Catching sleep is no problem for me. I’ve been blessed with a wonderful 2nd period schedule this year and the last. I don’t pull all-nighters very often. I can’t even pretend that IB or anything else I do is demanding enough to make me lose sleep. Ha, I even have time to write on RogerHub.  But I still have sleep-related problems. I’m many-fold more productive and responsible after midnight, when I have the house all to myself. That’s when I do English essays that require deep thinking and concentrate harder on my work. Tumblr and Reddit have come to a standstill¹, and most of the daytime distractions disappear. I wish I could get up early each morning and go take walks in the sunrise, but that’s not what’s going through my mind when the most annoying alarm sound in the world rings at 6:45. I thought about napping in the afternoon, so I would be generally more alert in the early morning and the late night. But in the afternoon, I want to go outside to skate and saw branches and climb trees and water the plants. There’s an internet cult around addressing the problem that too much time is dedicated to sleep. Polyphasic sleeping is typically a picture of a 24-hour clock with spokes of different sizes. You’ve seen it before. It’s naturally fascinating to me, and everybody else—that it’s possible to reduce the time spent sleeping by strategic planning of naps. I never really took it seriously, until recently. Typically, you would take quick power naps in order to supplement the nighttime sleeping period, because those power naps were more time-effective than the sleep cycles of a monophasic night-only sleep. But I kept reading and reading about it. Even the most conservative form, biphasic sleeping with one power nap directly opposite of the main sleeping period, was a bit concerning. I don’t know whether it’s beneficial or detrimental that I’m somewhat more knowledgeable about how we sleep. But I’ve considered it, and decided that it wasn’t worth the planning². This was the most interesting thing I’ve learned about all week. Go read into it. It’s just fascinating. It’s not really slowing time. But maybe, the idea of being awake for longer periods than most people, it’s really like you’re making your days longer.

I have been working with email systems for a little more than a year now, and in that time I’ve picked up some very useful and practically applied knowledge, which I want to share with you. So here’s How to stop email spam, in plain English.

Q: Why have I not heard this before?

A: Well that’s simple. There are a couple reasons. First, email services, which are websites like Yahoo and Hotmail, like to brag about their superiority at filtering spam. They attract customers by pretending that email spam is an unstoppable force, and then they tell you about all the things they are doing to filtering spam. They won’t tell you how to really stop the spam from coming in the first place, because that way they won’t make any money. Yes, even though getting an email address at Yahoo is free, they are making money through the advertisements that they show you.

But there’s another reason, and this one isn’t as scary. Many people suspect that email spam is not their fault, nor their responsibility to solve. Instead, they want automatic spam filtering software like Gmail’s spam folder or Office Outlook’s spam filter to sort out what is spam and keep what is real email. In summary, email services prefer to filter your spam instead of stopping it, which is why you have not heard this before.

Q: Then why is spam still a problem?

A: Haha, good question. One big problem is, how do we know what is spam? There is email that is obviously spam, like advertisements for free government grants and augmenting drugs. But what about TIME Magazine Newsletter or an information email about Conservative No-fun-at-all University of the South? Often times, what you call spam is actually legitimate email. The problem is, TIME does not know that you don’t want it. Gmail does not know that you don’t want it. The way email works today, there is no way for them to know one way or another.

Q: Haha, who cares? Nobody uses email anymore.

A: Ouch. That’s a problem. However cool and hip you think social networking is, the fact remains that email is still used by important and powerful people everywhere. It has been around for almost 30 years now, and it is here to stay. That’s why it is a good idea to have a functional email inbox, one that isn’t flooded with spam, and to check it often.

Instructions

1. Protect your email

Every year that goes by, it seems the Internet is used less for reading, and more for writing. All the time now, unimportant people like you and me are writing emails, blogs, tweets, and maybe even websites! Now that you can write for the Internet, you have to be careful about where you put your email! Bad people can use the Internet just like you can, and by searching for things that look like an email address¹, bad people can find your email quickly and sell it to advertisers.

