Musing's musings

What's wrong with this picture?

I was just cleaning out some of the approximately 6.022 x 10²³ spam e-mails that arrive daily in my various spam-catchers when I noticed a couple of, well, let's call them "interesting" subject lines. The first allegedly comes from a concern called "Psychology Training" and is titled "Become a Psychologist Online."

Suspending for a moment anything remotely like critical thinking, I'm going to say that's an example of some pretty good spam. Nothing egregiously out of line in terms of the return address, uses proper grammar, capitalization, etc., and isn't obviously one of the myriad scams or schemes using the intertoobz to separate fools from their money. (Turning critical thinking back on, however, I'd say that someone wasn't thinking too clearly when they put that one together--who on earth would consider seeing a psychologist with a degree from an online diploma mill? I'd rank that one right up there with the one that actually landed a couple of slots below it, on how to become a CSI by getting a "forensics" degree.)

Another one, from a different spamcatcher, was less well-crafted (and has already been deleted, so I'm working from memory here: I make no claim that everything I'm about to say is in fact 100% accurate). The alleged return address was a random mix of letters and numbers, and the subject line was something along the lines of "You want good job? Buy online degree bacheloor/master...."

Again, someone was not thinking all too clearly when this one was assembled. I s'pose it could be deliberate misspelling to avoid filters, but wouldn't you suppose that if you were trying to make money by helping people to acquire fraudulent credentials, it would be in your best interests to appear at least competent in the spelling-and-grammar department? Leaving aside the fact that almost no one puts any stock in almost any online degree program you'd care to name, and even making allowances for the less-than-stellar reading, comprehension, and proofreading skills of the average employee in the American workforce, I would certainly hope that someone would catch something as obvious as "Bacheloor of Arts" if it appeared on someone's diploma or an academic transcript.

Resurrecting history

It's another good day to be me. Yesterday, Reuters announced that an online consortium will virtually "reassemble" the oldest extant manuscript of the Bible, the Codex Sinaiticus. Written sometime in the early 4th century (probably in Alexandria, or at least following an Alexandrian text), this massive volume contained both the Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures in Greek, plus the Epistle of Barnabas and parts of another early Christian document known as the Shepherd of Hermas. The volume is called "Sinaiticus" because at one point it was kept in the Monastery of St. Catherine near Mount Sinai.

In the 19th century, a German scholar named Constantin von Tischendorf claimed to have seen some parchment leaves in a wastebasket that were about to be burned, and recognized them as belonging to the Septuagint, as the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures is called (from the tradition that it was translated from Hebrew by a group of seventy scholars; "septuaginta" in Latin means seventy). He got the monks to let him take some of the leaves back home with him to Leipzig, where they still live in the university library. As Tischendorf talked about his find and published work drawn from the leaves he'd "rescued," more scholars went to the monastery (including Tischendorf himself, several times), in an attempt to find more of it. The monks eventually parted with the codex, which Tischendorf sent to Tsar Alexander II, who had it published in facsimile.

After the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty, and when the fledgling Soviet Union was hard up for hard cash, they sold the volume to the British Library for a hundred thousand pounds in 1933. That's probably well in excess of a million dollars in modern currency, which gives some idea of the importance of this manuscript. Subsequently, during renovations at the monastery, an additional dozen leaves were discovered in a crypt. Since then, those 12 leaves have remained at the monastery, while fragments of three leaves are in the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg. Tischendorf's 43 leaves are in the collections at Leipzig University, and the British Library has the remaining 347.

Hence my excitement at the announcement that they're going to be digitized and presented online. For anybody who's ever read a scholarly edition of the Christian Scriptures in the original, you'll see the sigil for this codex all over the place: the Hebrew letter aleph, designating this as the first extant manuscript. It's next to impossible to get permission to work with the original text, it's so valuable. According to the wiki entry, only four scholars have been allowed the privilege in the last 20 years. Putting it online makes it available to the whole scholarly community--and without the need to travel to four countries to see all the pieces that still survive.

