spam comments and happiness

Spam blog comments are hilarious to me because of the ridiculously predictable syntactic patterns they fall into. They pretty much all begin with a compliment on your blog so generic that it could be said about any website followed by links to porn/herbal supplement/penis enlargement/loan consolidation/mortgage sites. And when I say links, I mean lots and lots of links. That’s one of the ways it’s so easy to spot spam comments. Who else is going to put fifteen links in one comment?

Thursday, I deleted 8374 spam-comments in one fell swoop, 99.99% of which had been caught by the spam-comment filter.

Here’s a thought — spammers, write bots that post comments with no links. Get yourself approved first as a trusted commenter, then send out your linkage. I mean, come on. Your usual tactics are too obvious. Try something new. I’m not trying to help out the spammers as much as trying to keep my housecleaning interesting. Once I’ve learned to nominalize a type of spam, it’s boring reading the same syntactic pattern 1000+ times.

What I really don’t understand about spam is its prevalence as a method of advertising. I should back up and say that I don’t really understand advertising either. I just don’t get how a photograph of some new car/vacation resort/shirt/cell phone/whatever whose digital enhancements are more obvious than Cybill Shepherd’s glow in Moonlighting is supposed to convince me to part with my money. The more effective kind of advertising is the kind so subtle that you don’t even realize that’s what it is. I would say that bike magazines are an example, because you can’t tell the difference between the articles and the ads, but that’s for a different reason. The ads are clearly ads; it’s just that so are the articles.

buy, buy!
“Buy-cycling” magazine sinks to a new low

No, the subtle, insidious advertising that’s most effective has to do with convincing people they need plasma TVs (well, TV in the first place), cappuccino makers, ringtones for cell phones, and Microsoft Windows. Things. Happiness has as much to do with consuming things as The Family Circus has to do with humor: people think they’re related, but they’re just not.

But about spam, what I don’t understand is how it persists as a phenomenon. I assume that it persists because its effective. But that’s what I don’t get. Who buys stuff from spammers? Who falls for the old “you won the lottery… in England… where you’ve never been nor bought a ticket” trick? Who hasn’t yet heard of the Nigerian bank account scam? And even if you haven’t, c’mon folks, you wouldn’t trust a stranger who one day knocks on your door and says they want to share 4 million dollars with you if only you’d turn over access to your bank account. Why would you believe an email saying the same thing?

On the internet we’re anonymous, or so we think. For some reason, we think anonymity protects us. So we can be anonymous in our ignorance, our gullibility. At a conference I helped organize in the fall, neuroscientist Chris Wood told the following joke:

In the brain, there is gullibility. How gullible are you? Do you think you could go to a neurosurgeon and have your gullibility removed, leaving everything else intact? If so, you’re pretty gullible and you probably ought to consider having the operation.

While your online identity may be virtual, the money in your bank account is not. At least, it’s not virtual in the same way that online identities are. More money won’t necessarily make you happy, but your happiness depends on having a baseline of material comfort. Falling for spammer’s scams can upset that baseline. Maybe we fall for it for the same reason we buy lottery tickets: we believe we’re entitled to more in life than toiling away at work.

Advertising works in the employ of the two great lies of happiness we’re told in this country. When we’re young, we’re told that everyone has an equal chance to be happy. As we get older, we learn that happiness has a specific shape — it looks like 401Ks, two cars, a spouse, 1.7 kids, and a green lawn. We also learn that some people have a more equal chance at happiness than others.

Later in life we’re told the other lie. No matter how much happiness you have, it’s not enough. But if you’ll only work a little harder, you’ll have more. It’s never OK to say, “I like my life, and I don’t need that new car, that time share at the beach, or any more insurance.”

Thus, the two lies of happiness are complementary: work hard to achieve happiness, and you’ll never work hard enough.