Now, ten years ago, you were probably taught not to give out your email address to strangers, as if it were as secret as your social security number. But that just doesn’t work today. You have to provide your email for everything from Twitter to TIME Magazine. But no problem! Protecting your email address is still possible. Just keep these three important points in mind:

1. Bad people will not spend time looking at websites on the Internet to find email to sell. That is too slow. Instead, they will make special programs (known as email crawlers) to harvest emails automatically. Anti-virus scanners will not find them, but that’s okay. They are much easier to fool.
2. Don’t make your email look like an email address! If you are blogging, tweeting, or writing anything that is publicly see-able, don’t just type out your email! That makes it too easy for bad people to steal your email address. Instead, you can write it out like roger at rogerhub.com. When people need to email you, they know how to put in the @ sign themselves².
3. If you are using a big website like Twitter or Facebook, don’t worry about them! Website makers have good sense when it comes to emails. They will take extra precaution to protect your email address from spam robots, but be sure to check your settings to make sure.

The bottom line: As long as your email does not really look³like an email, it is safe to put online.

2. Don’t just delete. Unsubscribe!

It would be great if you knew step #1 from the beginning, but chances are, your email address is already in the hands of many bad people and you get lots of unwanted email. No problem! There’s an easy way to stop the spam. Businesses and advertisers are required by law⁴ to let you take yourself off (unsubscribe) from their email list. When you unsubscribe, you prevent advertisers from ever emailing you again. Most of the spam you get is really from nice guys who don’t know that you don’t want their email. Being respectable guys and all, they will always include a link to use if you don’t want to get their email anymore. Use it! Don’t just delete spam emails, or they’ll keep coming.

But sometimes, unsubscribing doesn’t work. Evil people will not put a unsubscribe link. Or maybe the link won’t work and they just keep emailing you. If you notice that a lot of your spam emails look the same and are coming from the same person, there’s one more thing you can do.

3. Fight back.

This last solution is a bit extreme. Before you begin, wait at least 10 days after you unsubscribe⁵ before trying this.

Fortunately, the guys who made the Internet were good guys, and predicted that not everybody would play nicely. They designed email and the Internet so that you can find out a lot about who is sending you email. Let’s get started.

Email comes with a lot of extra data that you never see. This data has stuff like the subject, who it was from, when they sent it, and who else it was sent to. This data is collectively called the email headers. Now, when someone sends you an email, that message gets passed around from one computer to another computer until it gets to your email service: Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. Every time the message changes hands, the computer that has the email adds some more email headers to the email. This means you can find the first computer that had the email. That is the computer your spammer is using to send you spam. Here’s how:

• On Google Gmail - Open the spam email. Look to the right where you see the words “show details” and the time. Next to the Reply button, there’s a drop down menu. Open that, and click “Show Original”. A new tab will open with the headers.
• On Yahoo! Mail - Open the spam email. Look to the right where it says “Compact Header”. Change that to “Full Header” and a modal window will pop up with the headers.
• On Hotmail and Microsoft Outlook - Right click the email from your Inbox and press “View Source”.
• There is a more detailed guide on how to open email headers here.

Email headers are a bunch of lines that look this.

MIME-Version: 1.0

Received: by 10.20.30.40 with HTTP; Wed, 21 Sep 2011 18:00:00 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.20.30.50 with HTTP; Wed, 21 Sep 2011 18:00:00 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from [74.35.35.35] (helo=badspammer.example.com) by
youremailserver.example.com with esmtp (Exim 4.69); Wed, 21 Sep 2011 20:09:34 -0500
Received: from [127.0.0.1] by badspammer.example.com with ESMTP (TLSv1:AES256-SHA:256)
id HASH-??????????????; Wed, 21 Sep 2011 18:00:00 -0800
Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2011 18:51:43 -0700
Subject: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Crap taken from Tumblr
From: Friend <friend@example.com>
To: You <you@example.com>
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=bffec521577143cac104ad7defce

They look very intimidating. You want to look down the last line that begins with “Received:” and contains a (helo=????) mark. Typically, the email only has this once. Got it? You’ve got it:

(helo=badspammer.example.com)

Now that you know where the spam is coming from, you can look up the computer in a public directory known as the WHOIS database. The database contains contact information for the people responsible for every website in existence. Look for a report abuse email or a website, and take action! Somewhere out there, there is a responsible and hardworking somebody whom you can contact to shut down spammers, not just for you, but for everyone else too.

