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.

Hopefully no one else cuts their plants in half. Experts only… but seriously, in an epistemological sense; many popular topics today are just like talking about the nature of trees.

The universe’s resiliency allows for contradictory stuff to be practical, or at least appear generalizable on the long–tail and convincingly so. Bananas are indeed fascinating.

Banana trees are kind of invincible. Here’s what happens if you chop a sufficiently radioactive one clean across the mid…

Not everyone’s tech savvy. But… it’s interesting that deeper discussions around the objectionable nature of A/B testing are never had in these kind of journalistic articles.

Nothing beats plausibly deniable per device phenomena, dynamic article titles, and/or personalized content — the ole slow motion divide and conquer (they saw it, we didn’t).

That article caught my eye because my Internet speed is rotten enough that I’d have never known.

The miracle man section of this article is nostalgic. The simplicity of scamming (dividing email lists by two recursively) reminded me somewhat of how I was taught to think about the underlying simplicity of critical thinking, which apparently is a meme nowadays.