Someone pointed out an unusual thing the other day. A partly foreign/government owned utility company here had Barbados’ Independence Flag as The Bahamas’ innocently circulating online. My disambiguation antics are 20/20?

I was poking around tech news today. I didn’t know that the AIs train on comments. That’s funny because brevity optimizes for snide remarks. Speaking of snide, Robert Frost has a rather gentle and tactful kind — it’s absolutely genius.

He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
Why do they make good neighbors?

Someone said a while back that the design here was cookie cutter. That means I’ve stuck the landing, beautifully. Web design ended 24 years ago and that can’t be right but it’s in fact true. Exploratory design style sheets are kept to one’s self.

People dislike non-conventional interfaces or “wheel reinventing”, as the story goes. Of course, nobody knows precisely what they actually want, but markets lie not (unless manipulated). Data says; there’s preference for the familiar, the standard, and more of the same.

Teaching how to write a link in Markdown is hard. It’s one example of the subtle horrors of horizontal complexity. Horror as in, the number of questions asked from intuition. Is it []() or ()[]?

One question becomes two, with four answers, or more. Eventually ()[] = []() = ()() = [][]. But, is it [example.com][example] or [example][example.com]?

The number of possibly erroneous actions among correct ones is a useful metric for automating (graphical) interfaces.

That book is quite hilarious. The ambiguity is sneaky too. Why the 17th century? Popular scams approximate type 7 and 2. ‘Enticement to gambling’ and ‘dropping the bag’ are just short of a legalized bank robbery.

Related (Confidence):

1. The New Cheats of London Exposed (1792)
2. The Confidence–Man: His Masquerade (1857)
3. The Humbugs of the World (1866)
4. Don Quixote (1605)
5. The Swindler (1626)
6. The Water Margin (1589)
7. Plum in the Golden Vase (1610)
8. Stories Old and New (1620)

Unrelated (History & Philosophy):

1. Book of Changes
2. Book of Documents
3. The Analects
4. The Records of the Grand Historian

Falling for enough cons is the mark of a casual connoisseur in books of confidence. One of my favorites is The Book of Swindles by Zhang Yingyu. How could one not read a book that inspires such a beautifully scandalous contra introduction?

This is an age of deception. Con men ply the roadways. Bogus alchemists pretend to turn one piece of silver into three. Devious nuns entice young women into adultery. Sorcerers use charmed talismans for mind control and murder…

The first lesson against swindles is ‘obtaining passage through the state of Yu to attack the state of Guo’, which in faraway modern times translates to keeping the tin foil hats demarcated at a safe arm’s length of distance.

The Internet is such a chaotic mindscape and must be an epistemologist’s dream. The world adjusted disambiguation should be (rather tongue in cheek);

The Bahamas, not to be confused with Hamas, Barbados, or Bermuda, neither Bahamians with Bohemians in Bohemia of The Czech Republic, nor the plurality of Bohemian Rhapsodies, or Bahamas (the musician), or Bahamo (that town in Central Africa) or even Bahamut, the invisible fish that carries this planet on its back through the cosmic sea.

Bahamoj works though, it’s Esperanto or something.

I’m late on the uptake. Is Hamas in The Bahamas? No. But surely, hamas is inside The Bahamas. Yes, and rhymes internally too!

That made its rounds, but after coming across the source — it’s not funny anymore.

The fashion clock for large phones (phablets) is at its mid point. I was still curious though, and spent a bit of time researching the smallest, and most repairable Android phones on the market today. The results? Two devices that clock in at 7.5 cm (3 inches).

• Palm Phone (2018)
• Jelly Star (2023)

Fake news is like an endless simulation of the boy who cried wolf. That fable (boys and wolves) is kind of crafty too. You can’t depend on the boy to always be wrong. Why?

Because, if he rings the false alarm bell long enough, then no one will be prepared for when the big bad wolf actually appears.