Spam. I hate it!

My ISP uses a spam filter by Postini, a subsidiary of Google. The ISP charges $3 a month for it.  But Postini acts like a giant corporation that cannot fix anything.  For example, Postini allows passage of at least four emails a day that have the following characteristics:

From: Delmy Petros
To: patricia warrick
CC: venu julepally 55864 [followed by my address botched with caps]
Subject: Pa tro nsFee lHap pyToHa veSeenCaps ulesOutl et

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_5GPQVH5QIDEJXQ4V4SV5P7YKWM/blog/articles/196430/
 

Aseasy asaboo k andnoton lytellyoufif tyorsi xt yth ingsthat sgo ingto happ entoyou bu tfif tyor.

Oden

I got fed up and started using MailWasher today (free version.)  It appears to be heuristic; it learns what spam looks like.  If that's the case, it's cheaper than Postini and far superior.  We shall see.

Meanwhile I discovered the source of these awful emails.  It's Yahoo!  Anyone with a Yahoo address is just asking for spam.  Yes, it's possible to change your Yahoo settings to minimize who can see your address but why bother?  Just cancel your Yahoo account.  Yahoo is just another giant corporation that cannot or will not fix anything.

How to cancel a Yahoo account.  Google to the rescue!  

Hey, Google took my suggestion!

Well, maybe they started before I made the suggestion last month, but "Google is giving users the ability to block sites that annoy them from ever showing up again in their search results, via a new link next to search results," to quote wired.com.  Click the title of this entry to read the Wired article.

It's supposed to be available yesterday and today on English-language sites.  I just checked and couldn't find anything new. I really, really, really want to block results on huffing-puffing post!  Even their headlines annoy me.

The Intelligence Officer's Bookshelf

While researching Brian Wynne Garfield's body of work, I ran across this unusual web site.  I suppose it's not surprising that professionals read books related to their specialty, but I do find it amusing that the CIA would make the reading list public.

Stumbleupon

Stumpleupon.com, previously sold to eBay for $75 million, has been repurchased by its original owners for an undisclosed sum. See bits.blog.nytimes for details. I hope that it will regain the original promise that it showed.

If you are not familiar with stumpleupon, I highly recommend it.  It's free and, for the moment, ad free. You sign up with a short questionnaire covering your interests. It then guides you into stumbling upon Internet sites that appeal to you. Thereafter you can rate each site with thumbs up or down to improve the accuracy of your future finds.

Take a look and report back on the most interesting pages that you stumble upon.

Al Gore Admits Ethanol Bill Was An Error

Energy: Former Vice President Al Gore admitted Monday that his pivotal 1994 Senate vote for ethanol subsidies was bad policy but good politics. That says a lot about the reality of environmentalism in government.
As the ethanol tax credit comes up for renewal in Congress on Dec. 31, it's worth noting it only came about because the vice president cast the decisive 51st vote in favor of it in 1994.
At the time, he packaged it as a big move to preserve the environment in a market-friendly, sustainable manner, and for years defended his vote because it was supposedly good for us.
"The more we can make this home-grown fuel a successful, widely-used product, the better-off our farmers and our environment will be," he recounted in 1998.
Now the real story emerges. On Monday he matter-of-factly told a bankers group in Greece it was actually about helping himself.
"One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president," the former vice president said.

See the original article for the estimates of what this has cost taxpayers and people who depend on corn for nourishment.

Phosphates in Detergents

Well, I've had it with the eco-terrorists.  As of July there are enough states that outlaw phosphates in detergents that all national brands of detergent have switched to phosphate-free (<0.5%) formulations. And the feds have proposed that the ban become nationwide.  In other words, dish washing detergent is now useless.  There are other solutions in the clothes washer, like pre-wash sprays and borax, that mitigate the problem. But dish washers are no longer functional. Glassware comes out with lip prints on the rims. I'm not talking about lipstick, though I doubt that comes off either.  It doesn't even remove dried saliva!  And stainless steel flatware comes out stained.

New York has gone so far as to ban phosphorus in lawn fertilizer by 2012!  No more flowers or healthy root systems.  13-0-13 doesn't seem to cut it.

This is ludicrous. It won't work, simply because there is no ban on trisodium phosphate (TSP.)  But beware, I have seen a product in hardware stores with the brand name TSP that contains no phosphates! 

So you can add your own TSP (~$3.50 a pound) and use the cheapest store-brand detergent as a bonus.  It should work better than anything else you can buy. I hope those who chose to add their own phosphates do it wisely. TSP is 20% phosphorus by weight. No more than 9% phosphorus, please.  If my math is correct, that means no more than one part TSP to two parts phosphorous-free detergent.  But check the label on your TSP and adjust accordingly.  Not all real trisodium phosphate products are 100% trisodium phosphate.

