Duke University Library has an awesome collection of newspaper ads from the early 20th century. Not only are they an old-timey reminder of the culture that defeated the Nazis and gave us Daffy Duck, you can learn about tampons as well. Yay!

link

Seems like the wikipedia's having a problem. Just when I was gearing up to do some scraping... bummer.



In lighter news, the classic search engine Altavista was recently hacked. I visited night before last and their portal page had been blanked and replaced with a single heading 'do you yahoo?'.

This is genius. Unmitigated freaking genius. Mad props to whoever this is.



Link.
Via.

I was thinking today about language and grammar recognition by machines, as used for auto-translating, document rewriting, etc. I need a thesaurus of phrases for rewriting documents. I'm trying work out how a bot could compile one and it occurs to me that google has a huge database of English text from which to derive rules.

Suppose you were to search for ''A banana is a'' (with the double quotes). Taking only the sentences which begin with that phrase. Google returns results containing:

a banana is a banana
a banana is a fruit
a banana is a tropical herbaceous plant
a banana is a good source of water
a banana is a tropical fruit
a banana is a phallic symbol
a banana is a monoecious plant
a banana is a healthy snack

If a bot trims out the rest of the sentences then this can be used to create relationships between nouns.

banana --> fruit
banana --> phallic symbol
...etc

If this is done for other nouns we might get:

apple --> fruit
apple --> computer

So having done this for a bunch of words we can make a list of things 'which are' fruit. So far we've got 'apple' and banana', and we can do some text substitutions. 'she was eating a banana' can be substituted with 'she was eating a fruit'. If we substitute 'she was eating a phallic symbol' it's still gramatically correct (and sounds kinda sexy) but we've lost the meaning of the original phrase. Which is no good if we're rewriting document that humans will read. So how's a computer going to know which is the better substitution?

It's a tough. My best answer at the moment is to have the bot see what humans use more often, ie, Google both terms and see which comes up more often.

'she was eating a fruit' => 95
'she was eating a phallic symbol' => 0
'she was eating a snack' => 164
'she was eating a monoecious plant' => 0

Now we have a score for each substituion. To make a general case for each word (so as not to have to search each time, and because many phrases will not exist at all) we could search nouns against verbs for proximity and the number of Google matches will be the score for how appropriate they are to each other.

''eat * banana'' OR ''banana * eat'' => 142,000
''eat * snack'' OR ''snack * eat'' => 269,000

We can also test verb substitutions from a regular thesaurus this way. For example Roget's lists nosh, chow and masticate as alternatives to 'eat'.

'eat * banana' => 124,000
'nosh * banana' => 13
'chow * banana' => 303
'masticate * banana' => 4

So 'chow' is the most likely substitute for 'eat' out of these three (personally I prefer masticate) but it's not a very common switch. If chow and eat had simmilar scores (say within 66% of each other) then that would likely be a better substitution.

Ultimately I'd like to be able to make a bot rewrite text into infinite permutations retainging the original English (human) meaning as well as some of its nuance.

I'm sure it's possible, I'm not sure how. Try 'He attended MIT to study' (remove object from sentence). Googling for 'He * MIT to study' gives:

he was at MIT to study
he was accepted at MIT to study
he came to MIT to study
he entered MIT to study

As well as a buch of bad substitutions, most of which can be filtered out by context. 'he returned to MIT to study' would be harder for a machine to spot as a bad substitution because it changes the meaning.

Thinking.... thinking.... thinking....

Any thoughts or ideas, email me!

I just read something wonderful in the Wikipedia article for the town of Alnwick:

For completeness I thought I'd find and add some images of Sugar Grove's twin facility outside Yakima, Washinton. Notice how many of the dishes are pointing inwards towards the United States, as well as West, to intercept traffic coming in off the Pacific. Images produced using Google Earth, click to enlarge.



The gorge in these photos runs due west.

