Victorian Trolling: How Con Artists Spammed in a Time Before Email
The main difference between 21st-century scams and those of centuries past is one of delivery method.Read more. [Image: Wikimedia Commons/Benjamin Breen]
At the grocery store the other day Sarah and I attempted to find shallot for a recipe, but I can't
tell the difference between shallot, sweet onions, yellow onions, etc. etc. We found something that we decided was the closest we'd find in the store and I believe we picked correctly because at
checkout the cashier rang it up as shallot.
I think this could be
a practical problem that the 20q Pocket Mind Reader should be able to solve: obtain the name of an unidentified object. When we got home
I decided to test the 20q Pocket Mind Reader on shallot. Unfortunately, it told me I had an onion, but I think if these were designed for identifying unknown objects based solely on information you
can obtain by looking at it, rather than requiring knowledge of seeds, where it grows, etc. it would do better. Or I could just ask someone who works at the grocery store.
More ideas stolen from me in the same vein as my stolen OpenID thoughts.
Fast
Pedestrian Crossing on Four Way Stops. In college I didn't have a car and every weekend I had weekly poker with friends who lived nearby so I would end up waiting to cross from one corner of a
traffic lit four way stop to the opposite corner. Waiting there in the cold gave me plenty of time to consider the fastest method of getting to the opposite corner of a four-way stop. My plan was
to hit the pedestrian crossing button for both directions and travel on the first one available. This only seems like a bad choice if the pedestrian crossing signal travels clockwise or counter
clockwise around the four way stop. In those two cases its better to take the later of the two pedestrian signal crossings, but I have yet to see those two patterns on a real life traffic stop. I
decided recently to see if my plan was actually sound and looked up info on traffic signals. But the info
didn't say much other than "its complicated" and "it depends" (I'm paraphrasing). Then I found some guy's analysis of this problem. So I'm done with this and I'll continue pressing both
buttons and crossing on the first pedestrian signal. Incidentally on one such night when I was waiting to cross this intersection I heard a loud multi-click sound and realized that the woman in the
SUV waiting to cross the intersection next to me had just locked her doors. I guess my thinking-about-crossing-the-street face is intimidating.
Windows Searching
Windows Media Center Recorded TV's Closed Captions. An Ars-Technica article on
a fancy DVR described one of the DVRs features: full text search over the subtitles of the recorded TV shows. I thought implementing this for Windows Media Center recorded TV shows and Windows
Search would be an interesting project to learn about video files, and extending Windows Search. As it turns out though some guy, Stephen Toub implemented Windows Search over MCE closed captions already. Stephen Toub's article is very long and describes some
other very interesting related projects including 'summarizing video files' which you may want to read.
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