In August, soon after my brother returned to South Carolina from a year spent in South America, the family gathered at the beach to welcome him home. Parting ways at the end of the week, I took the train back to Durham with a one-and-a-half hour layover in Wilson, NC. At the station, I met Roscoe, a former truck driver and cold war era Army vet. He wonders what it will take for this country to turn around, to realize that there is more than enough money in the United States to make sure no sick person is without health care, no hungry person is without food, no jobless person is without a home. Seeing eye to eye, we both wonder why we’re the ones considered radicals.

After serving in the Army in the 70’s, he went to college and studied a little philosophy. We talked about Plato’s Republic, about trying to figure out what justice really is, and about whether the next generation will be any better prepared for the demands of a liberal democracy. Socrates, Plato’s voice in the Republic, didn’t live long enough to see the iPod or its advertisements. Hemlock ended his life prematurely. But even without seeing the ways that Hollywood and Wall Street distort our sense of value, Socrates knew that materialism is a poor substitute for a life of civic virtue. He died 2400 years ago.

Known since the days of ancient Greece, living simply is no more tied to poverty than happiness is tied to wealth. And yet we still have trouble disentangling both.

Google’s browser sync

Many nights, surfing (ahem, I mean, ah, researching) on-line, I want to look at a website I found earlier — maybe hours, days, or months earlier. I look through my Bookmarks and can’t find the link I know I saved. But the next day, back at the office, I find the Bookmark on my computer at work. That’s because I found the page and saved it while I was at work. I’ve done this often enough so that I now have two lists of Bookmarks. Once each list got long enough, I couldn’t remember where I’ve saved something and where I haven’t.

If you’re the kind of person who keeps a strict separation between work and home, then having separate lists of Bookmarks (in Mozilla’s Firefox) or Favorites (Internet Explorer) makes sense. But as long as you use more than one computer (say, a desktop and a laptop — or, like me, one at work, one at home and no Berlin wall between) and you want to access all of your bookmarks from either, then you’ve run into the frustration of asynchronous lists.

Some early attempts at solving this problem were web-based (see del.icio.us or mybookmarks.com for examples). Web-based solutions always seemed clunky to me – why would I want to log-in to a website to keep up with my Bookmarks?

Google browser sync solves this problem by keeping your Bookmarks synchronized across all computers on which the program is installed.

browser sync.jpgGoogle browser sync is an xpi extension for the Firefox browser. If you don’t know what an xpi extension is, think of it like a customization for your browser. Yes, you can install little tools in Firefox that allow you to customize it in certain ways. What the browser sync does is it allows you to access your bookmarks from any computer on which you have the sync installed. Pretty cool, eh?

You install it on computers you use regularly, and it keeps your bookmarks (including toolbar bookmarks, the ones that appear just under the url bar) synchronized. Be aware that it also syncs your saved passwords, saved form fields, and anything else that you’ve told Firefox to remember. The browser sync tool also remembers the pages you were looking at the last time you shut down Firefox. So with the browser sync installed, when you launch the browser, a dialogue bubble asks whether you’d like to pick up where you left off last time.

From the website — http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/browsersync/

Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions.

Because it synchronizes passwords, this is not something to install on a computer that is not your own. It’s not a good idea to install it on a public computer. But for any computer that you use regularly and to which you have secure access, browser sync helps keep your midnight research flowing.

N.B. — Google has entered the web-based bookmarks game as well. If browser sync is not something for you, because of its security-related concerns, then web-based solutions may be the way to go. Try Google Bookmarks, as well as del.icio.us and others.

The Outspokin’ Cyclist: Ice puts focus on need for different kind of cities

Phillip Barron
The Herald Sun

DURHAM — Cafeteria conversation at work on January 31st revolved around the predicted ice storm. Bread, milk, and bottled water would be cleared off grocery store shelves by the time we left work that evening we all joked. We also guessed that the next day’s news would be littered with images of cars skidding off the road.

It’s not that Southerners can’t drive in wintery conditions. Neither can the local transplants from New England or the midwest. No one can drive on ice.

And since no one can drive on ice, the answer is not to drive at all.

