Flashes of Panic

I think if I actually managed to choke off the flow of spam into my users’ mailboxes, many of them would miss the entertainment value of complaining about it.

One in particular has had a series of notifications about winning European lottery tickets. (I’m sure this is some sort of variant on the infamous “Nigerian” advance-fee scam.) We wondered today just how many tickets she had “bought.” It occurred to me, though: if x out of every y tickets bought are winners, and you buy zero tickets, wouldn’t you then have a theoretically infinite number of winners?

Either way, it looks like these s[p|c]ammers have sufficiently advanced math skills to have determined the value of division by zero.

(Thumbnail explanation of the above cryptic word: it’s a regular expression, a way of expressing text strings with some flexibility. In this case, a string beginning with “s”, containing either “p” or “c” in the second position, then “ammers” over the rest of the string. It should match either “spammers” or “scammers” successfully, and it’s very brief. Unless you feel compelled to include a four-sentence explanation.)

Now playing: Pendulums from All of Our Names by Sarah Harmer