Tetherd Cow Ahead

So I was over at Modern Mechanics having a browse as I’m wont to do, and I found this great article about an invention to keep canvassers and peddlers from ringing your doorbell.

The principle is simple enough – the doorbell won’t ring unless you first pay a dime into the slot, thereby discouraging anyone without a legitimate purpose. If you’re an approved caller, your dime can be refunded on opening of the door. If you’re just a hustler you lose your dime and it goes to charity. Brilliant enough – there are times when I would have found this mighty handy.

Then I had a brainwave (and I’m actually being serious here folks, for a change): take this idea and remodel it for the digital world and you have a fantastic method of stopping email spam in it’s tracks.

Now there have been a few different pay-per-mail schemes mooted in the past, but they tend to come from people like Microsoft who have a view setting up yet another revenue stream (and heck knows they really need it). They invariably operate on the principle that you make a micropayment for each email you send. In other words, it’s using the old Post Office concept – you stamp your mail to send it. And it costs you.

I’m suggesting something significantly different.

Here’s how I propose it would work: If someone wants to send you an email they must pay you a small fee – say the equivalent of a mailed letter. Their email goes into your Inbox and when you see who it’s from, you approve it and their fee is refunded. You only need to do this once for every sender.

Spammers would be completely stymied – sending millions of unsolicited emails would cost a fortune. Genuine advertisers could still send you email, but they would have to pay – and if you declined their dime, they would lose it.

The money would be held in some kind of escrow, and from time to time you would approve its donation to charity. The escrow slush fund could also finance the service that facilitates the process.

This idea also answers one of the the most widely-voiced objections to a ‘paid’ email system: that users would have to start paying for something that is already free. With my Dime Per Chimeâ„¢ scheme the end user doesn’t pay at all![tippy title=”¹”]In fact the biggest drawback I can see is that it might become too effective, thereby rendering the whole idea worthless…[/tippy]

Sum effect: End user happy, charities happy, spammers very very unhappy. O frabjous day!

Is this not genius?

Help me beta it Cowerati!

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¹In fact the biggest drawback I can see is that it might become too effective, thereby rendering the whole idea worthless…

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A little while back, just after I posted my little observation on the claims of Irish ‘Free Energy’ company Steorn, my page load stats spiked. Scanning back over the visitors provides some fascinating reading: lots of name searches for ‘Sean McCarthy’, ‘Richard Walshe’, ‘Steorn’ and various combinations of those. Now it’s impossible to know exactly what this means but the fact is that posting about loony scientific claims seems to attract nearly as much interest as posting about erotic images.

With that thought, it is pretty obvious that combining these two fields is really going to jazz up the Hit-O-Meter.

So it is my pleasure to bring to you today… Sister Veronica’s Science Report!

Over to you babe.

Oh wow! So cool Reverend!!!! Y’know I always thought science was, like, fully wicked at sk00l. LOL!!!! Mr. Smythe looked so HOT in that lab coat. LOL! ;-)

XOXOXOXOX

Thank you Cowerati for your wonderful submissions for ideas for Classic works of literature suitably reduced in scale for publication as Nano Editions, a la Teeny Ted from Turnip Town.

I can tell you that judging a winner was a tough call from so many chuckle-worthy entries. In the end I just had to go with my initial instincts and give the prize to the suggestion that most surprised and delighted me on first reading.

First, some Honourable Mentions:

Phoebe Fay got a chuckle with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Neighbourhood, as did Casey with Slaughterhouse .5. Chickie definitely got a laugh with The Okay Earth, and Joey also raised a guffaw with … (his abbreviated version of Waiting for Godot)

Pil continued to completely confuse me with a book that Adolf Hitler almost certainly never even thought of writing, Mein Achselhöhle (about his armpit…?), and HughT almost pipped the winner at the post with his wonderful The Life of Pi to Four Decimal Places.

In the end, I had to go with the suggestion that I thought most succinctly summed up the spirit of the Nano Publication (ie, a Classic with essence suitably distilled for sub-miniature reproduction), combined with the most outrageous pun. It was, of course, Radiocative Jam‘s Less Miserables.

Jam, the trophy is yours. Salut, and well done. An appropriate prize is winging its way across the Pacific.

In another first for The Cow, this post comes to you live from the inter-city train that runs between Sydney and Melbourne. Well, not live, as such – there is no actual internet connection on the train, lest you think that Australia might be anywhere near that technologically hip – but I am typing it on my laptop ((You may think I’m that technologically hip.)) as we hurtle ((I use the word with irony.)) out of Albury Wodonga towards Melbourne, now about three hours away.

Being something of a fan of rail travel, and heading off to visit Violet Towne for a few days, I thought that instead of taking the usual ho-hum plane flight I might splurge the extra $20 ((That should really have clued me in… a 20 buck difference between Economy and First Class travel… )) and kick back in the luxury of First Class. Sure, the train takes about 6 times longer, but hey, First Class! You know: Leather seats; red velvet curtains; witty attractive passengers; crisp white linen table cloths and sparkling silver cutlery in the dining car. Orient Expressville baby! Get the picture?

Yep, it’s the wrong picture.

We head out of Sydney Central at 8am, late, but what’s rail travel without delays, right? The First Class carriage is moderately filled, but I have two seats to myself, and there is no-one behind me or across the aisle. Cool. Nice, quiet trip!

10 minutes out: Ergghh. These First Class seats are SO uncomfortable. They must be the only seats I’ve encountered anywhere in the world where reclining them increases their discomfort by a factor proportional to the angle of inclination (that’s not to say that they were comfortable upright either – I’ve sat on more luxurious seats in bus shelters). I marvel that anyone can have, even intentionally, designed something so back-achingly awful. I hope the designer, when he goes to Hell (for he surely will), spends Eternity in one of these seats.

