Administrative

New Regex Question

OK, I’m still getting these weird blog spams, like this:

A new comment has been posted on your blog Transterrestrial Musings, on
entry #4886 (Lousy Salesmen).
http://www.transterrestrial.com/archives/004886.html

IP Address: 61.102.44.56
Name: Kimberly
Email Address: naomi@pochta.net

Comments:

Great work!
[url=http://aouyktgf.com/nntn/hzmj.html]My homepage[/url] | [url=http://wtjpdovz.com/iure/alke.html]Cool site[/url]

They tend to come in pairs, with the same nonsense URLs, but different email addresses and IP addresses.

I’ve been just deleting them without adding to the blacklist, because I don’t want to clog up my blacklist with these nonsense strings that seem to be one (or two) shot deals.

But how about refining previous attempts at a pattern match? Instead of just looking for a string of consonants, how about a string of five consonants containing at least one of the letters “z,” “x,” or “q”? That would seem pretty safe to me, from a false positive standpoint, and would catch most of them. If so, what would that regex look like?

And I’d like to know what the point is, other than annoyance. Any theories (other than perhaps incompetence on the part of the spammer)?

Space

Dumb SpaceX Question

The vehicle presumably still had a lot of propellant in it when the engine cut off and it fell back on the reef, presumably in flames from the fire that caused the problem, and wouldn’t be shut down by the cutoff valve. Why wasn’t there an earth-shattering kaboom?

Media Criticism

A Potential Waste

Zeyad is coming to the US. That’s good.

He’s going to study journalism. That, not so much.

Jeff says that he’s a “born journalist.” If so, why need he study journalism?

Will he learn things in journalism school that actually make him a better journalist? Will he learn things that make him a worse one? Will he have to unlearn some of them to find his full potential?

No secret–I’m not a big fan of the major of journalism. I think of it as a metadegree, a pseudodegree, and one that in fact is probably almost as damaging and counterproductive as a degree in education, in which all of the training is about how to convey information, whereas very little actual information to convey is learned. Were it up to me, neither of these would even exist as majors, or schools.

If he persists in this, I hope that he’ll be sure to take some classes that aren’t required in a journalism curriculum, like statistics, and history, and logic, and solid training in basic science. And for the history classes, I hope that he can find a non-leftist instructor.

Good luck to him.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Here’s a relevant piece in today’s Journal (sorry, subscribers only, but I think it goes free after a week):

…a band of Democratic-leaning thinkers wants to reclaim the issue. Their proposal, unveiled yesterday, is simple: Get rid of bad teachers and reward good ones.

Simple, in this case, is significant on two counts. First, the proposal publicly confronts teachers’ unions, an influential Democratic Party constituency, with the fact that bad teachers are part of the problem…

…[it] rests on several arguments: that the current practice of demanding certification based on teacher-training courses has outlived its usefulness, that routinely granting teachers lifetime tenure after two or three years is stupid, and that student test scores and other systemic ways to evaluate teachers are now good enough to act on.

Good for them. And good luck with that. I can already hear the howls and cries of “treason” from the NEA.

Social Commentary

Recognition

The new Battlestar Galactica (not the old one) has won a Peabody Award, a well-deserved first for the Sci Fi Channel.

I think this is a good sign of the mainstreaming of this important genre of literature, for too long ghettoized, when it’s becoming more and more relevant to the technological future rapidly closing in.

Space

Space Tourism=Space Settlement

We start with the richest among us only able to afford a few minute or a few days in space. As we get richer and space gets cheaper, we can have space studios, then space apartments, space mansions, space palaces and space shopping malls. People live where they are. The spectrum from tourism to settlement is just a measure of time. Where does space tourism leave off and space settlement begin? Two-week time shares are probably tourism. One-way tickets, definitely settlement. What’s the down payment on a one-year lease?

Space Science

Tweaking The Drake Equation

Planet formation may be much more common than previously thought:

Scientists say the latest finding should shed light on how planetary systems form.

“It shows that planet formation is really ubiquitous in the universe. It’s a very robust process and can happen in all sorts of unexpected environments,” said lead researcher Deepto Chakrabarty, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!