A few years ago, I worked for the University of Waterloo as a computer science tutor. As a result of this, my email address was published in plain text on several very public pages, and was picked up by pretty much every spammer on Earth (read: India).
This was the first time I encountered the “let’s generate tons of random pseudosentences to escape the spam filter” trick. While most of the sentences were painful to read, quite a few of them were oddly beautiful. It occurred to me that someone, somewhere, must have gotten the idea to write poetry based on this stuff.
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Posted on March 28th, 2006 by Debo
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make it out to the Black Mountain Trail this weekend, but I’ll get there eventually.
I did manage to go for a little walk just north of where I work. There’s a hill there that is appropriately called Vista Slope, since it gives a terrific view of the surrounding area. I’ve been meaning to bring my camera up there since I bought it, and this time I actually remembered to do so.
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Posted on March 21st, 2006 by Debo
It’s funny what pops into one’s head when one is folding laundry.
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Posted on March 21st, 2006 by Debo
A few oddments in the world of biology…
Hummingbirds have great memories, and would in fact die of starvation if they didn’t. The Globe and Mail explains the how and why.
Have you listened to what your DNA has to say lately? There are many projects out there that generate music based on DNA sequence input, such as this one.
And finally, us bioinformaticians have apparently been confronted with an ultimatum: consult, or die. I thought that it was an interesting read.
Posted on March 12th, 2006 by Debo
I was supposed to hike the Black Mountain Trail today, but I realized that I wanted to take pictures of it while I was there. So, I postponed the trip until next week so that I could bike out to Fry’s Electronics in Palo Alto to buy a digital camera instead. I figured that this would also be a good opportunity to see the part of town that didn’t want to beat me up.
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Posted on March 12th, 2006 by Debo