Update 18 November:

After some experimentation, I discovered that the film on my dishes was primarily CaCO3 - hard-water deposits.  The older detergents seemed to have kept it at bay. I tried white vinegar in the wash water, but it didn't do much. I finally resorted to Lime Away, a gel containing HCl.  Hand washing with it cleaned up my dishes, glassware, and flatware nicely.  Next I bought some Seventh Generation dishwasher cleaner to remove the old calcium deposits and finally some Lemi-Shine and Savogran TSP.  The Savogram is not completely soluble.  It tends to leave a powder on the dishes if used in the main wash, but it takes very little of it. My final solution was Lemmi-Shine in the soap dispenser and one-quarter TSP and three-quarters cheap dishwasher detergent in the pre-wash cup.  I'm also using Cascade Rinse Aid in the rinse dispenser, but I'm not sure it's contributing much.

Sparkling clean dishes. I may also experiment with borax and baking soda.

Sunday web surfing and amazon.com

My favorite Sunday pastime is web surfing.  It seems no matter where I start, I end up at Amazon.com.

Today it started half way through watching CBS Sunday Morning when Osgood ran a 20-minute piece on Steig Larsson, author of the Millennium Trilogy.  I paused the TiVo and went to the web to read more about his relationship with Eva Gabrielsson, his domestic partner.  There I saw a comment that he was the second best selling author in the world, after Khaled Hosseini, who I was forced to look up.  Ah yes, The Kite Runner.  Now I know who he is. Turns out he does have a new novel called A Thousand Splendid Suns released in October, 2010.

Next stop was the Best Seller List in the New York Times.  It occurred to me that the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, so I looked for him (in vain.)  The list has nine categories, all self-explanatory except the last which is called "Graphic Books."

Graphic Books appear to be highly illustrated books that don't fit well under children's books, like the Oz books by L. Frank Baum.  His second book, The Marvelous Land Of Oz, is on the best selling graphic books list. That thought that odd; he's dead. So I went Wikipedia and sure enough, he died in 1919. But I did discover that it was the second book in his ten-book canonRuth Plumly Thompson who wrote 19 Oz books, all considered to be in the canon. about Oz.  There I learned about

By this time I needed a better definition of canon, so I Googled "define literary canon"  which lead me to Protocanon and ultimately to Deuterocanon, and Apocrypha.  Aha!  I had never thought of the connection between literary canon and canonization of saints. Makes perfect sense.  Along the way, I ran into the term Septuagint, or LXX. That same Protocanon Wikipedia article has a nice to know piece of trivia regarding why the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible is called LXX.  (No mention of why it was called LXX instead of the Greek number οϝʹ, but I had digressed enough by then and didn't try to find out.)  But there was an interesting bit of trivia associated with LXX.

"King Ptolomy once gathered 72 Elders. He placed them in 72 chambers, each of them in a separate one, without revealing to them why they were summoned. He entered each one's room and said: 'Write for me the Torah of Moshe, your teacher. 'God put it in the heart of each one to translate identically as all the others did.'"

Well, I guess LXX means 70-ish.  Still, I had to ask about which Ptolemy.  Turns out he was Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the king of Ptolemaic Egypt from 283 BCE to 246 BCE and the son of the founder of the Ptolemaic kingdom.  Hmm, and who was Cleopatra's (and Antony's) son?  He turns out to be Ptolemy Philadelphus, too, named after his distant, but not direct, ancestor.

At this point I had about five browser tabs open that I had yet to visit.  You've Won The Nobel Prize -- Wait, Don't Hang Up! and a bunch of Amazon.com links.  One was to The Marvelous Land of Oz.  Turns out that this is the 100th anniversary of the first Oz book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900. Reading the customer reviews, I saw " I just finished reading this one, a chapter each night, to my preschool age son. He loved it." So I put it on my wish list as a reminder to get the first two books for my granddaughter when she is five or six.

The other Amazon tabs?  One was The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. Sorry, I don't agree with Mr. Harris that scientifically determined values can replace religion.  Improve it, perhaps, but for my money, I like the threat of eternal damnation. Maybe it doesn't affect me, but there are a lot of folks out there who need better self-control.

Why do I always end up at Amazon?  Probably because that's where the ultimate references still point.  The web has not replaced books, but it has made them more accessible in a variety of formats, including immediate download.  So why is the publishing business declining?  Turns out that the decline is in advertiser-supported publications.  The book publishing business seems to be thriving despite the new costs of converting to digital equipment.