Friday, 27 October 2006

A Conversation With Gmail's Spam Filter

Scott:  Where is my email?

Gmail's Spam Filter:  Right over there.  (Points off-stage.)

Scott:  Shouldn't it be in my inbox?

Gmail's Spam Filter:  Probably.

Scott:  May I have it please?

Gmail's Spam Filter:  Sure.  (Walks off-stage.  Returns lugging a giant sack of emails.)

Scott:  And that is?

Gmail's Spam Filter:  The first couple thousand.

Scott:  (boggled)  The first couple thousand?

Gmail's Spam Filter:  I thought you wanted them.

Scott:  (understandably upset)  I'm just curious about why I never got them in the first—Does that say February?

Gmail's Spam Filter:  Looks to.

Scott:  (visibly agitated)  Why?

Gmail's Spam Filter:  That's when I intercepted them.

Scott:  (approaching irate)  Why?

Gmail's Spam Filter:  They contained words.

Scott:  (almost livid)  Spam words?

Gmail's Spam Filter:  The regular kind.

Scott:  (speechless)  ...

Gmail's Spam Filter:  It's not like you weren't asking for it.

Scott:  Asking for it?

Gmail's Spam Filter: (suddenly, and violently, angry)  YOU CAN'T JUST TURN ON A SPAM FILTER AND EXPECT IT NOT TO—

Scott:  Not to what?  Steal my email?

Gmail's Spam Filter:  —TAKE WHAT IT WANTS!  WHEN IT WANTS IT!

Scott:  This is ridiculous.  I'm turning you off. 

Gmail's Spam Filter:  Just you tr—

Oct 27, 2006 9:44:42 PM | Weblogs

5 Comments

Chance

Now that he's gone, hello achilles, may I interest you in some low-c0st v!@gra>? add length and g_irth now.

Posted by: Chance | Friday, 27 October 2006 at 11:21 PM

Joseph Kugelmass

Scott, this was very funny. What I love best about Gmail's filter is that it seems to instinctively know which people on MySpace are my actual friends, and which are eventually going to try to bring up the subject of their webcam.

Posted by: Joseph Kugelmass | Saturday, 28 October 2006 at 12:11 AM

Sine.Qua.Non

Speaking of widgets that can be turned on or off.....
I just discovered something extremely cool that I wish I would have had when I was working on my thesis, much less any other kind of research. Thought maybe you and your readers might find this widget by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society extremely useful:

H20

Posted by: Sine.Qua.Non | Saturday, 28 October 2006 at 04:01 AM

Adam Roberts

Now you'll discover the truth: that if the doors of [email] perception be cleansed [of spam filters] the e-universe will appear as it is: INFINITE!!!

Posted by: Adam Roberts | Saturday, 28 October 2006 at 08:46 AM

Andi

omg... this is the wierdest conversation that i've ever encountered with a spam blocker...

Posted by: Andi | Friday, 05 September 2008 at 05:18 PM

The comments to this entry are closed.

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The Best Science Book Ever Written... [That's odd. I x-posted what I wrote on the Valve yesterday, but it didn't stick. Now it will. Be sure to read the comments over there, as they're already quite substantial.] ...is a novel? Jonah Lehrer links to The Guardian‘s account of the Royal Institution of London’s crowning Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table “The Best Scientific Book Ever Written.” Not that Levi’s quasi-modernist memoir doesn’t deserve acclaim. Every chapter’s prefixed by an element which plays some crucial part in the plot or symbolizes—like Linati’s Joycean kidney, with all its attendant frustrations—some moment of personal, cultural or historical of import. It’s brilliantly executed—but its brilliance lies in Levi’s deft imbrication of the scientific and the personal, the personal and the historical, the scientific and the historical, &c. The Periodic Table is not a scientific work with literary merit, but a literary work informed, to take one example, by practical applications of modern chemistry. I wouldn’t complain, except that books like Levi’s receive lay-praise daily. More worthy of celebration is the rare scientific book able to move a public forever on the brink of scientific illiteracy. I don’t want to rehearse the thesis of Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots here, but the Royal Institution’s inclusion of Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle over On The Origin of Species on the shortlist demands it.* The Voyage of the Beagle is an important but utterly conventional document in literary and scientific history. It lacks The Origin‘s novelistic flair. Beers: The sense that everything is connected, though the connections may be obscured, gave urgency to the enterprise of uncovering such connections. This was the form of plotting crucial to Dickens’s work, as we can see, for example, in Bleak House, where the fifty-six named—and many more unnamed—characters all turn out to be related by way either of concealed descent (Esther and Lady Deadlock) or of economic dependency ("The dependency of one organic being on another, as of a parasite on its prey, lies generally between beings remote in scale of nature") .... As [Bleak House] proceeds the immense assemblage of apparently contingent characters is ordered and reordered into multiple sets of relations so that we discover that all of them are interdependent. What at first looks like agglomeration proves to be analysable connection. The unruly superfluity of Darwin’s material at first gives an impression of superfecundity without design. Only gradually and retrospectively does the force of the argument emerge from the profusion of example. (42) Darwin accomplished in The Origin what the popular explication of Pinker’s The Blank Slate doesn’t even attempt: namely, to explain a scientific concept in all its complexity to a world which mostly only understood novels. Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene actually moves in the opposite direction—it is most powerful when Dawkins oversimplifies, e.g. when he reduces lived complexity into “memes.” (The Dawkins and Pinker books were also shortlisted.) I suppose my bias shows here, but I think Darwin’s literary-scientific achievement in The Origin towers over the solid work of popularization,...
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Can You Help a Brother Out? Ever since Collin called my attention to the horrid time the MLA assigned the "Meet the Bloggers" panel, I've had a number of MLA-related posts hopping around my head. I waited to release them 'til today because: I've been busily replying to the scandalous number of emails Gmail squirreled away. The Silas Weir Mitchell chapter is sloppy step from a T.K.O. The program for MLA 2006 hadn't made it to California yet. As I've nearly dispatched the first two items and the PMLA Fairy finally arrived, the reality of my impending talk is settling in and I need your help. Boon companions will remember that my talk's titled "The New Interdisciplinary." Thing is, I'd love to pepper it with important sounding numbers suggestive of my readership's disciplinary and professional diversity. I would love it if you could leave a comment—anonymous is fine—telling me your discipline (if you're an academic) or profession (if you're a human being).* I'd appreciate regular commenters piping up too, as that'll make the counting all the easier. * This includes all the good people who surprised me with their knowledge of Official Kaufman Arcana last night. (About which, more later.)

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