Send them an email. Copy and paste the headers and the WHOIS information you used to find them. Explain your concerns about their client’s unfair business practices, and the ass-whooping will begin shortly.

Summary

It’s not impossible to stop spam. Not impossible at all. With good email practices and precautions, you can effectively get your inbox back before you know it.

Disclaimer

The majority of the content here is my personal opinion. I don’t know what goes on within the walls of our major online email providers. The best I can do is present meaningful and educated conjecture. My advice here is not to be understood as anything more than a fun thought exercise to reevaluate your interactions with electronic mail.

References follow.

I saw a dead dog on Brea Canyon yesterday night. It was small and had these fair chestnut curls, suggesting that his owners had taken great care of him¹, well at least until he was ran over. I’m not even know if he really was dead. The body was in the intersection, but located in such a way that it would only bother you if you wanted to branch off into one of the side roads, where all the warehouses are. Ha, bother. That’s all it really is. Naturally, nobody could be bothered to get out of their car and check, at the risk of holding up traffic and feeling the stigmas of the nonconformist. Whether he got to his safe spot in the road because somebody moved him, or because cars gradually knocked him out of the way, I hope it was the former. I guess animals die all the time, but that this particular dog had so many of the elaborate markings of human domestication made me imagine something. I imagined I was like a middle-aged white lady and the dog got out again. So I’m taking my spoiled brat of a 7 year old daughter out to look around, and she’s decorating the leather seats, consumed by anxiety. I’m kind of pissed off now, at my idiot child, at how long this excursion is going to cut into my television time. Then, it comes into view, the shell of a familiar face in a disturbingly unfamiliar setting. Ha, I know nothing about owning a dog². I’ve never had one, and I’ve never considered them seriously. This is what just what my mind suggests. Roadkill is bothersome to most everyone, but devastating to a few. And out of this observation, comes an interesting idea. I’ll write about it tomorrow another day.

Ever since I got my Kindle, it’s just been reading and reading all the time. It’s tough to describe in words, why it has such a profound effect, why I prefer it to a DS or a tablet¹ or even a real paperback. Part of it is the form. It doesn’t smell like library books do. I don’t have to crease the page, holding it open. Part of it is having so many books with me where ever I go. Above all, it’s probably the associations attached to reading: intelligence, culture. But really, this is all it took? Reading is so much enjoyable with the device. If I didn’t have one, I likely wouldn’t bother reading much. I can freeze the oceans, fly to Titan, and ha, I can learn C on this thing. All the nonsense coming from the literary types, it makes more sense with a Kindle. Everything does. In celebration, I went out got Finnegans Wake², the most pretentious literature I could find, to put on my Kindle.

The principle of humanity, states that when interpreting another speaker we must assume that his or her beliefs and desires are connected to each other and to reality in some way, and attribute to him or her “the propositional attitudes one supposes one would have oneself in those circumstances” (Daniel Dennett, “Mid-Term Examination,” in The Intentional Stance, p. 343).

[From Wikipedia on the Principle of Humanity.]

It may be hard to imagine now, but if you ever find yourself with a distressing abundance of free time, reading about cognitive science and philosophy on Wikipedia will eat it right up. If there is any philosophical thought, more true than the Principle of Humanity¹, then I haven’t discovered it yet. I’ll keep this short. Remember the Great Gatsby? “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” This is something to live by. It’s not about equality, it’s not about fairness. There’s no reason why everyone should live equally. But if we all take just a few simple considerations, there can be less conflict².

If someone is being an asshole, assume they’ve been having a bad day. Acknowledge that they could be right. If something sounds wrong, assume it is right. Pretend their logic is infallible and continue without objection. Often times, complete adherence to rationality and unwavering realism is much too coarse. Assuming the best in others is not so much fantastic optimism as benefit of the doubt. It is nearly opposite to cynicism, more developed than optimism, and wiser than realism. Sometimes when the work starts building up, I put my head down and consider. I consider, the cosmos. Global consciousness, human achievement, and the wonderful complexity of systems on Earth. I put on a grin, and sit back up to continue. Then, maybe, I listen to some OneRepublic.