Google Maps Link

This is a snip from a recent New York Times article about the NSA center to monitor communications coming into the US off the eastern seaboard:

Turns out that it's illegal to eat your ballot card in Canada:

from bash.org

Now here's a truly incredible idea, hire some models to wear short skirts with adverising space on their panties, then have them walk around a convention floor, dropping stuff and picking it up again. And this actually happened, in Kiev.
Ok Kodak, you have my full attention. Sell me something.



source

Man! I love being alive! I just read an article in the Times about 'Natura', a Christian themed nudist camp and Garden of Eden theme park opening in Florida. Christian nude volleyball. SweeEEEeeet!

link: Christians strip to build a new Eden
via BoingBoing

UPDATE: This is an old article that is attracting some attention recently. Edited May 2007 in answer to the comments, quotes courtesy of the Wikipedia article on Christian nudism. It should be noted that the modern naturism movement is in part an ideological descendant of Christian nudist communities going back to the Adamites of the 1st through 4th centuries. Nudism is not contrary to Christian belief, but some of the foamier-mouthed, cultish evangelical sects like to say it is.

Pope John Paul II

"Sexual modesty cannot then in any simple way be identified with the use of clothing, nor shamelessness with the absence of clothing and total or partial nakedness... Immodesty is present only when nakedness plays a negative role with regard to the value of the person."

"Nakedness itself is not immodest... Immodesty is present only when nakedness plays a negative role with regard to the value of the person, when its aim is to arouse concupiscence, as a result of which the person is put in the position of an object for enjoyment."

A gratuitous picture

Dr. R. C. Sproul

"Jesus provides the covering for our nakedness... so that once we are covered by the righteousness of Christ, we can be naked in the presence of God and not be shamed. We can stop running. We can stop hiding. Because we have been adorned with a gown of perfect righteousness, if we trust in Him."

A. W. Tozer
From The Pursuit of God - Chapter 10: The Sacrament of Living:

"The monkish hatred of the body which figures so prominently in the works of certain early devotional writers is wholly without support in the word of God. Common modesty is found in the sacred Scriptures, it is true, but never prudery or a false sense of shame. The New Testament accepts as a matter of course that in His incarnation our Lord took upon Him a real human body, and no effort is made to steer around the downright implications of such a fact. He lived in that body here among men and never once performed a non-sacred act. His presence in human flesh sweeps away forever the evil notion that there is about the human body something innately offensive to the Deity. God created our bodies and we do not offend Him by placing the responsibility where it belongs. He is not ashamed of the work of His own hands."

[read on...]

ww.com voyeurism

Seasons greetings y'all. I've just been on a web safari of ww.com and I must say it was a little disppointing. I'd read an article on [not giving them a link] about teenage girls who (scold) who set up websites with (shock!) photo galeries of (scold) themselves, and how they sometimes show a little flesh (what about the children?) to solicit (for shame!) stuff from their wishlists. We're not talking nudity here, just cute 16/17 year olds with tank tops and fan clubs.

So after reading some stuffy and sex negative things about how these 'vulnerable teenagers' are 'exploited' when they set up non-nude, non-porn websites to wheedle gifts out of needy men, I decided it might be worth checking out.

One of the cam portals had apperently achieved infamy when girls would sometimes even flash their breasts (*gasp*) to get stuff they want. But I suspect this is all hype dreamed up by the right wing media for parents to fret over, because when I went to this site it was hella lame.

In short order I surfed through all 904 cams and the most interesting thing on there was a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment of this woman picking her nose:



Fantastic. Among the things to be seen, a litter of puppies, a snowman, some test patterns, several overweight fiftysomething men naked and spanking it, and a kitty. I liked the kitty. If I wanted to see naked old folk decongesting the weasel I would go to Southern-Gents.com.

So there were no pretty teenage girls in tank tops to talk to. *sigh*. It occurs to me that the old guys may have known where the girls were at (judging by their enthusiastic munchkin-punching), didn't feel like asking them for some reason.

''Hey, um... what you watching there? Really? Ok, well I see you're enjoying your Oprah reruns so I'll leave you to it..''

