How To Spot A Psychopath

A new, better-than-ever opportunity to watch Tim ‘n’ Rex’s outstanding Secret Life Of Machines (previously mentioned here and here) has arrived:

The Exploratorium science museum has made every single episode available for straightforward download from their site!

[UPDATE: Or, at least, they did. There was unexpected demand, so they took the files down again. Their Webmaster quietly reinstated them in a different location for a while, but then word got out and he took ‘em away agin. Never mind, though: I got them all, and made a torrent! The Exploratorium direct-download page came back up after the initial rush was over, so you should be able to get the episodes there now - but you might as well still give their server a break and use the torrent.]

There are QuickTime streaming versions which seem to be broken at the moment, but never mind those - the ones you want are the “iPhone” versions. They’re standard iPhone video format (480 by 360 pixel, MPEG4 video, 128 kilobit AAC audio, M4V container), which is playable on PCs without much messing around. If you don’t happen to have the right codecs and don’t want to faff about installing QuickTime or something, just play ‘em with the all-in-one VLC media player.

(The iPhone format is also 30 frames per second, not the 15fps of the old iPod Video format.)

I presume these rips are from the DVD edition, because they look a lot nicer than the VHS rips that’ve been doing the rounds before now. And they’re less than 192Mb per episode, so all 18 episodes will fit with room to spare on one DVD-R.

Many blogs let you look into the life of someone else. Sometimes that life is quite interesting. And sometimes that life is described with a combination of honesty and prurience which, I’m not ashamed to say, particularly appeals to me.

I can’t quite pin down what it is, besides Not Safe For Workitude of one kind or another, that leads me to particularly enjoy these blogs over others. I mean, Random Acts Of Reality seems to contain all of the same ingredients, and I like it a lot, but it doesn’t quite make it into the same category as these three:

I Am a Japanese School Teacher (first article here).

The Tard Blog, another tale of education against all odds (and also the quickest-to-read of the three, in case you’d like to try to get something else done today).

And the incomparable True Porn Clerk Stories.

About a trillion people already know about these, but I think there’s a reasonable chance that even dedicated Net dorks aficionadoes haven’t seen all three of them.

(If they’re all new to you, you can of course completely kiss your productivity goodbye.)

Shamus (of the now-superseded DM of the Rings comic) has a post up about the joy of X-Com, a still-excellent game that you can now play for free on a $5 computer.

I managed to avoid the various X-Coms entirely, but I sank quite a few hours into X-Com’s predecessor Laser Squad.

I made a sort of Zen meditation out scenario 1, “The Assassins”, with the evil industrialist and his tame Daleks hiding in his house. My first move was usually to blow the front wall away with a bazooka. Sometimes, this ended the game immediately, because the bazooka shot went through the one-pixel gap between the leaves of the front door and blew up against an interior wall, close enough to the evil industrialist to kill him.

(Laser Squad has now begotten a modernised, proper multiplayer version of itself, Laser Squad Nemesis. It’s commercial software, but it only costs $17.)

I’m not crazy about motorsport. I like it more than any other sport, but for me, that’s faint praise.

Part of my affection is devoted to the peculiar jargon of the motorsport commentator.

I don’t mean just the really good commentators, here. I’ll take a Walkerism or Brundlequote if I can get one, but even the God-awful everyday commentators here in Australia (who have a particular affection for the word “carnage”, possibly because they think the first three letters mean it’s particularly applicable to automobiles) have a collection of diverting stock phrases.

It is, for instance, important not only to “keep it on the black stuff”, but also to “keep the shiny side up”, and by extension the “rubber side down”.

One must attempt to not “spear off into the bushes”.

A brake failure, patch of oil or excursion onto wet grass is likely to cause one to “proceed directly to the scene of the accident”.

(That’s a bit too highbrow for the Aussie commentators, as is the delightful Rolls-Royce euphemism for a breakdown, “failure to proceed”. I’ve also previously mentioned “understeering directly to the scene of the accident” in my Prius post.)

A transmission failure can give you “a box full of neutrals”.

“Talent” is generally regarded as a fungible commodity; expressions involving the transfer, location, misplacement or storage (typically in a “bag”) of varible quantities of talent may be employed by a driver or rider to explain virtually any occurrence on the track.

If you rip all four wheels off an open-wheeled racing car, you have “turned it into a canoe”.

