambridge, Mass., who prefers not to check bags,” explaining why. Cool.
If you haven’t seen it already, you might be interested in reading a report that I helped put together for the Mind Machine Project.
(found on Slashdot)
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have
other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was
passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatibility with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
A lawyer, a doctor, and a type theorist are discussing whether it is better to have a lover or a spouse. The lawyer says, “Clearly it is better to have a lover - for reasons I need not explain.” The doctor says, “No, no, it is better to have a spouse - for reasons I need not explain.” The type theorist says “You’re both wrong! It’s clearly better to have both a lover and a spouse: then when the spouse thinks you’re with the lover, and the lover thinks you’re with the spouse, you can be in your office proving theorems.”
(I hope there are no type theorists in the audience…)
Sometimes we hear a non-native English speaker say something like “That problem seems very toy,” where an American would probably say “That seems like a toy problem.” In fact, both speakers are using the noun “toy” as an adjective, but there are many restrictions on how an American would typically use it - only immediately preceding its referent, and without modifiers like “very.” Other English constructions exhibit this as well - for instance, we would say “That looks like a bottle cap” but not “That cap looks very bottle.” Is there already a name for this sort of restricted noun-to-adjective conversion? If not, I suggest “reluctant adjective.” :-)
[Note: in a departure from my usual use of this website for interesting links and abstract musings, this series of posts will be more like the original sense of a “blog” - essentially a personal diary. Since I’m abroad, it should be more interesting.]
[Note 2: More photos and videos will be uploaded over the next week or two. Please check both here and http://davidad.smugmug.com/Travel/201001-Madrid/ for updates. All photos will be uploaded to smugmug, and those which fit into the narrative will be added here as well.]
I’m writing this from Madrid, Spain, during the coffee breaks of DAMP, a workshop of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2010), the most important conference in my specialty (programming language theory). I’ve also brought along my girlfriend, Emily - she’s not attending the conference, but she’s always wanted to visit Europe and especially Spain.
We left Boston on Sunday afternoon, encountering delays at Logan Airport due to the presence of Air Force One, which I saw the tail stabilizer of from quite far away out the window of the terminal building. Once the President had cleared the area we were on our way to transfer in Philadelphia - rushing to just make the boarding call for our flight to Madrid. The next morning we awoke to the sunrise over Portugal.
Arriving in Madrid-Barajas Airport, we made our way to the baggage claim, only to discover that Emily’s checked bag didn’t make it to Philadelphia in time to come with us to Madrid. (Whenever possible, I carry all of my baggage with me - heavy, but worth it for situations like this.) We filled out a claim form, got some euros, and proceeded through customs - which, as usual in Europe, was basically just a special door.
We got some food in the airport and proceeded to the Metro station to head to the city center. Our destination was the Atocha Renfe station, where there were lockers in which I could stow my heavy carry-on bag while we explored the city. (This was also the place where we would meet my friend in Spain, Luis, later that night.) Three metro lines later, we found ourselves in the huge station - a modern subway, commuter rail, and intercity rail station, as well as the attached old station building, which had been converted to an indoor tropical greenhouse. With some confusion, we found the “consignas” (place to lock up luggage).
Next, our goal was to find places for Emily to buy contact solution and clothing to replace those lost in the checked bag. We had heard there was some public wireless internet in the city center, but a quick check inside and outside the train station revealed nothing unencrypted. Having nothing better to do, we began to explore the streets, essentially at random, which was actually a lot of fun.
Eventually we found ourselves wanting something to eat, and stopped in at an Italian restaurant called “Pinocchio,” where we got a calzone and a pizza. Although recognizably Italian, as I anticipated, they were quite different from American Italian food,and the calzone in particular had a recognizably Spanish flair (the tomato sauce was almost more like a mild salsa than a marinara). We also got a brownie with “hot chocolate” (like American fudge sauce), which was excellent.
The restaurant was on a wide open plaza, and for a while after we finished our meal we watched some children playing. Also on the plaza, though, was the Rena Sofia museum of modern art - a popular tourist destination due to its housing the original of Picasso’s “Guernica.” Besides the Picassos and Dalis, there were many other examples of later 20th century art that Emily and I found fascinating (although, as always, a few utterly failed to stimulate). I would rank it among the top 5 art galleries I’ve ever been to.
Finally, we returned to the Atocha Renfe station to meet Luis, who was coming in after finishing his lectures that afternoon as a professor in Cadiz. I got my luggage from the consignas and we took a taxi northward.
Here’s something to think about: in our brave new quantum world, any physical event predicate you choose has some nonzero chance of occurring. Yet, even then, not every imaginable cause for such an event’s occurrence is self-consistent. So, for example, while there is an infinitesimal, non-zero chance that the Green Party will win the next Presidential election, there is absolutely no chance that the Green Party will win the next Presidential election because they got fewer than 2% of the vote. Another cause must have contributed to this strange occurrence. If we cared to, theoretically, it would be possible to enumerate the possible causes of every event, and it is possible to identify cause-groups which are not sufficient - no matter what - and probability doesn’t enter into it.
This is an intuitive expression of why I think causality is a really interesting and useful concept. However, I haven’t thought about it enough to say for sure that it’s not wrong. I’d appreciate your thoughts below.
Reviewing Randomness: you might have heard of the mathematical “anti-table,” published by RAND, entitled “A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates.” What you have probably not heard is that a number of aspiring comedians have posted reviews of the book to Amazon. Click the image to see them.