Oh well. Though I'm biased, I'm going to recommend my own webcam setup over ww.com, there are often more than 904 of them online, and there's usually something cool to watch. Though I was initially disappointed that my cam hacking never turned up any naked folks, ww.com has shown me that its probably a blessing.

Hey all, after some tinkering I've put the webcams back online. For those who haven't used them before, these are random Panasonic webcams from around the world that can often be controlled (pan/tilt/zoom) from an interface on this site.

I've had a lot of fun with them and you can see some amazing things if you're patient. Figure out where they are in the world, work out the time difference and wait to see sunrises, gridlock, wildlife, etc.

There is now also an option to set this site's banner to a still from any cam, have fun :-)

April 1st is still a few months away, so here's an idea for a bit of fun mischief you can plan in advance, this could throretically be used for a DoS attack, so dont be a jerk and go damaging innocent people's syetems.

Background: A lot of email services are set up with autoresponders, ie, when you send an email to customer service you get an automated response back like 'Thank you for contacting Shady Crooks Sp4m service, we'll get back to you soon. In the meantime...' blah blah blah. Now because it's an autoresponder you can send it *any* email and it'll make that response for you, and send it to your 'reply' address. Note that the reply address on emails does not have to be the same address you send from.

Method: Suppose you were to sign up for a free Yahoo China email address (read why you might have beef) and set up the return address on your email to one of these autoresponsers. Then you send a taunting email to Sp4m Associates, and the replay address is customer service at KKK.org or some other vile outfit.

What would happen? The Sp4m autoresponder fires an email at KKK, who fires one back at Sp4m, who sends another to KKK and so on, with your original taunting message at the bottom of each. Inboxes get full.

Bonus: OK, so that was a fun way to get at those sleazy cons who fill your inbox with junk every day. Can we make it better? You Bet! Suppose we find a whole list of these autoresponders :-) We'll open a text file and start saving them up for April 1st, every time you come across unsavoury 'businesses' online (like these guys).

Then we'll set up a POP3/SMTP to webmail relay (I'm not going to explain this, if you dont know how then you probably wont be covering your tracks well enough and shouldn't be hacking) and a little script to connect them all together. If we consider each autoresponder as a vertex then every time we send en email we're creating an edge on the graph, till they're all connected. Send the emails with a random delay of 5 to 10 minutes, and be sure to get a few back to throw off the anti-spam of the webmail you're sending from (which might automatically close your account).

Voila! Chaos.

And *please* dont use your own IP.

Happy April Fools!

I'm not even going to try to explain what I was doing here, I just came across this section in this UK girl's sex store:

The US Department of Homeland security was put on alert earlier this week as reports surfaced that Al Quaeda, Islamic Jihad and other terrist organisations were planning a major attack on, er, Golfland, in San Jose.

The three acre miniature golf course, described as San Jose's equivalent of the White House or Sears Tower is an obvious target for those who wish to do America lasting, devastating harm.

From BoingBoing.net

Today is Dean Gray Tuesday, a day for angst and the dowloading of free music. So for the next couple hours, I'll be getting to the spirit and sharing with you some illegal MP3s here or you can go to www.americanedit.org
to find more mirrors of this years album.

Fuck Warner! Up the Revolution!

I am so getting one of these! Apparently it's a japanese fashion trend; get a big old handset and have it slung on a belt hook for your cell phone. Wonder if it can be modded into one of those styling 1960s handsets, like with a metal rim. hmmm...

Cooo000oool!

This and other fun peacocking stuff at: FredFlare.com

Was at the Bell Ringers dinner this evening, great company, excellent food, our own private vicar at the table (usually the whole town has to share a vicar). And on top of that this place has some *hot* staff. I dont think any of them are single, so I hadn't made too much time thus far, might hang out there more in the future. Nice high toned place, so I'm not going to have a punchup with a chav over some girl I'm sarging, or have to AMOG a tattooed gorilla called Knuckles. Probably be the only male customer under 40 :-) Need to bear places like this in mind in future. Hmmm...



I like the word 'tartlets' being next to my name on that card. Anyhoo, I just got home to an email from one Joseph Matthews that contains a really interesting idea:

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