There’s also the verb “to alligate”, which arises from the description of a line of nose-to-tail racing cars as “an alligator”. It naturally follows that what they are doing is alligating, just as oysters oyst, tigers tige and lemurs leme.

I invite your own contributions.

From: mrlarry gates <mrlarryg@yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 18:41:19 -0700 (PDT)
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: Regarding To Order 1999 flatbed,

Hello Costomer Service,

This Is mr Larry Gates With Mark & company.And I Am Sending Email Regarding To Order 1999 flatbed, And Pls If You Do Also Carry the 1999 flatbed, And I Will Also Like You To Provide Me With The Prices For The 1999 flatbed, And Also I Will Like This 1999 flatbed To Be Ship To One Of My Company In West Africa And It Will Be Pick Up From Your Location And Also I Will Like To Know If You Do Accept Credit Card Payment And I Want Your Contact Office Number And Your Cell Phone Number So That I can Call You And Proceed With The Order / Payment And Pick Up? And I Am Looking forward To Hear Back From You Soon.

Thank You.
Best Regards.
Rev mr larry gates.
Owner Of Company.
Phone Number 360-846-4894.
__________________________________________________
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OK, this guy is actually presumably trying to get me to mail him some flatbed scanners in return for his stolen credit card number.

But when I first read this spam, I couldn’t help but think he was actually asking me to mail him a flatbed truck.

Larry’s presentation reminds me of HIRAM FROM PUERTO RICO, immortalised at the end of my first Dan’s Data letters column.

It’s been a while since I last favoured you all with fascinating details of the roughly 500 unwanted messages that daily make it through to my last line of defense.

Herewith, a summary of recent developments.

I, like some other people, have been enjoying the emissions of the (I presume) single pharmacy spammer who has hit upon a way to send messages which appeal to every possible consumer. Half of his spams have the subject line “This is not for idiots”. The other half, magnificently, have “Not for oversmart people”.

I’ve also had a lot of those weird “…goes bra-less” spams, promoting some ad-laden “news” site that just copies content from other sites. Entertainingly, the spammers’ list of names of nubile starlets to put at the start of the “…goes bra-less” subject line includes Barbra Streisand.

I’ve also been pleased to receive a dodgy link scheme e-mail from someone who may be headed for fame in the Expert Sex Change/Penis Land/The Rapist Finder stakes; he’s got a “very authentic directory” which “generates a high volume of qualified traffic” (even though most of its categories are empty…), and he decided to call it beontopranking-google.com.

It took me a while to figure out that he meant that to read Be On Top Ranking Google, rather than Be Onto Pranking Google, which I admit doesn’t scan very well, but is singularly appropriate for someone who’s sending link-to-me spam.

(This “domain name confusion” subject even has a Leo Stoller connection. It’s a small world, isn’t it?)

I’m not actually particularly annoyed by the typical “link request” e-mail. It’s simple, to the point, and hopeless, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with asking for links, however worthless such schemes may be.

But I got five copies of a link request from one Philip Gahan of the internationally unrenowned OrBay Online Auctions, who’ve confidently decided that the only thing on Dan’s Data is my review of the Aeropress coffee maker, and thereby included a link to dansdata.com on one of their numerous, and tiny, “Home and Garden” directory pages.

(One of the other links on that page at the moment is helpfully titled “Dantechnology DE ANTONI:macchine per smerigliatura e pulitura. Linishing and polishing machine. - pulitura, smerigliatura, brillantatura, carteggiatura,lucidatura pulire, smerigliare, carteggiare, brillantare, cromatura,cromare, rubinetto, rubinetti, maniglia, maniglie, pentole, cucchiaio, posate, posata,robot, robotica, automazione, automatismo, tavola, macchina, campana, campane,polish,polishing,grind,grinding,bell,buffing,finishing,taps,handle , lavorazioni , meccanica, subfornitura ,linishing, pots,pans,lids,fiera,faucets, fiere,exhibition”.)

Honourable mention: Whoever it was who thought that because this letters column has a letter with the title “Drive saunas”, my site must therefore be an ideal candidate for a link swap with a company that makes hot tubs.

And while I’m at it: Hello to the gibbering nitwits at SalesUniversal (dot com), who think I’m in the market for their “Business List of 88,000+ business contacts across Arizona state”, and to the drooling lackwits at SlipStreamVideo (dot com), who’ve sent me a number of messages saying “We’re interested in representing your product in the marketplace”, without revealing to me what product they believe I am selling.

