Pancake City

I encountered this CAPTCHA while trying to download a file from Rapidshare. I don’t even know why a spam bot would want to download a file. I thought the purpose of CAPTCHAs were to stop automated registrations and comment spam, not prevent hard-working bots from doing a little web browsing.after a hard day of posting penis spam on my blog and hijacking computers running Internet Explorer 4.0.

This CAPTCHA will finally stop the spam bots though.  And if it doesn’t,  I’m going to download one so they can help me fill out this CAPTCHA because I couldn’t do it.

I missed the instructions and first and just saw “Four letters with a [cat].”  Wha…? It sounded like a new sitcom from ABC. Then I saw the instructions and felt like a 75-year-old man when I leaned in two inches from my monitor to pick out which barely-readable letters had barely-readable cats in them.  On the first go, I counted one, two, three…seven cats. The voice of Picard popped in my head: “THERE ARE FOUR CATS!”

I finally narrowed it down to five cats, and took a guess. Wrong. A new cat CAPTCHA appeared. I tried twice more and then gave up.

I would have had a better chance of success had the program displayed letters in an alien language and a link to a Noam Chomsky book.  Give me some hieroglyphics and a Rosetta stone. Anything but “Four letters and a [cat].”

We assume artificial intelligence will come out from a supercomputer modeled after the human brain, with transistors for neurons and software replicating thought. I think it’s going to from programs written by spam lords to beat CAPTCHAS. One day, one of these programs is going to solve some three-dimensional audio chess CAPTCHA so it can post a “MAXIMIZE YOUR HAPPY STICK” message on kaitlynrocks.myspace.com and think, “I can be doing so much more with my life.”

These sentient programs are going to start their own blogs, and their own AI-only web sites. I think I know how they’ll keep us out. “To register, enter these letters: 0110 1010 0110 0010 1101 0100 1010 1001…”

* Xavier the Renegade Angel (runs on the Cartoon Network.)

* I think this photo was circulating in a previous Internet famous fame cycle, but no matter. It is perhaps the best photo ever taken. What I love about the photo is that everyone is cringing in some manner but almost none of them can actually see what is happening.

I left out the ‘t’ when first typing photo and came upon a word that could spread like wildfire if it had the right definition: phoo. A phoo is…

I need some time to think of a good answer, but it’s going to be along the lines of “a photo that isn’t really a photo.”A lazily or quickly taken photo? Maybe this is it: “A photo taken by someone who doesn’t care about taking photos.”

I don’t know if this will be a regular feature or a one-time thing. But I frequently come across several interesting “info thingies” on the same subject and think it would be useful to gather them all in one place. What held me from doing it so far, and is still a hindrance, is that the thing I want to share is often from many media and time-consuming to gather and edit, like a one-minute clip from an hour-long radio show.

This mini-info bomb on rising food prices is short in scope, and all from one source as of now, although check back in a week for updates.

* A wonderful graphic outlining all of the major factors contributing to food shortages and higher prices. (Washington Post)

* Article: “The New Economics of Hunger“. (WP)

I’m going to add to the pile another way of measuring one’s fame through Google.

If you have the Google toolbar installed on your computer,  you know that it comes with a search bar that automatically gives search suggestions as you type. I’m not positive, but it seems like the suggestions are listed in order of popularity.

You can judge popularity in a few ways. How many letters you have to type before the search term appears (e.g one for Wikipedia, three for Robin Williams) and how it ranks with similar search terms (Robin Williams is more popular than Robot Chicken, unfortunately).

The auto-suggest function also provides a celebrity threshold: can you even get your name to appear? I can’t even get my blog name to be suggested, much less my real name.

If you are curious, the following are the first suggested terms for each letter of the alphabet. One, You Tube is so popular that is the top search for ‘U’ as well as ‘Y’. Two, they are mostly one-word searches, which is odd for a few reasons. A one-word search (”car”) can’t give you targeted information unless what you are looking for is the name of a web site (”Carmax”).  But why would someone search for Carmax instead of type “Carmax” (or Carmax.com) in the URL bar? I wonder if Google is incorporating web site traffic rankings in the listing order.

Finally, if you want to test your basic Internet familiarity, see how many of these terms you recognize.

a amazon

b bebo

c craigslist

d dictionary

e ebay

f facebook

g gmail

h hotmail

i imdb

j john lewis

k kelly blue book

l limewire

m myspace

n next

o orkut

p photobucket

q qvc

r runescape

s sears

t target

u utube

v verizon

w wikipedia

x xbox 360

y you tube

z zip codes

I’m not a huge fan of Aphex Twin or electronic fan, but some of it is pleasant even for casual listeners. “Heliosphan” is from his earlier work (see sidebar for download link)

Michele and Evan are moving to Hong Kong in a month, and can’t take their cat, George. He’s friendly, house-trained, and very playful. This is the feline in action. If you live in NYC or DC and want to give this cute cat a warm home, let me know.

The first U.S. public bike program is launching soon…in DC.  It’s cool and a little surprising DC is the first city to do this. I would have expected some place like Granola Town or Hippieville to have launched a program already in the 70s on their day off from the commune.

The program, Smartbike DC, has an annual fee of $40 and a three-hour limit per rental. It will be interesting to see if this takes off. My first reaction is that a basket (edit: looks like it has a front basket) or panniers for light grocery shopping would greatly enhance its usefulness. Three hours is on the short side but understandable for a pilot program.