20 minutes out: We stop at Strathfield Station, the last urban stop before we hit the country, and pick up a million extra passengers. Well I do exaggerate. But in a fitting demonstration of CountryLink ineptness, there are, in fact, more passengers boarding the train than there are seats available. Yippee. This causes more delays.

The seats around me fill up. With old ladies. Now I’ve got nothing at all against old ladies, but these are stupid old ladies. Stupid, loud, annoying old ladies. You know the kind of thing – everytime the train goes past a station one of them says “Oooh. Flemington. Oooh. Picton. Ooooh. Moss Vale”. One of them talks endlessly about absolutely nothing. In a very loud voice. For hours. I can’t even drown her out with my iPod turned up loud. I glare at her pointedly and screw my ear-buds in even tighter. She takes this as an invitation to turn her volume up from squawk to shrill. If I ever get that bad, someone shoot me.

The loudspeaker spruiks wares from the Buffet Car. Idiotically, I venture out for a cup of coffee (mostly so I can have some brief respite from the inane prattle which has now turned into a mix of racism and cooking suggestions). I come back with a scalding hot cup of weak instant sludge and a little container of UHT milk. I look at the these things on my cheap cardboard tray. Someone’s meddling with my sanity. First Class? Swill?

I try to console myself with the thought that if this is First Class, things must be truly hideous in Economy. Evidence of this is forthcoming pretty quickly. The First Class carriage is the second car on the train. The first car is a sleeper that has been converted to Economy seating for the daytime trip. This means the First Class carriage is between them and the Buffet Car.

Soon begins the long procession of Economy Class passengers intending to fuel themselves for the gruelling journey. The first thing I notice is most of these people hardly need fueling. In fact, dispensing with the train and jogging to Melbourne might be a good option for many of them.

There is one guy who has the most ENORMOUS belly I have ever seen. He’s not really a big man in other respects, but his belly looks like it composes the better part of his body mass. The most off-putting thing is that he chooses to highlight his asset by wearing tight jeans and an even tighter lycra t-shirt that allows the bottom of his stomach to sag out. The shirt’s slogan says ‘Buff Riders’. At first I thought it read ‘Butt Riders’ but I had ample opportunity to check. I don’t know which is worse when I think about it. He has no front teeth, and makes numerous trips back and forth to top up with Coke so he can remain that way.

Then there is the young, even groovy looking, guy in dark suit and sunglasses, who walks past clutching to his chest something that looks awfully like a carpet bag. Attentive to his threads he may be, attentive to his personal hygiene he definitely is not. A wave of overpowering body odour floods in his wake as he passes through. After his second trip, and the sense of disbelief that anyone could smell that bad has diminished, First Class passengers start to cringe pre-emptively when he enters the door at the far end of the carriage. For inexplicable reasons he makes numerous trips back and forth, always clutching the carpet bag, but never bringing back any food or drink.

From time to time the happy CountryLink staff keep us informed of where we are. Which wouldn’t be so bad except for the fact that every time they announce “Our next stop will be Goulburn”, the old ladies go into a flurry of repetition: “Ooooh, Goulburn! Next stop is Goulburn! Oooh…!” (I kid you not). I start dreading the click of the intercom that heralds the announcements.

So. Three hours or so to go and it’s getting dark.

I begin to really really wish this was the Orient Express. Not because I’m pining any longer for the crisp white tablecloths or the mahogany trim or the caviar and champagne, but because this First Class carriage is looking more and more like a very fitting setting for murder.

In a sterling attempt to redefine the concept of light reading, Robert Chaplin at the Nano Imaging Facility of Simon Fraser University recently created the smallest book in the world by using a using a focused-gallium-ion beam to ‘carve’ the letters of a story in silicon at a resolution of 40 nanometers*. The tale Mr Chaplin chose for this escapade is written by Malcom Douglas Chaplin who I guess we can presume to be related. It concerns ‘Teeny Ted from Turnip Town’ and his successful entry in the local Turnip contest. You can read all about Teeny Ted’s exploits with the aid of your handy electron microscope and still have time to apply another coat of Powdery Mist to the wainscotting before tea.

Robert even has a blog where you can read more about his creation and congratulate him personally (I love the web!).

Anyway, this whole episode prompted me to thinking that Teeny Ted is just the foot-in-the-door for the new shelfspace-saving Nano Book phenomenon that is certainly upon us. Obviously, a great place to start would be re-releasing the Classics in Teensy Tiny form. Of course their content would need to be diminished in some way to be more in keeping with the format.

It will not surprise you to learn that I have a few suggestions…

•A Tale of One City

•Lesser Expectations

•20 Leagues Under the Sea

•Gone with the Breeze

•Disagreement of the Worlds

•A Clockwork Cumquat

•Even Littler Women

•The Insignificant Gatsby

•The Old Man and the Condensation

I daresay my faithful readers will have more…

Special Cow Announcement: Moo! Oh, sorry, I mean: Owing to the high calibre of suggestions so far for Condensed Version Classics to be etched at nano scale, I have decided to award a prize to the entry that makes me laugh the most. It will be a proper prize mailed out in the actual Real World Snail Mail.

Judge’s (ie my) decision will be final and no correspondence will be entered into. I’ve always wanted to be able to say that. I’ve also always wanted to say Damn the torpedoes and full steam ahead!! but so far no proper opportunity has presented itself. Maybe somewhere in the next year’s worth of posts…