Speech Contest

I went to an Toastmaster Dual-Area Speech Contest today. Actually it was two contests: one for Table Topics (impromptu speaking) and one for the International Speech Contest. What was interesting was not who won the speech contests, but their compatibility with each other. These were the speeches that were given in this order:

"Just add one" - my speech. My main thesis was that there never is an end to anything; it is always possible to proceed.

"Answering the knock of change" There occasionally comes a time when you need to change to achieve success.

"The Picture of Success" or how you can picture yourself succeeding to tell yourself where your actions should be heading.

"The Very Last Time" A tribute to Babe Ruth and to the speaker's grandfather, as they both entered the last phase of their lives.

If the last speech were made the first, this would be a good 30-minute panel course on how to succeed. For that speech says that there sooner or later will be an end. The second speech, Just Add One, would say that even then, you can go one step farther. The third speech says that in order to do that, you have to answer the knock of change. And the fourth one sums things up, asking you to picture yourself a success in a never-ending ever-changing world.

I did not win the contest, but I did win Table Topics, simply by showing up. So I go up to the next level - Division.

Spam Words

Spam, spam, spam. It is increasing tremendously. Near the beginning of the millennium it was 8 percent of all email; now it is closer to 40 percent, according to my morning paper. So how do you get rid of it? Delete it. But if you have to delete 40 percent of your emails, that will take a long time; besides, you may accidentally think that a legitimate email is spam and delete it. So how do you deal with it? The ultimate answer would be legislation at the national level, plus enforcement. But without that, how to get rid of spams?

There are various products on the market to identify spam. One of the most available is the Rules wizard in Outlook. You can write a rule to tell Outlook to do something with "junk mail"; perhaps delete it, or better yet, send it to a folder you label "spam". You define a rule through a wizard, and it runs something like "Check messages when they arrive; if they have "mortgage" or "credit" in the subject, then move it to the Spam folder and stop processing more rules". The last is needed on move rules to prevent the computer from squawking that a message is not there. The rule checks for words in the subject; another possibility is the address, but addresses tend to be more particular.

So suppose you want to set up an anti-spam rule that identifies it by words in the subject. A word like "Richmond" is not likely to be in a spam subject, because most spammers spam the world, not just Richmond. However, "mortgage" is likely to be a spam subject, since so many spams offer low mortgage rates. A while ago I made a test of spam. I saved all the spams and did a word frequency analysis of spam subjects and of legitimate mail subjects. I identified those words that had a high frequency in spam and a low frequency in legitimate mail. I came up with these words:

free, business, make, money, now, credit, get, cash, mortgage, cost, fee, how, merchant, addresses, guaranteed, offshore, equity, opportunity, vacation, viagra, mom, advertise, anyone, anything, commerce, sex, million, millions, find, increase, account, solution

I did it again today and came up with these words:

free, business, make, money, now, credit, get, cash, mortgage, com, insurance, rates, best, cartridges, shipping, adv, james, online, software, inkjet, win, card, debt, refinance, up, lowest, only, family, gift, jimvb, save, mindspring, sale, your, off

The first eight words of both lists are the same and can be thought of as a basic spam word list. The other words reflect fads in spamming. In the first set of words, they were offering viagra, the opportunity to find anyone, and millions of email addresses. In the second set, they are more personal, mentioning my name and email address, and hawk inkjet cartridges, mortgages, credit and credit cards, and bargains. By far the top spam word of them all is free. It appeared this time in 309 spams and in 26 legitimate emails. It is a good idea to put this word in your anti-spam rule list, but you still need to check the spam folder for legitimate emails that contain "free", as in "How to keep our country free".

The best idea would be to use a selection of these words in an anti-spam rule, and tell the computer to put the emails in the spam folder. Also put in past or future dated emails and emails marked of high importance, with the red flag. This also goes in reverse. You don't want your email to wind up in someone's spam or junk folder, or even worse, deleted. Further, people reply to your email , and the words you use come back to you; they go into the spam folder if they contain "million". So if you have to use one of these spam words in your subject, misspell it. Say "Weather about to guet warmer", for instance. Or you could say, "Weather about to g9et warmer", sticking in an extraneous digit.

Perhaps one of these days spam email will go the way of junk faxes.

Blogger Error

I just posted this blog on Morse Code and Words. Immediately it throws up this error message: "The system cannot find the file specified." What file? Did I specify a file? I didn't specify a file. I wrote some text and asked Blogger to put it in my blog. What's more, when I checked this blog page, it had the Morse Code blog in with the others. So I am still able to use the system. That is a property of Pyra and Blogger: They throw up errors that don't mean anything. That is why I rated them only moderately good a while ago and hope that Google will mean an improvement. At least it is better than errors that prevent me from posting altogether.

Morse Code and Words

I notice that words have definite rhythms; for example, record and record have different rhythms. Record, as in 33 rpm, has an N pattern: Dah Dit, for Dah Dit is an N in Morse Code. Record, as in copy with a recorder, has an A pattern: Dit Dah. So words can be reduced to letters by their rhythms, if they are not too long. Even if they are, we can convert them to bits, and thus to numbers. Here are some examples:

E . a (the article)
T - dog
A .- receipt
N -. mother
I .. in the
M -- Great Dane
S ... so as to
U ..- in the lake
R .-. apartment
W .-- a done deal
D -.. galaxy
K -.- kitty cat
G --. New Yorker
O --- Go! Go! Go!
X -..- Slow to react
B -... automobile
C -.-. helicopter
-.-.. hippopotamus

and so forth. Piecing these together is what produces a poem. Any poem can be reduced to Morse Code, or more properly, to a series of 1s and 0s representing a rhythm. Writing a poem or a song involves putting these together in the right manner to fit into a good rhythm.

Can God make square circles?

I was doing some fill in the blank browsing today; in particular, "two plus two equals" -four. I wanted to see what some people's idea of two plus two were if they weren't four. I got numerous answers from the Orwellian five to the uplifting love to such things as foresight and sheep to such numbers as 3, 16, and 32. What really struck me was one of those who said it was five, namely http://gci.gospelcom.net/dw/1995/11/04/. One of the statements the author of this page makes is "God can make square circles if He wants to." Huhh?? Really?

Well, it might be impossible to prove that God does not exist or that he does not make square circles. What I can prove is that if God can make square circles, then I am God. Here is the reason. If God can make a square circle, it is possible that a square circle exists. Draw two tangent lines through two different points on the border of such a square circle. Since the figure is square, the points can be selected so that the tangents have the same slope. They then have an angle 0 with respect to each other. However, since the figure is also a circle, with the tangents being close to each other, they are not the same, and the tangents make an angle t that is greater than 0. Since this angle is also zero, t = 0. Divide both sides by t, which I can do since t > 0. The result is 1 = 0. Add 1 to both sides to get 2 = 1. Now God and I are two entities. But since 2 = 1, God and I are one entity. Therefore, I am God.

The argument goes further from here. Since God can make square circles and since I am God, therefore I can make square circles. No, I am afraid that I cannot make any square circles. This implies that the hypothesis of my proof above is false; i.e., God cannot make square circles. In other words, because I can't make square circles, therefore God can't either.

I can make all these conclusions because I start with a contradiction to begin with: square circles. A contradiction implies anything, and can be used by crackpots to "prove" their theories and by despots to justify mayhem. Whatever is beyond our ability to comprehend may be such, but there is no way we can talk sense about it if it involves contradictions. There is no way that a supreme being or deity can violate the laws of logic. And thus be it to Gods who are not God, to even numbers greater than 2 that are prime, and indeed, also to square circles.