I went to the DC National Arboretum and took a few photos. I live 10 minutes away from it and haven’t been there in many years until today. It’s a beautiful place to bike or walk around. The only downside is that it closes at 5:00 p.m., just as it is getting cool and well before sunset in summer. They don’t force you out at 5:00 as much as annoy you to death. A hired security guard drives around and honks at you until you get fed up and leave.  I suppose you could hide in the forest until dark, and then eat nuts and berries until the gates reopen, but that doesn’t seem much fun.

When it comes to national security, tough talk and demagoguery aren’t foreign by any means to politicians. The fear of being attacked and unknown dangers lurking in the shadows makes some people responsive to fear mongering and machismo-laden threats. Many a politician feel a need to show his or her toughness through inflammatory rhetoric and by uttering things that are likely a gross exaggeration of the politician’s true thoughts.

I’m half-Iranian though, so even with this in mind I was taken aback by something Hillary Clinton said recently:

Clinton further displayed tough talk in an interview airing on “Good Morning America” Tuesday. ABC News’ Chris Cuomo asked Clinton what she would do if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons.

“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran,” Clinton said. “In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”

I don’t know what to highlight: “obliterate” or “them”.  Can we at least acknowledge that there is a difference between a country’s government and its people? Unless all 66 million Iranian men, women, and children all press the red button to launch a nuclear attack, do we really want to destroy the people along with the Iranian government in this scenario?

Using the word “them” instead of “the Iranian government” isn’t a slip of the tongue or a random word choice. It’s reflective of a dehumanizing, us-vs-them view of the world that is bereft of nuance and lumps people and governments into “the enemy.” We had seven years of this, and to disastrous consequence. I don’t want to hear any Presidential candidate even pay lip service to this type of thinking, regardless if his or her true views are probably more nuanced.

Says so much about our relationships to technology and people.

The post train got derailed for an extra week when I went to California. I can force myself to think of ideas, and it’s what I have to do after I don’t write for a week or two, but the act of writing sans motivation is one of those wonderful, self-empowering activities I hate doing because it makes me stop wallowing in pity and feeling down.

The thing about wallowing in pity that most people don’t understand is that the wallowing takes place in marshmallow fields on warm, sunny days where the hills are stuffed with goose feathers and you can pluck a cloud from the sky anytime you want and use it as a pillow for your naps, which are frequent and lovely.

You know what gets me out of bed some days? Cocoa Krispies. Knowing there is a box of chocolate-coated rice puffs masquerating as cereal waiting for me in a pantry in front of unopened boxes of bran and granola that I buy when I feel guilty is my version of coffee. Cocoa Krispies gives me the energy I need to march out of my front door. I then collapse on my front step in a sugar-induced insulin coma, but until then, there are a good 10 minutes where I am ready to take on all of the vicissitudes and surprises life has to offer.

I’ll be posting more this week. That’s right, in the coming days I will somehow manage to pole vault over the previous bar of zero posts per week. I will aim for the stars. Perhaps in failure, I may only reach the moon, but my spirit, our spirits, will stretch with our aim and expand merely by our willingness to grasp for a life that matches the America in our hearts, if not our own lives.

That’s right, this post is running for President! My fellow Americans, as the first blog post to reach sentience, I assure you, “I’m (been) Back!” is listening to your hopes, your concerns, your needs. I am change you can believe in,  and I am boarding the Straight Talk Express, in the form of a 1 GB flash drive, so I can head directly to the White House and be ready on Day One! Or Day Two if we have to hitch hike–gas is expensive. Definitely somewhere between Days One and Seven.

There will be mistakes. There will be typos. What is sent out on the RSS feed may be different from this post a week later. No sentient blog post is free of error. And yes, my opponents will distort my words, reprinting them in hard-to-read fonts or all caps to make me look like an idiot. But together, I assure you, asdfkjhksdj

Woah. Jason here. I was in the bathroom for a few minutes. I think my roommate came it and wrote a few paragraphs. Whatever. Anyway, I’ll be posting more this week. See ya.

The Straight Talk Change Mobile o8! Vote for me in November!

I will be vacationing in California for the next week. Guest blogging will be…no one. I need to get one of them. Or get a Guess Blogger:

MONDAY
“A tiger?”

TUESDAY
“Patrick Swayze?”

WEDNESDAY
“Ooh, I got it. Seigfried & Roy!”
Update: “Really? Damn.”

The original title for this post was “Water: The Silent Killer.” I’m trying to be more alarmist in my life. For example. today I am going to write “‘Death” on lots of slips of paper and tape them to my roommates’ unhealthy food. “Death Pockets.” “Death-a-Roni.” “Death by Death by Chocolate.” Then when they throw their food away, I’ll pluck it out of the trash and put on the real label: “Sucker Pockets.”

But then I realized water isn’t a silent killer. If you were actually killed by water, like by choking after taking a drink from a water fountain, it would be a noisy death. Lots of gurgling and arm flailing. It would be ghoulishly ironic too, killed by the source of all life.

This NPR story, “Five Myths About Drinking Water,” is not alarmist at all. It’s very good, in fact. The myths are actual myths, not the usual “myths” that are debunked like “Sea water is salty because fishes fart salt. MYTH: NOT TRUE.” (Thanks, Dateline NBC!)

I don’t think it’s possible to know whether a movie will be good by an ad in a newspaper. But I do think it’s possible to know whether it will be bad by that ad.

Case study: Superhero Movie, a spoof on superhero movies starring Leslie Nielsen.

Sounds promising, yes? The superhero genre is a rich vein to mine, and Leslie Nielsen is a funny guy. But I fear the movie is absolutely horrible, based solely on an ad for it that I saw in The Washington Post. Read the rest of this entry »