Following up on my "failed predictions" point, I point at the now widely-distributed article about the low-fat vs. low-carb diets.

The standard dietary orthodoxy predicts that the results of this study would be exactly the opposite of what happened. The predictions are wrong. Therefore, the standard model is wrong. I don't need to be a nutritionist to make this determination.

I don't know what the right model is. I think that's pretty sad, considering that if nutritionists hadn't gotten bogged down by a premature orthodoxy, we would probably be now in the position of refining a solid idea, instead of where we really are now, which is quite nearly square one.

Over the past couple of years, I've been turning into a skeptic on the global warming theory, in particular the idea that mankind's actions have effectively doomed us to an uncomfortably hot planet (since the putatively required solutions are all completely unimplementable).

I will grant that my politics would seem to incline me to such skepticism, but I try to decide based on the science, not the politics. If the world truly is heading for disaster, I want to know.

It is very hard to judge a science that you have no experience in, but there is one metric that you can correctly use as an educated outsider to determine whether a scientist is on the right track or the wrong track: the accuracy of predictions. If a prediction is correctly made, it favors a theory, proportionally to the difficulty of the prediction. If the prediction is wrong, it is very solid evidence that the theory or model is wrong. This judgment can be often be made by anybody, especially when it's a question of something simple like temperature.

Slashdot has an unusually interesting discussion on the rise and fall of CAPTCHAs, which is why I give that link precedence over the original story.

I mention this because I keep waiting for someone to discuss the root problem, and it's so rarely done that I guess I'm just going to have to do it myself. The root problem of spam comes from the following simple tension:

1. We want to be able to contact or be contacted by anybody.
2. We don't want to be contacted by just anybody.

Without understanding this fundamental dynamic, the whole "spam" situation won't make any sense.

One of the things I sometimes fiddle with in the back of my head is how to fix school curricula to better serve students and society. One of the stronger ideas I have is that economics (and ideally, game theory) should be taught, replacing a lot of really dumb mathematical holdovers like trigonometric identities for a semester or two.

And over the last few weeks, I've been really wishing that we'd been teaching economics for the past fifty years instead of other silly things, because the blinding stupidity on exhibit in the recent oil debates is really starting to get to me.

I can prove the News Media, or the "MSM" if you like, is not about news. I really do mean "prove". It's quite simple.

Markdown.

BBCode.

Uncountably many Wiki markups, all different.

reStructuredText.

Textile.

Pottymouth.

Who knows what I'm missing.

Please stop.

Sometimes in the middle of the night I get kind of stuck. Laying in bed, not quite awake, not totally asleep, kind of dreaming. And stuck on one particular subject, unable to change it and think/dream about anything else. - recently at Chizumatic

I'm sitting here wide awake at 4:15 am local time having just had this happen due to a bad combination of getting too cold while sleeping (always gives me annoyingly complicated dreams) and probably too much caffeine.

Will integrity issues be heating back up?

... probably not. It looks to me, based on the project page, that the vast majority of modifications come from local proxies the user is running, and the remainder is just on-the-fly image compression, which I am broadly not opposed to, as the human perception integrity is mostly maintained. (Not in favor of, mind you, but not opposed.)

In many modern languages, encoding errors are the number one cause of security flaws in software.

This is going to be long because if you don't have a deep understanding about what is going on, you too will write encoding-based security flaws. Given the widespread state of ignorance about this situation, including a large number of people who don't even believe there is a problem, I do not believe I can make this much shorter.

But before I can discuss any sort of solution, what exactly is the problem? Let us start with a parable.

One of the little games I play with my spam is waiting for their incredibly bad random name schemes to come up with a name I actually recognize. Today I've had the closest hit yet: "Charles Brown", who, tragically, has turned to the Nigerian scam to fund his kite habit.

Oh, kite-eating tree, how low you have brought him.