Aleksandr Nikitenko* must be smiling

The Chicago Tribune is reporting that a suburban school district has made students responsible for what they post online in their blogs, MySpace profiles, etc.:

For Libertyville and Vernon Hills High Schools, the changes will mean that all students participating in extracurricular activities, including athletic teams, fine arts groups and school clubs, will have to sign a pledge agreeing that evidence of "illegal or inappropriate" behavior posted on the Internet could be grounds for disciplinary action.

Officials of District 128, which includes the two schools, said about 80 percent of the district's 3,200 students participate in one or more extracurricular activities.

Associate Supt. Prentiss Lea said the changes are part of an effort to get the district community more knowledgeable about the growing Internet blog phenomenon and more aware of the pitfalls of such sites as MySpace.com.

"By adding the blog sites [to the student codes of conduct], we wanted to raise discussions on the issue," he said. "We have taken the first steps to starting that conversation."

They may have a point about needing to raise awareness of and initiate discussions about what goes on in teen cyberspace: I am not in a position to determine the merits of that claim. But I believe Superintendent Lea is gravely mistaken as to the appropriateness of the means by which he has chosen to work toward his stated end. I would go so far as to say that he is not so much attempting to kill a gnat with a thermonuclear weapon as he is attempting to acquire nuclear weapons by raising sunflowers.

We've met the dead-enders...

...and they are us:

The United States lags dangerously behind al Qaeda and other enemies in getting out information in the digital media age and must update its old-fashioned methods, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Friday.

Modernization is crucial to winning the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide who are bombarded with negative images of the West, Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations.

The Pentagon chief said today's weapons of war included e-mail, Blackberries, instant messaging, digital cameras and Web logs, or blogs.

"Our enemies have skillfully adapted to fighting wars in today's media age, but ... our country has not adapted," Rumsfeld said.

Everybody stop googling for porn!

The Reich-wing bedwetters are at it again:

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The Bush administration, seeking to revive an online pornography law struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, has subpoenaed Google Inc. for details on what its users have been looking for through its popular search engine.

Google has refused to comply with the subpoena, issued last year, for a broad range of material from its databases, including a request for 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period, lawyers for the U.S. Justice Department said in papers filed Wednesday in federal court in San Jose.

Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the donkey! Haven't we got more important things to worry about than whether someone, somewhere, might be spanking the monkey to an online porno site? Our government (and the Republican Party to which the Reich-wing bedwetters all belong) is awash in corruption scandals, our armed forces are bogged down in the biggest clusterfuck since Vietnam, our alliances are in tatters, our deficit is the only thing rising faster than the New Horizons spacecraft that just launched today, people in New Orleans and Mississippi and Alabama are still waiting for FEMA to show up and take care of them after the worst hurricane season in recorded history--and what does their preznit do? Try to find out who's been looking at which porno sites on the internets.

Give me a fucking break, OK? You people have tried to impose your narrow-minded, tighty-righty interpretation of personal morality on the rest of the country for the last 15 years. Every single time, the ink is barely dry on the president's signature before the ACLU has obtained a restraining order as the first step in forcing the Supreme Court to review the latest attempt at an online Comstock Act. And as soon as the Supreme Court properly strikes down the law on First Amendment grounds, the tighty-righties start trying to write language to get around whatever objections the Court had to the last version. You'd think they'd have learned their lesson by now.

Apparently not. The government contends, according to the WaPo article, that the information they're seeking from Google will prove that their new law offers better protection to innocents surfing the internets than filtering software does. Frankly, I have my doubts about the effectiveness of both the kind of law they're proposing and filtering software--at least of the kind that's currently available--and about the alleged "innocence" of the people who are surfing for porn. There's also the fact that the average horny teen-ager is likely to be far more computer savvy than his or her parents, which ultimately defeats the purpose of filtering software.

Go ahead, guys. Waste more time and government resources on this wild-goose chase. It's unlikely you'll be able to get anything passed in the time you have left before losing control over the government this coming November. And even if you do, the Supreme Court is still waiting at the end of the road, and even your pet Chief Justice Dread Pirate Roberts is unlikely to let you wipe your asses with the First Amendment.

In the meantime, we should all quit using Google to find porno online. Use Yahoo! or MSN instead, OK?