³

When it comes to extraneous information, people do the stupidest things, and I swear, this sort of idiocy knows no bounds. Even on History IB/SL Internal Assessments, you’ll get parentheses intermixed with em dashes and [brackets] partitioning off some irrelevant information about Joseph Stalin’s economic policy¹. You may scoff in wonder at my use of footnotes on RogerHub, but let me give you the full story before you dismiss them as a pretentious show of unnecessary formality. Often times, there’s information that’s not pertinent to a narrative or argument, but I want to include it for some reason, be it self-justification, disclaimer, literary citation, or further reading. Conventionally, I would wrap keywords in a hyperlink, or I would set aside an explanatory paragraph enclosed in brackets and italics. But in the spirit of a semantic web², that just doesn’t feel right. It is, by definition, not part of the copy, so it should not be there, messing up the text with colorful links and senseless punctuation. Honestly, if you can come up with something better than footnotes to embed extraneous information, let it be. For now, I really don’t know why footnotes aren’t yet a built-in feature on Wordpress.

Unrelated: I’ve just recovered an 8 year old laptop (2003) with a broken screen, useless battery, and 225MB of RAM. Now it’s running Debian Linux, playing The Workday Release³, and letting me type this onto WordPress. Sometimes I think broken things are the only things worth fixing.

On the way home, I saw a blue graphing calculator on the ground on La Puente Rd. The cover was lying directly over the line of broken white lane dividers, safe, so long as cars maintained reasonably within their own lanes. The detached circuit board, whose protective cover was missing, having been ripped off by the massive shearing force of car tires, wasn’t as fortunate: it was slightly to the left of the outer lane, where tires were frequent to step over it. Even at a distance, one could hear the circuit board collecting tire tracks as an occasional car happened to position it’s tire correctly. Seeing the defeated state of the calculator, you could almost say that drivers were aiming for it¹.

I mean, I lose things all the time, but who² would have imagined that their calculator was currently taking a beating from passing cars?

It always surprises me that there are people on television who are paid to talk about good food. There’s a middle-aged chinese lady who could pass for your neighbor’s real estate agent, in a crowded restaurant at a table for 4, talking to her similarly-dressed companion about how onions stir-fried rapidly over high heat are more appropriate for certain dishes, something like that. Whether it’s out of insight or ignorance, I don’t understand how there could be so much room for discussion. In America, where extreme poverty is lacking a refrigerator in your home, I need look no further than the salted peanut and pickled cabbage appetizer at a local chinese restaurant for the best taste I could ask for. Most food already hits this imaginary ceiling of maximum tastefulness, and there’s nothing¹ appreciably better, in my perspective.

Maybe it requires an educated and refined talent of taste to truly indulge in food priced above the rational range. Or perhaps so-called expensive food is valued not for its elusive balance of tastes, but for the very sentiment² of indulging fancy. In fact, it’s could be similar to Las Vegas.

Actually, the market place, in aggregate, has a long a glorious history of celebrating really mediocre crap technology that is an unfortunate compromise between cheap and “good enough”. In short, encouraging and then trusting people to “spend their money on better things” is a sure fire recipe to be subjected to crappy technology.

[On the ubiquity of social networking in inappropriate places.]

Imagine you’re the chief of staff on the Infrastructural and Technological Development team in your post-apocalyptic group of refugee zombie-survivors. Before you can start building anything, there’s a few things you need to decide upon. Let’s say you’ve still got a reasonable tool to measure the different quantities of both the metric and imperial system of measurements. Also, you’ve retained massive libraries of knowledge, from the details of the RoHS directive, to alternative economic theory, to RFC specifications for everything from email to HTTP/1.1 headers and the definitions of key words. But none of that matters, because you’re in charge of the only known colony of human beings left on the planet, you can do whatever the hell you want.

Surely, we’ve all had our if-I-were-in-charge moments and brilliant ideas that could have worked, were we not already so comfortable with certain widespread crapnology in existence. In cases like these, it’s not hard to see why a democratic direct vote may not be appropriate. Call it socialist or totalitarian, but often times, people don’t do a good job choosing what’s best for them. Or rather, they lack the necessary information to make a truly optimal choice¹. Unfortunately, our economic system does not recognize this. Products and services are successful when a number of people buy and use them. Effectively, consumers are free to vote democratically with their dollars. But when information is too costly or time-consuming to come by, people tend to choose the “good enough” option, taking things at face value and economizing on time instead of value. It’s simply inevitable that, without proper information, people regularly end up voting for the wrong things.

