Geek Drivel

After one month of using it, I’m very happy to confirm that SpamBayes (via the ThunderBayes plug-in for Thunderbird) is absolutely as awesome as I’d heard it could be!

The scoring is so accurate that I decided a while back to let it automatically delete messages with 100% spam probability as read, so that I didn’t have to look at them at all — that’s the majority of the spam I get. Anything with a lesser spam probability, or anything it’s uncertain about, is moved to a junk folder but is left unread; I look it over to confirm that it’s really spam before getting rid of it.

The statistics for the last two weeks: the majority (83%) of spam messages I received scored 100 and were auto-deleted. 11% of spam messages scored over 90 and were marked as spam and left for my confirmation, and the remaining 6% were marked uncertain. And there were no false positives, or even false negatives.

It’s not perfect, but it’s far better than anything else I’ve used.

…because he was protected by the DVD in his pocket. Maybe we’ve finally found a good use for all the “Waterworld” DVDs that were made.

Joel Spolsky has an interesting article in February’s Inc. Magazine (readable online here). It might explain something I’ve never been able to figure out: why no one else seems to be seriously pursuing Project X, even though the idea behind it is hundreds of years old.

Wow… don’t mess with Germans, their idea of a vacation sounds pretty harsh. Though I suppose it’s arguably better than being locked up in a US jail.

UPDATE: Really harsh.

Science meets science fiction, and people benefit, once again.

Someone actually purchased the movie rights to John Dies At The End.

In case you hadn’t run across it yet, John Dies At The End (JDatE) is a “ridiculous horror novel” from David Wong, the mind that brought you the Pointless Waste of Time website (and is now an editor at Cracked Magazine).

Un-frickin’-believable. To quote the announcement:

So there it is, kids. No matter how incredibly retarded your dream is, it can still come true.

Interesting, but do we really need more garbage floating around in Earth orbit?

Tomorrow night, 10:01pm US Eastern time, a total lunar eclipse begins. Don’t miss it, it’s the last one for nearly three years.

An amusing look at the trustworthiness of your memories, perception, and other facets of your brain.

This page made me think… not so much about the movies mentioned (I’ve never seen most of them, and don’t care to), but about how fiction can teach us the more important things about life better than reality can, in some cases. I learned much of what I know about people and their relationships from certain fantasy books (ones by Mercedes Lackey in particular), strangely enough, just as I learned a good portion of my farther-out science hypotheses (along with a large helping of mainstream science) by reading science fiction, “the last great literature of ideas.“