Tenser, said the Tensor

Firefox Encodings

Has anybody else noticed Firefox mis-guessing the character encoding of web pages when it's set to "Auto-Detect, Universal"?  I keep going to pages that I think I've visited without trouble before in Firefox and seeing lots of these: �.  That's the Unicode REPLACEMENT CHARACTER, U+FFFD, which is "used as a substitute for an uninterpretable character from another encoding".  I guess this means auto-detect is deciding that some pages are UTF-8, then when non-ASCII characters occur in patterns that don't form legal UTF-8 encodings, they get replaced with �.  This seems to have been happening to me a lot recently—did they change something in a recent patch?

A Hell of a Sales Pitch

I just received spam email that contained the following enticements:

1. The title "Bastard you die"
2. The first line "ponzi scam"
3. The URLs of four web sites, which I will not repeat
4. The final exhortation "Bastard join my site now!"

Um, no thank you?

Are the spammers now deploying some kind of sophisticated reverse psychology?  Maybe they don't want me to visit those URLs, so the right way to spite them is to visit them anyway!  Or possibly not.  It's very confusing.

Wikireliability

The (already pretty sizable) grain of salt with which I take Wikipedia articles just got a little bit bigger.  On the bright side, though, this AP wire story will probably be the first thing a lot of people have ever heard about Wikipedia, and there's no such thing as bad publicity, right?  Right?

We're Tops in Secret Plans

Tales from the Referrer Log: thanks to a post I made a few weeks ago, this blog is now the number eight Google search for top secret plans, and the number one search for the string "top secret plans".  I've never been prouder.

Hey, guys?  I think the search results ranking algorithm might need some tweaking.  I'm just saying.

A Kissed Out Red Float Post

Having recently posted about the Cocteau Twins and about the meanless text included in spam email, I realized the two subjects are related in an interesting way.  Liz Fraser, the lead singer of the Cocteau Twins, is famous for the very strange way she articulated the lyrics of their songs.  She's not just singing pure notes—there are actual consonants and vowels in there—but it's not any language I know.

Entertaining Gibberish

If you're like me (and why wouldn't you be?) you get a lot of spam.  In fact, you're probably not like me—my non-Tensor, non-school email address is probably on just about every spammer's list of addresses because I've had it since 1996 and used to post to Usenet from it.  (It seemed like a good idea at the time.)  In any case, I get a bunch of those spam messages with randomly-generated text in them, some of which I find amusingly nonsensical, so I've included a selection.

Sage Spam

I just received a piece of spam advertising "V1@GRA" and "C1al1s" that appears to be from "Hillel".  I had no idea he'd gotten into that line of business, but I think he's timed his entry into the market well—after all, if not now, when?  I suppose it's only a matter of time before I receive a personal offer for a risk-free Nigerian business opportunity from Shammai.

Transparent Screen

The latest fad that's sweeping the blognation seems to be the transparent screen trick: take a photograph of whatever sits behind your screen, then carefully crop and tweak the image and use it as your desktop background.  The result is the illusion that your screen is transparent, with your icons and windows floating in space.  Unable to resist, I spent an hour or so moving my monitor out of the way, taking photos in various lighting conditions, and massaging the best photo until it matches up quite well.  Here's the result:

A Font Odyssey

Recently, I'd been noticing that sometimes when I visited certain blogs, they looked sort of...ugly.  Not from a design standpoint (although, just between you and me, the blogosphere could probably stand a top-to-bottom redesign, this blog included), but because certain fonts seemed to be displaying wrong.  In particular, some letters seemed to be slightly larger than others, leading to an unpleasant "ransom note" effect—just barely noticeable and therefore extra annoying.  I did some digging, and the cause was both interesting and not, as far as I can tell, described on the web anywhere.

NameVoyager

For your edification and amusement: NameVoyager, a Java-based visualization of the popularity of various given names in the United States for more than a century.  I had fun looking up the names of friends and family members and noticing that, almost without exception, each received his or her name during the peak of that name's popularity.  Even in naming, we're slaves to fashion.  For a challenge, try to find a name that was popular at the beginning of the sample (around 1900), went out of style, then came back into vogue recently.  The best examples I've found so far are "Ivy" and "Edgar".  (hat tip: Peeve Farm)

[Update: Add "Emma" and "Maggie" to the list of back-in-fashion names.  Also, try entering single letters (i.e. "a", "b", etc.) to see the distribution for all names beginning with that letter—there's no consistent pattern in the consonants, but all the vowels show a U-shaped curve.  For some reason, vowel-initial names were out of fashion for a while in the middle of the last century, but now they've come back.  What's up with that?]