What we can do to prepare for the next ice storm is break away from our dependence on the automobile. The problem with giving up the car is that our communities are designed so that driving is necessary. Walking to the store is often not an option.

Since the 1950s, residential development in this country has revolved around the personal automobile. Because cars enable us to drive farther, our communities have been spreading. Look at growth patterns for any major city in the US for the past forty years, and you’ll see a consistent pattern. Unless locked by geographic features (like Pittsburgh’s rivers) or municipal decisions (like Portland, Oregon’s growth belt), cities grow at the periphery. They expand. And Durham is no exception.

So, no one lives around the corner from the corner store anymore, and very few of us live around the corner from work.

The outskirts of town is where new neighborhoods go up. But while residential development sprawls, employment hubs like downtowns, universities, government buildings, and dense commercial districts remain the daily destinations for hundreds of thousands of drivers Triangle-wide. Research Triangle Park is the archetypal employment center — zoned for businesses only, every single one of the nearly 40,000 employees has to get into and out of RTP every week day. (Lest anyone thinks I’m pointing the finger at others, I’m one of those 40,000 traveling into RTP every day.)

The Triangle Transit Authority’s buses serve the park, and DOT recently striped bike lanes on the freshly repaved Cornwallis Rd. But in an ice storm, neither buses nor bikes handle the roads any better than cars.

This growth at the periphery mindset is what drives big-box retail. Giant grocery stores and retail chains anchor parking lots larger than football fields, just waiting for us to drive to them. In fact, in some parking lots you get the feeling that you’re out of place if you’re not in a car. Try walking or riding your bike to Southpoint Mall. It’s clear the expectation is that we drive to the store.

Not only do giant retail chains water down the flavor of business by making the suburbs of any town indistinguishable from any other (what Parisians are currently calling “banalization”), national chains drive locally owned hardware stores, fruit stands, and grocery co-ops out of business. And this means that our development patterns determine for us our transportation patterns — car dependent and subject to the weather.

Why can’t Durham lead the effort to offer up another development model?

Ice is not the only reason to think about creating different kinds of cities. Even OPEC, the cartel of the largest oil exporting countries, finally admits that “peak oil” — the term reserved for the economic aftermath of a world in which oil production reaches a peak and then rapidly declines — could happen in the next decade.

Crippling ice storms give us a glimpse at what life after peak oil may look like if we don’t start designing transportation around something other than the automobile. While many communities around the country are already making plans for the peak oil crisis, the Triangle is back to ground-zero designing a regional rail system.

Of course, anyone who’s seen the movie The Ice Storm knows that not even trains can move safely through the frozen glaze, so regional rail is not the answer. But as long as we look for the one thing to deliver us from auto-topia, our future planning will be as stalled as a Camaro on I-40 in an ice storm. Regional rail is part of the answer; so is a more efficient bus network. So is mixed-use, high-density residential development in our existing employment hubs. So is a sidewalk and crosswalk infrastructure that accommodates wheelchairs and strollers.

Each city and county has a development review board, which can be more than just a rubber stamp on developer-submitted plans. Durham County Commissioner Becky Heron knows that, and that’s why she’s one of Durham’s best advocates for smart development.

In addition to being ranked among the “Best Places to Live” and “Best Places to do Business,” Durham’s most recent honor is a spot among Forbes Magazine’s December 2006 list of the top ten “Smartest Cities”. If we’re so smart, then we can figure out how to make Durham a more walkable community.

Walkable communities are safer communities. Whether a community is safe isn’t always a measure of crime — a safe Durham is one where you can cross Roxboro Street without fearing for your life. A safe Durham is one where Duke Street and Gregson Street are no longer freeways running through the middle of neighborhoods.

A safe community is one in which getting to the store, running errands, caring for an elderly friend or parent, or getting to work isn’t made impossible by the weather.

A walkable community is one in which during Triangle-wide ice storms, we can get to the food, firewood, or friendship we need to endure it.

park-ing