And what are we to do about it? Wait for the apocalypse?

You can see that this difficulty is particularly frustrating to those who live to change the world. The more I read about the alignment of corporate profit-incentives and consumer benefit in social networking theory², the less I can blame Zuckerberg for the pool-pah³ he’s created. I suppose the problem is not Facebook anymore, or perhaps, it has never been Facebook. That online social networking would be a major target in political campaigns, corporate propaganda, and intimate social interaction could hardly have been predicted by the hacker-culture engineers, founders of Facebook. People simply need a bit more time to mature and adjust. But nonetheless, it’s unacceptable to wait for markets to sort themselves out. If this nonsensical phenomenon⁴ can be observed and predicted, it can be avoided as well.

I never thought to try this until now. I will leave this running overnight:

#!/bin/bash

while [ `curl www.pottermore.com | grep “registration is now closed” | wc -w` \

       -ne “0” ]; do

echo [`date`] Checked pottermore.com: Registration is still closed.

sleep 20

done


echo [`date`] Message has changed. Check status at [http://pottermore.com/].

mplayer “$HOME/Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone - Prologue.mp3” \

        > /dev/null 2> /dev/null

Yeah? yeah? And this.

chmod +x ./pottermore.sh;./pottermore.sh

Alright. Let’s do this.

I was at New Capital last night with my family, and Zaneta was about to order some water. I’m okay with tea, because I just don’t like cold drinks with Chinese food. But if everyone was getting a water, I wouldn’t bother raising my opinion. Then I noticed: I could prevent just one number. I could prevent an order of 3 waters, because the plan that I had formed in my head ensured that an order of 3 would be unreasonable¹.

What if decisions were made this way? Let’s say there is a governing council of some 79 men². A resolution is introduced to the council, and groups of councilmen deliberate. Each man has his own special interests, and no one can come up with a compromise that suits them all. They amend the resolution multiple times and end up with 7 different revisions. Then, they take a vote. The way the vote works is, each revision is given a zero-based incremented index. In this case, they are zero, one, two, three, four, five, and six. Each councilman votes either yay or nay, and the number of votes in opposition is subtracted from the number of affirmative votes. Let’s say the difference is 39. The number is taken modulus 7, from seven revisions, and the remainder identifies the decision of the council, in this case: 4.

Some more interesting points: the councilmen do not vote on revisions, but simply on a number. For this to work, there must be collaboration. Votes will have to be public, but simultaneous, or the system will digress into madness. If there are deals and collusion between councilmen, they will inevitably be broken. From a single person’s standpoint, deceiving another party is the only way to advance one’s own interest. Essentially, the decsion may as well be chosen randomly³.

I can think of a simple analogy to this. Let’s say there are 5 friends sitting in a circle, playing a game. At the end of each round, the each person shows either the palm or the back of their hand. If there is a majority of palms, all who have the back of their hand facing up are disqualified. If there is a majority of backs, the opposite is true. If there is a tie, the game continues. Players can have secret deals with one another to target others. Of course, these must be eventually broken in order to win, leaving only sentiments of hate and betrayal. The game continues until there are 2 players left, the winners.

Does this not suck? This game and it’s implementation in government are stupid and idiotic ideas. But I feel that they accurately describe humanity’s inability to achieve a global perspective. Will we wait until there are only 2 players left?

In the Civics Online course, Seawright makes us debate with one another about political issues. Who knew people could become so bitter over things they cared naught about? Why is voting just a yes or a no? What if we had like an optional double-vote where you could vote twice for things you cared a lot about? And if you think double-voting would just cancel itself out and be ineffective, consider this: people who are indecisive will not opt to vote twice. By doing so, it increases the power of his¹ own double-votes and it lessens the responsibility/guilt of a bad decision.

In other news, I just opened the code to my 3rd open-source project on GitHub. Too bad nobody ever follows my crap repositories. But I swear, I’ll keep this one updated and continue to work on it. If you have a GitHub account, here it is. Heh.