Problem Attic. Insert witty tagline here.

Recently I have been getting a ridiculous amount of spam in the form of comments on this blog (ridiculous as in, I’ve probably had over a thousand in the last couple of months). Fortunately, I have been able to block most of it.

Some of this spam, however, is really quite sophisticated entertaining. Here is a selection of the best efforts to evade my filters.
Read it all…

Few people may know this, but in the days before I was “lazy computer geek Matt” (or “cunning productive fox”) I was “slightly lazy but does a lot of mountain-biking computer geek Matt.” Those days are back! I am, once again, mountain biking with a vengeance, and also with a slight lack of common sense. Anyway, here are some of the lessons mountain-biking has taught me.
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From a brilliant example of corporate evil (on the Dow corporate website “Yes Men’sâ€? mock Dow site. Thanks Gus, sorry everybody for the misleading.):

On December 3, 1984, Union Carbide - now part of Dow - accidentally killed thousands of residents of Bhopal, India, when its pesticide plant leaked a vast cloud of lethal gas over the city.

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As Dow has repeatedly noted, Dow cannot and will not take responsibility for the accident. (”What we cannot and will not do… is accept responsibility for the Bhopal accident.” - CEO Michael Parker, 2002.) The Dow position has not changed, despite public pressure.

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Dow shareholders will see NO losses, because Dow’s policy towards Bhopal HAS NOT CHANGED. Much as we at Dow may care, as human beings, about the victims of the Bhopal catastrophe, we must reiterate that Dow’s sole and unique responsibility is to its shareholders, and Dow CANNOT do anything that goes against its bottom line [i.e income] unless forced to by law.

I feel sick.

[Update, 24/12: Updated sources, struck out fabricated material.]

“The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Echo chamber: a room in which no external sound can be heard, only echoes of sound originating inside the room.

Too often, we surround ourselves with people who agree with us, or who think the same things, or even just approach things from the same direction. Too often, we forget that, while we need these people, we also need the other sort.

We need people who disagree with us, who make us think, who make us argue, who make us engage, who make us step outside our comfortable beliefs.

We need people who make us feel wrong, because this forces us to question what we believe, and in the end makes us more certain.

This is my “little” brother (and me):

I say “little” because, at 13 14 (oops), he’s already taller than me. Drat.