Isotropic

More candidates for hell …
Just as I was finishing my previous post, my phone announced I’d received a new text message. Even though it was 05:29, I wasn’t surprised because my friends know I keep unusual hours.
However, it was SMS spam; in particular, stock spam. Who in their right mind would buy any [...]

“… they could have [...] eliminated the infrastructure kinetically”, according to Gadi Evron in “Internet Attacks Against Georgian Websites” (and followup).
There is a plethora of commentary on the Georgian situation, so I’m not going to discuss it here. However, the concept of eliminating infrastructure kinetically did ping my interesting phrases meter, so I’m [...]

When someone’s post consists of only “Creepy. Deeply, deeply creepy.“, you just have to check it out.
Maybe “It’s No Boo-Boo - Bandages as Fashion Accessories” is creepy, but my first impression was “this is silly”. But if you then lie and say it’s just a cut instead of proclaiming your bleeding-edge fashion [...]

As I’ve said before, I like interesting phrases. Here’s another one:

What we’re seeing suggests there may be a social connectivity constant for humanity. –Eric Horvitz, Microsoft Messenger project

Wow, that sounds profound. See the BBC News article “Study revives six degrees theory” for the full story. Background information is available in the [...]

Ultimately, if you are allowed to travel at all, it will be in a pod, naked and sedated.
Regulations already prohibit starting out with a variety of innocuous materials (shampoo), over-zealous policy enforcement prohibits “inappropriate” dress (Transformer t-shirts) , and economic pressure is exerted to limit the amount of luggage you carry.
If you carry electronic [...]

In Quirky Spam I described a special corner of hell for email spammers. Well, I’ve found them some neighbors.
I occasionally look through my spam for a few moments of entertainment — or is it more like gawking at car wreck as you drive by? Well, whatever. I recently came across one [...]

“Who doesn’t long for household help at times? Service robots will soon be able to relieve us of heavy, dirty, monotonous or irksome tasks. Research scientists have now presented a new generation of household robots, the ‘Care-O-bot® 3′.” — ScienceDaily, New Generation Of Home Robots Have Gentle Touch
It is interesting that (according to the [...]

The post “Guidelines on Memory and the Law” at Neurophilosophy summarizes a report, commissioned by the British Psychological Society, regarding the implications of memory research for the legal profession. “These guidelines, which are available as a PDF, are intended to inform those who work in criminal and civil law - for example, the police [...]

No, I’m not.
In Name Scrapers I mentioned the non-uniqueness of my name in an example. That must have sensitized me to pick up on Kevin Kelly’s GoggleUnique Names.
After mentioning several well-known strategies for choosing names, he goes on to discuss two new strategies, which he calls “global branding” and “GoogleUnique”.
The first is about names [...]

The Slashdot headline “How to Fight Name Scraping Scammers?” caught my eye, and I had to follow it up. Curt Monash discovered his name on a dating site, but he’d never registered there. It appears that the site paired up first and last names at random and then presented them as being [...]