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Trading Up

A Montreal blogger is “living on magic,” trying to trade up from a red paper clip to a house. His trades thus far are almost surreal:

  • Paper clip for a fish-shaped pen
  • Fish-shaped pen for a clay doorknob with a funny face on it
  • Clay doorknob for a camping stove
  • Stove for a generator
  • Generator for an “instant party”
  • Instant party for a snowmobile
  • Snowmobile for an all-expenses-paid trip to Yahk, British Columbia
  • Yahk trip for a panel van
  • Van for a recording contract
  • Recording contract for the year of free rent in Phoenix

We should all live on such magic.

Music: The Roches :: Mr. Sellack
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Pet Food Healthier

It’s official, sort of: According to one study, pet food is healthier than many fast foods.

Nutrition experts who compared 30 human meals with 15 pet foods discovered that Gourmet Gold cat food, with 2.9 grams of fat per 100 grams, was eight times less fatty than pieces of Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) which had 23.2 grams of fat per 100 grams and 1.9 grams of salt.

Scientist John Searle, from the Global food-testing lab in Burton upon Trent, says ““It would not do a human any harm to eat this cat and dog food. It would be categorised in the green or amber levels. But some convenience foods would fall in the red or unhealthy category.”

Music: The Roches :: Damned Old Dog
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Chairs, Sculptures, and Brains

Reason #216 why having a three-yr-old around guarantees you’ll never be bored: Excellent Jokes.

Me: “Miles, will you tell me a joke?”

Miles: “I know an orangutan who likes to eat chairs, sculptures, and brains! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”

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Akismet for MT

The collaborative comment spam filtering database has drastically improved the game for me over the past few months, but until recently, it worked only with WordPress. Just days after I switched from MovableType to WP, I was contacted to help with a secret beta test of a version of Akismet for MT. Since I could no longer run that test on this blog, I deployed it on John Battelle’s Searchblog and Mary Hodder’s Napsterization, two of Birdhouse’s hardest-hit installations. After identifying some bugs and an initial rocky start, the plugin started kicking some serious butt.

Today Akismet/MT went public — ironically at the same time some independent coders developed their own versions. So far, the only thing that seems to hang it up are scoring conflicts with other installed systems. For example, if you have MT set to score +1 for a comment containing less than three links, but Akismet flags a comment as spam and ranks it -1, the two scores cancel each other out. But those are minor bumps.

Unfortunately Akismet isn’t quite the true golden egg in terms of reducing server load, though it does help. My comments on that topic here.

Spammers listen up: There are a whole lot more of us than there are of you, and it’s really hard to imagine you figuring out how to game this system. You don’t stand a chance.

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Google Mini Minus Link Love

First-hand report from an organization using the Google-mini appliance. Mostly run-of-the-mill observations, but it surfaces a limitation of Goog-in-the-enterprise that hadn’t occurred to me: Google’s secret sauce is PageRank, and PageRank depends on link love. But if what you’re indexing is a few thousand Word/Excel/PDF documents that don’t link to each other, there is no link love to be had, and you’re back to Alta Vista days and plain old keyword frequency.

If the interlinking metadata between documents is non-existent, and PageRank is zero on every one of your documents, you’re back to keyword frequency matching.

That’s not really a criticism of the Google appliances themselves, as I’m not sure what could be done about it, but it seems to me a bit like selling an invention known for one special feature… without that feature. Big Macs without the secret sauce.

Music: Captain Beefheart and His Magi :: Grown So Ugly
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Ask Philosophers

Ever wonder what real, working philosophers think about subjects like medical immortality or whether alcoholics should be allowed to breed? Ask Philosophers has assembled a couple dozen professional philosophers to provide commentary on questions from the general public.

There is a paradox surrounding philosophy that AskPhilosophers seeks to address. On the one hand, everyone confronts philosophical issues throughout his or her life. But on the other, very few have the opportunity to learn about philosophy, a subject that is usually taught only at the college level. (Why? There is no good reason for this and plenty of bad ones.) AskPhilosophers aims to bridge this gap by putting the skills and knowledge of trained philosophers at the service of the general public.

“Is thought possible without language? (re: Helen Keller)” … “What, if anything, distinguishes natural from artistic beauty?” The answers aren’t always 100% satisfying (philosophy never is), but they do a great job of bringing clearer focus to the questions themselves.

“Can Non-Being and Being occupy the same space at the same time?” How many hands do you have? Two? Or do you have three? Your left hand, your right hand, and the non-existent third hand that’s attached to your head? Obviously, that last “hand” shouldn’t count. To say that you don’t have a third hand isn’t to say that you have a hand that possesses the particularly stunting property of non-existence.

Especially amazing is the fact that the site has been so successful in getting real philosophers to engage the public so actively/enthusiastically. A wonderful experiment.

Music: Devendra Banhart :: Michigan State

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Blogosphere Suffers Spam Explosion

c|net on the increasingly difficult problem of fighting spam on weblogs:

Boing Boing would allow its readers to leave comments and engage in a discussion on the wildly popular blog, if it weren’t for spam.

The piece focuses more on problems bloggers themselves face:

“It is a major hassle,” Frauenfelder said. “It is just getting worse and worse. My fantasies of violent revenge against spammers become more lurid every week.”

than on problems caused for their web hosts, and is a superficial overview in many respects, but it’s good to see some mainstream attention to the problem, which consumes more of my time than I had ever imagined it would.

At this point, I’ve tried every approach under the sun for the Birdhouse bloggers: standard blacklists (a moving target), moderation and authentication (chilling effect on conversation), mod_security blacklists (hard to keep updated, resource intensive), javascript (ultimately hackable), referrer tracking (shuts out commenters behind certain firewalls)…

But I’ve never had it as easy as I have since switching to WordPress and setting up the distributed Akismet system, which has blocked more than 1,000 spams from this blog in the past two weeks without a single false positive, and while requiring very minimal system resources. Sounds like a lot, but some of my users average around one spam/trackback submission attempt per minute, 24×7. You do the math.

Music: The Flaming Lips :: What Is The Light?

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King of the Mondegreens

Now that The Archive has been collecting user votes for a few months, I’ve created a Funniest lyrics page, showing aggregate vote tallies for the top 250 lyrics. It’s been interesting watching vote counts go up and down, as most votes seem to cancel each other out. 5,000 page views may result in a net positive of just 50 or so “Funny” votes (I see this phenomenon with the submissions backlog as well). Unsurprisingly, the collective consciousness considers the bawdiest mishearances the funniest. Which is a shame, since it pushes brilliant mishearances like Clown control to Mao Tse Tung toward the bottom of the list. But that’s democracy. For ya.

Music: Half Man Half Biscuit :: On Passing Lilac Urine