I mean, you can kind of understand the endless flow of Chinese commercial spam; lots of people seem to think I’m one of the world’s major LED, LCD and magnet retailers, thanks to my high PageRanks for those search terms.

That still doesn’t really excuse the spammer who sent me two copies of their “Lighting Fixture Chandeliers Hotels Projects” message, though. At least they broke up the stream of identical messages “FROM MR GABRIEL NWAKEZE22″.

MR NWAKEZE22’s intriguing financial proposition was, to be fair, more appealing than the one from one David de Hilster, whose somewhat novel theory that Einstein Was Wrong (and that E actually equals MC cubed…) has, apparently, spawned a documentary pithily titled “Einstein Wrong - The Miracle Year”.

The documentary is “about a suburban house wife who takes on the icon of 20th century physics to see if in fact relativity is wrong”, it’s shot and in the can, it “has two Oscar-winning distributors interested in the project”… but it’s still in search of an Executive Producer.

(By which they mean, someone willing to give them a lot of money.)

Other points of light in the river of mud have included:

One message with the subject line “hey [Unknown Tag *$rname* Please Fix]!”.

A fake-watches spam which not only informed me that “Celebrities wear Rolex‘s” and “Millionaires wear Rolex‘s” but also that “Jesus would wear a Rolex”.

Colon-cleanse spam which alleged “The longer your body is exposed to rotting food in your intestines, the greater the risk of toxic build up!” That text is apparently plagiarised from this patent application, of all things.

And, in conclusion, I’m also the proud recipient of an endless stream of bounce messages from stupidly configured mail servers, which assume that spam whose “From” line is “VIAGRA ™ Official Site <dan@dansdata.com>” must actually be from me.

These servers usually seem to be in the funny little two-character-TLD areas of the Internet - .ua, .fm, that kind of thing. And the addresses that’re bouncing are usually more glimpses of the uncleaned grease-trap that is the average spammer’s address list.

Just the other day I received three very helpful Delivery Status Notification (Failure) messages telling me that the messages “I” had sent to anal-sex@aluar.yu-yake.com, anal@inet.ua and anal@ua.fm had failed.

The icing on this particularly delectable cake was that the bounces - regarding addresses at domains registered in Japan, the Ukraine and the USA, respectively - all came “from” postmaster@adstechinc.com. That’s a company that makes electronic medical records software, and your guess is as good as mine about why its name’s being tacked onto farflung spam errors.

When last we visited the wonderful world of image “retargeting” by means of the cunning seam carving technique, I envisaged a decent free seam carving Photoshop plugin in the near-ish future.

Well, that hasn’t turned up yet. But a couple of options besides rsizr.com and that GIMP plugin have.

The inventively named Content Aware Image Resizer is a simple command line utility that can only cope with BMP format images, but gets the job done (a bit slowly…), is multithreaded, and is GPL-licensed so C++ hackers can fiddle with the source.

Resizor is a standalone Windows app, which is only single-threaded but still seems a bit faster than CAIR (I think rsizr.com is faster now than it used to be, too), has a bunch of fancy resizing algorithms as well as the seam carving “Retarget” option, and has a graphical interface too.

Resizor only lets you make an image smaller by seam carving (one of the interesting features of the technique is that it can just as easily enlarge images as shrink them), but it does what most people want to do.

If you, like me, are a cynical depressive type, you should probably not read about the latest adventures of the luckless Mr Tehn.

Oh, sure, in Lovecraft books people who look like him are always rising from the too-deep mines by night to claim the sanity of mortal men, or getting up to NSFW hi-jinks with Japanese schoolgirls.

But that’s all just racist nonsense that completely ignores the very real plight of the tentacled abomination in today’s world.

Poor Mr Tehn.

At least, if this previous strip is to be believed, he has a cat.

(Now, those Schlorbians - they have a ball.)

(And please allow me to repeat my strong recommendation of Tim Kreider’s two books.)

High-tech dowsing rods have a storied history.

Their reason for being is simple enough. You can’t really make a lot of money by selling the regular kind of dowsing rod or divining pendulum, you see, since anybody can make their own from coat-hanger wire, a stick, or any old thing on the end of a string.

(Pendulum enthusiasts often seem to believe that their pendulum needs a bob made from some exotic mineral or other, but there’s not a lot of money to be made there, either.)

But you sure can make a lot of money if you make a special technomalogical box with some lights on it and an antenna sticking out which does, in essence, the same thing as a dowsing rod.

