Soft Arts

This is pretty much straight from Ringworld and is basically a paraphrasing of the monoculture problem, but here goes: The more dependent a society is on a single technology, the more devastated it can be if that technology is destroyed.

As a result, it seems necessary to have contingency plans for technologies we adopt (computers, operating systems, power sources, etc) that may be rendered unusable in unforeseen events. We can not allow our society’s infrastructure to collapse as a result of such a catastrophe.

People, let’s face it. Global warming is happening.

That’s a trickier matter. The earth has been much colder, and much warmer, than it currently is. The razor-thin sample of time which we refer to as “recorded history” is hardly a big enough sample to determine what the earth’s “normal” climate is. We just know what we are used to.

The ice at the north and south poles is melting. Asking whether or not it is linked to global climate change is fatuous. YES, the climate is changing, that’s why it is unseasonably cold in Seattle right now, and it is probably why weather patterns have been so disrupted for the last 15 years (El Nino? Katrina? Remember those?).

The real questions are: how much of what we are seeing is being caused by human beings, would this be happening without us, and is there anything we can do to stop it?

This is hardly the main reason I use Numbers over Excel, but I noticed this awhile back and it gave me a warm fuzzy: the cell formatting dialog has the number 42 (the answer to life, the universe, and everything) showing in it, presumably as an homage to the late, great, Douglas Adams.

A lot of spammers try to get around spam filters by using unusual spellings of terms that humans will recognize but black lists won’t (i.e., “pr0n”).

Perhaps spam filters could capitalize on this and run incoming email through a dictionary. Anything with more than 3 or 4 unrecognizable words gets flagged. Unrecognized terms can be added to the dictionary to help the system develop a more sophisticated vocabulary.

Obviously some innocent people are going to send messages that will be flagged as possible spam, but paying attention to your spell checker before sending out email will help considerable. Technical emails would like prove more of a problem as most dictionaries don’t include a particularly wide range of technical terms in them.

Spammers have recently started sending out fake invoices from iTunes, and it got me thinking: wouldn’t it be great if Apple included a secret word in their email notifications that I would immediately recognize? Once I thought about it a little more, I realized that the idea could easily extend to just about any service, and could also be used to eliminate false positives in spam filters.

This would be an effective anti-phishing technique. Let’s say your bank asks you to pick a safe word to be associated with your account. Once that’s selected, any email that they send to you will include that safeword in the email’s subject line as an easily identifiable sign of authenticity.

If you picked “Incontinent Panda” as your safe word, instead of
Subject: Bank of America: Important Notice On Your Account Information (Re-Confirm)

you would see

Subject: [Incontinent Panda] Bank of America: Important Notice On Your Account Information (Re-Confirm)

Since the odds of a phisher guessing this pass phrase is pretty low, you can tell at a glance that this is most likely the real deal. Since these emails go out to you, and you only, the odds of the safe word getting compromised is fairly low.