“What Lucky People Do Differently than Unlucky People”

Posted by on

You know, there may be a lot of truth to this. But I think there’s more going on there than today’s science alone can explain.

I do keep my eyes open around machinery (mechanical, electrical, or electronic), and I tend to understand it very well, by a combination of aptitude, interest, and training. But when I get around a malfunctioning machine, there’s a good chance that it will suddenly start working properly even if I don’t do anything with it. Or even touch it; sometimes all I have to do is look at it. When asked how I fixed it, I always say that “machines just like me.” I can’t think of any other reason for it.

Other people have just the opposite effect. I’ve heard several people say that any machine they get around tends to break; I can’t verify it, but judging by my own experience, I’d say it’s quite possible. In a limited way, the universe does seem to conform to the expectations of human observers.

Warning: weird philosophical exposition ahead!

I’ve talked about this before, but I suspect that the universe we live in isn’t the “real” universe. I think this is a simulation. I doubt anyone will ever be able to prove or disprove it, because the rules of the simulation apparently ensure that just about all the odd things that happen are technically within statistical possibility, no matter how improbable. In other words, no one can roll boxcars forever, no matter how lucky he is… but in a game of Dungeons and Dragons, I once rolled 100 on a 100-sided die five times in a row when I needed to. After the first two times, the other players made me use different dice each time, so it wasn’t a matter of loaded dice. They couldn’t believe it, and with good reason: the odds against that are ten billion to one. Fortunately I didn’t realize that at the time, or I suspect it wouldn’t have worked.

Furthermore, if this is a simulation, the most likely scenario I can see is that this is a giant playground (and/or experiment, but playground seems very likely). In either case, the creators would almost certainly have the ability to enter it — we’re close to that now ourselves (the ability to feed experiences directly into the brain), and their science would have to be far beyond ours. Of course, if they did, they wouldn’t break out of character to tell us, for obvious reasons — if we could prove that the universe wasn’t real, people would act very differently, likely screwing up the reason for the simulation.

Or maybe the simulation’s creators can’t tell us about it, by design. Maybe the simulation was designed such that their form in it is as living creatures from within it — including humans. And their knowledge of anything outside of it has been blocked while they’re here.

In other words, maybe they’re us, and we just aren’t allowed to remember it at present.

It’s certainly something to think about.

And now, the news…

Posted by on

I think the spammer registration problem may be dealt with, at least for the moment. Since I added the new layers of defenses, only one spammer account has gotten through the first layer of registration (which checks its information against multiple online databases of known spammers). It failed the e-mail confirmation step and was auto-deleted last night, a week after the confirmation e-mail was sent. I love it when technology works. 🙂

Project M is nearing usability, at long last. A couple days ago I finished a very tricky bit of code involving caching pages of results from a database query on demand and tracking their offsets as the database is updated in the background. It was vital for handling large result sets; now Project M should be able to handle sets as large as any program of its type, very quickly, even when sorted on unindexed columns. 😀

I’m also trying to implement a new form of public-key signature for Project Badger (new to me anyway; it’s about ten years old). If done properly, it promises to be much faster than the signature system which we were forced to adopt a while back. It’s a fun project to work on, but I haven’t gotten it to work yet, so we’ll see how that goes.

Our personal taxes were actually done early this year, for a change… they’re usually done just in the nick of time, but I managed to force myself to do it several weeks before the deadline, even though it meant an entire day spent on nothing else. This being-responsible thing really sucks. 😉

All in all, things are looking up, and in a couple months we may even be able to afford furniture for a room or two, as GoddessJ has wanted for the last seven months. We’ll see how that goes.

“Central U.S. prepares for earthquakes”

Posted by on

Odd as it may seem, it’s not such a bad idea. When I was living in Illinois, I heard an offhand remark on a science program that that area of the country was “overdue” for an earthquake already, and that was twenty-five years ago. I don’t know what science might be behind that assertion, but if I have any readers in that area, the warning is probably worth paying some attention to. Though knowing humanity, no one will until it’s too late.

“‘Star Wars’ fan gathers support for life-size AT-AT”

Posted by on

I’d be all for this idea if it weren’t for one thing: at this point in history, do you really want to give the people currently running various levels of the US government the ability to commandeer a walking weapons platform explicitly designed for really big lasers?

(I’m mostly joking… but only mostly.)

“Mummy, mummy, there’s a nuclear monster!”

Posted by on

More on the nuclear “disaster” at Fukushima, and its consequences. And a few facts about Chernobyl that most people aren’t aware of as well. (And this will be my last post on the subject for at least a month, I promise.)

This is the problem that everyone faces, who describes nuclear incidents as they really are — that is, insignificant. You are accused of being heartless, of failing to care about or empathise with people who are terribly frightened. You have committed the same sin as bracingly telling a toddler that there is no monster under his bed and that he should go back to sleep.

Part of the problem here is that in the case of nuclear dangers it is rather as though the toddler had a mentally troubled aunt or uncle who, in addition to telling the kid fairytales at story time, insists that the monsters in the stories are real.

“Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt” is alive and well, and living in TV newsrooms worldwide.

“Email protected by Fourth Amendment, says appeals court”

Posted by on

You know, when I see things like this, I have to ask where these guys were when e-mail was the sole domain of us geeks. Does anyone else remember Operation Sundevil? Or the raid against Steve Jackson Games (makers of one of my favorite games in my late teens, Car Wars) around the same time? If it should be protected when everybody does it, it should have been protected when only geeks did it too.

But I suppose I shouldn’t complain. Better late than never.

Public E-Mail Addresses vs. Spammers

Posted by on

This post is old, but touches on a topic that’s near and dear to my heart — methods of stopping spammers from overwhelming a publicly-available e-mail address. It argues that posting an address in a somewhat-obfuscated form (like “myname AT spamtrap DOT com”) actually helps spammers, because it’s much easier to search for using Google (which doesn’t allow you to search for the at-symbol).

But the most interesting idea I saw was this comment:

Obfuscating your address gives may falsely convince you that your important address is safe. If it’s published, in any form (even in the firstname at lastname dot c0m form, or as some kind of puzzle), it is possible for a member of the public (including spammers) to get it. A much better method is to set up a disposable address which forwards to your sacred address. Once the disposable address is compromised and you start getting spam via it, just kill it off and replace it with a different disposable address. Once you trust a sender, you can give them your sacred address. I started using junk1@… in about 2000, and am now on junk7@… and my sacred address is mainly spam free.

That is such a simple answer that I can’t believe I didn’t think of it myself.

Of course, it wouldn’t be very useful for most people, the way e-mail is set up right now. But for a company’s public-facing e-mail address, which must be available on their website, it could be a very useful answer. (If you could refer people to a contact form, instead of publishing an address, that problem is pretty much solved — but if any significant fraction of people started doing that, spammers would figure it out too.)

That also gave me other ideas for stopping spam. I won’t go into them at present, because they need more thought and because I might well create a commercial solution out of them in the future. We’ll see.

(Other interesting comments there include this one and this one.)