Which is nothing, of course. But plenty of people believe in dowsing, despite the repeated failure of dowsers to actually detect any darn thing in controlled tests.

But people insist on continuing to believe in dowsing, especially if it’s dressed up with modern trappings. So other people are pleased to make decorated dowsing rods and sell them, or just their special expertise, for enormous prices.

There’ve been a few high-tech dowsing doodads over the years. The Quadro Tracker, the DKL LifeGuard, various and sundry other “Locator” devices; the list goes on. Several of these devices have been purchased - or, at least, the their promotors hired at great expense - by business and governmental entities. Not once have these things actually managed to find human life signs under rubble (in the case of the LifeGuard) or… well, just about anything (in the case of the Quadro Tracker), but hope springs eternal.

South African ex-cop Danie Krugel’s incredible human-locator, though, is a significant step forward in the modern scam artists’ constant struggle to further improve their money-to-effort ratio.

You just give him anything from the body of a lost person - a bit of hair, say, with or without the roots that contain the actual DNA - and his magic box will locate said person, by means of super-scientific quantum GPS DNA resonance. Apparently his box can also find oil or, um, bacteria.

Many dowsers and pendulumists believe they can do their thing over a mere map, without having to actually go to the place where people are trying to find oil or water or the Lost Treasure of the Aztecs or whatever. Danie Krugel is running the same sort of operation; he’s not leaving the house if you don’t provide a camera crew (and, I suspect, a substantial fee…).

And, apparently, the money rolls in!

Some terribly cynical people have reached the conclusion that Mr Krugel’s magic box is a bit of a rip-off. Ben Goldacre just commented on it; he’s less than impressed with some recent uncritical coverage of it in the UK papers. Apparently Mr Krugel has located “traces” of the missing child Madeleine McCann “on a resort beach”, and in so doing catapulted himself into the same exalted category as those “psychics” who make money by stringing along grief-stricken families and annoying the police. (Sometimes they manage to parley this sort of thing into considerable celebrity.)

This South African blogger is also less than entirely impressed by Mr Krugel. Here’s her post about Krugel’s performance on a South African show, mentioned in glowing terms on the above-linked Canada Free Press article.

In brief, he actually achieved such amazing feats as saying that the body of a girl abducted by a now-dead paedophile was somewhere close to the paedophile’s house - the location of which was public knowledge. They went there, they “narrowed it down”, they dug up an old dumping ground and found 101 kinds of random junk including some little bits of bone that almost certainly had nothing to do with the missing girl, they handed those bits of bone over to the distraught parents, then they declared victory and went home.

Every now and then, a psychic says a missing person is dead (and often that the body is “near water”, a claim that could mean it’s just about anywhere except the middle of the Kalahari…), but that person later turns up alive and well.

Even that, though, seldom seems to dent the psychic’s popularity.

The vendors of techno-dowsing gear often make more definite claims about their equipment, which can lead to problems when it clearly fails to, say, find people trapped under rubble.

Danie Krugel’s playing it smart, by hybridising psychic-detective claims with techno-gibberish. People who’d never think of retaining the services of a psychic may be more kindly disposed to his “scientific” equivalent.

(A few days later, Ben Goldacre wrote a Guardian column about Krugel, who did not distinguish himself in a phone interview. And the day after that, the Observer apologised, more or less, for printing such abject bullshit.)

UPDATE: A couple of years after I wrote the above, it came to light that a different version of these idiotic electro-dowsing-rod things has been sold, at the usual outrageous prices, to the Iraqi government. They use them to detect bombs at security checkpoints. Or, you know, to not detect bombs at security checkpoints.

I only now got around to reading Gerard Ryle’s latest Sydney Morning Herald article about “troubled” gasoline-improving-pill company Firepower, and its “colourful” directors.

The piece is pretty much just an updated recap of the sordid saga documented in previous articles, but more and more of the Firepower principals’ background is coming out, and it’s entertaining stuff. The nonexistent contracts, fake tests, string of previous financially questionable fuel-saving companies and guys linked to Nicolae Ceausescu and Halliburton, we already knew about. But there’s more.

Kitchen renovations and standover men! Child-sex allegations! And, less excitingly, the continuing slow turning of the gears of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, which may finally see these swindlers thrown in jail.

Don’t count on it, though. For every “high flying” rip-off artist that actually sees the inside of a comfortable minimum security prison for a few months, there are ten who just declare bankruptcy yet again and then head off in a “borrowed” private jet to their next important meeting.