Live from Austin!

A great many words have been written on the subject of e-mail spam. Effort has been poured into all kinds of technological measures against it. In my view, many of these efforts have been a waste of time, because they have failed to address the fundamental problem of spam.

To explain my thinking, I’ll start with some basic statements:

1. Your attention is a valuable resource. If you doubt this, you need only look at the amount of money spent on advertising in an attempt to acquire your attention.

2. Therefore, your inbox is a valuable resource. Many people, perhaps most people, now check e-mail multiple times a day. In fact, according to some surveys college students spend more time on the Internet than watching TV. They check their e-mail inbox more than they look at ad breaks.

3. SMTP e-mail allows anyone to send mail. There’s no centralized registration required in SMTP; there’s no control over the growth of the SMTP e-mail network. While some servers restrict which SMTP clients may connect to them, there’s essentially no control over who sends mail, as it’s always possible to open a new web e-mail account, buy a new ISP dial-up account, or whatever.

4. SMTP e-mail is free for the sender. Sure, many people pay for their Internet access; but once you have an Internet connection, sending e-mail basically doesn’t cost you anything—it has marginal cost.

Now, let me re-cast those four statements:

We have unrestricted access for anyone in the world to use arbitrary amounts of a valuable resource.

Can you think of any case where there has been a system like that, and it has worked? I can’t. The canonical example is the tragedy of the commons, but there are plenty of others, including the Cambridge ‘Green Bike’ scheme and the overfishing of cod.

In order to avoid a “tragedy of the commons” situation, we need to alter the situation so that one of the statements above is no longer true. Let’s go through them again and consider our options.

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We finally got to watching A.i.: Artificial Intelligence. We’re probably the last people alive who haven’t seen it, so I trust you will allow me the indulgence of a few spoilers in the course of my criticism.

Let’s start with the big issue: the movie has the most egregious deus ex machina ending I have seen in years of movie-watching. It’s so hideous that it could be used as the canonical example when educating future generations of movie makers in what not to do. Apparently the ending was part of the Kubrick script for the movie, but Spielberg gave it that final saccharine twist. I’d like to think that Kubrick would have seen sense and removed the whole thing, like he did the original pie fight ending to Dr Strangelove.

A.i. is supposedly some kind of tribute or homage to Kubrick…but of course, the problem is it’s hard to pick two directors whose styles are as dissimilar as Kubrick and Spielberg, unless you start talking about (say) Errol Morris and John Waters.

Visually, there’s really nothing Kubrick to see. The fight with the bike gangs is a frenetic MTV cut-up, rather than a sequence of smooth menacing tracking shots. Even when David finds rows of boxed Davids, and Spielberg finally tries to use a Kubrick-style tracking shot for effect, he keeps the camera too high and the result is merely tedious. In fact, it brought to mind the groundbreaking camera work of Ed Wood, as lovingly recreated by Tim Burton.

Perhaps the worst thing, though, is that Spielberg just can’t seem to avoid the temptation to try and make every single story into a kid-friendly movie. Thus a male robot prostitute suddenly takes David to visit the cartoon head of Albert Einstein, voiced by Robin Williams, which we’re told is conveniently situated in the middle of the biggest red light district on earth. No, that’s not the noise of Stanley Kubrick spinning in his grave, it’s just the whirling pulleys as my suspended disbelief comes crashing to the ground.

In the original script, the mother’s an alcoholic, and the robot kid inadvertently feeds her problem when he keeps making her Bloody Marys just the way she likes them, in a futile attempt to get her to love him. Yeah, that would have worked. What doesn’t work is making mom a nice mug of coffee. Not even if you whirl the coffee containers around in an inexplicable fashion in the middle of the shot. But problem drinking is an Adult Situation, so we can’t have that in a Spielberg movie.

Yes, it’s a fairy tale, but I’m old enough to remember that fairy tales used to have wicked witches and evil monsters in. C’mon, Mr Spielberg, I know you can do better.

A research proposal.

Introduction

There are a great many inexact and colloquial units of measurement used in everyday life by native English speakers. Often they are used in situations where their meaning can only be metaphorical—“a handful of people turned up”, “I have a truckload of work to do next week”, “I was stuck in traffic for an eternity”.

This research project would aim to answer a number of fundamental questions about such inexact measurements:

1. Are the relative sizes of the measurements universally understood between native English speakers? For example, does everyone have roughly the same idea of how much “a hell of a lot” is, compared to (say) “an obscene amount”?

2. Do they have a well-ordered ranking? That is, if unit A is generally deemed larger than unit B, and unit B is larger than unit C, is it guaranteed that unit A is generally felt to be larger than unit C?

3. Is there a definite deep semantic content to inexact quantities, such that they can be understood without conscious reasoning? Is this what gives them their literary expressive power?

Methodology

The project would be divided into four phases, outlined below.

PHASE ONE

The initial phase would consist of collecting an extensive list of inexact or colloquial quantitative measures. The principal criterion for inclusion on the list would be that the measurement in question is ill-defined; hence the list could include “miles”, in the sense of “the bus stop is bloody miles away”.

This initial research phase would probably take several months.

PHASE TWO

Next, the units would be categorized according to their dimensionality. Unlike in exact unit systems, colloquial units can have multiple values for their dimension. For example, a “handful” can be either a dimensionless quantity (“a handful of people showed up”), a unit of currency (“a handful of spare change in my pocket”), a unit of volume (“a handful of rice to throw at the bride and groom”), or a unit of weight (“a handful of potato chips”).

This phase would also be quite time-consuming; it would take a bunch of months. During this time, software development for phase three would begin.

PHASE THREE

A group of randomly chosen test subjects, all native English speakers, would be asked to answer computer-administered questions, presented via the web in the following form: