Category Archives: Funny

Confirmation Bias

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Have you ever noticed that someone mentions something, and all of a sudden you notice that thing multiple times? One professor mentioned that very phenomenon one week. Early the next week, I was touring Waltham’s 911 dispatch center, and noted the software they used for  (Computer Aided Dispatch) CAD, intending to look more into it. The next day, I had that professor’s class again, and, for reasons I still don’t understand, somehow slipped in a mention of knowing someone who worked at that company. So I mentioned this to him after class, and also pointed out the incredible irony of the fact that the week before he’d mentioned the “someone mentions something, and all of a sudden you keep seeing” it phenomonen. {Meta: this phenomonen may, itself, be related to a confirmation bias, but I digress.}

So Kyle mentioned confirmation bias in one of his recent posts. The next day someone on Ask MetaFilter asked why black people were afraid of his dog. Most answers bordered around it being a confirmation bias. (Although it got interesting when several people reported having noticed the same thing, suggesting that maybe, just maybe there is some sort of racial difference in how dogs are viewed.)

The other day there was a lunar eclipse. Around the same time, we had several short problems with Internet access, where traffic wasn’t leaving Bentley. (Incidentally, I had the same experience I’ve had with most of my tickets–I only open then when I run into an issue I can’t solve myself and am very confident that it’s a problem, so I usually include enough information that the front-level have no idea what’s going on an forward it to an expert… So I ended up speaking with our “Network Engineer,” a position I didn’t even know we had, and we had a good talk about exactly whta the problem was… It appears to lie with an upstream company performing some maintenance.)

So today my professor–who teaches nothing related to electronics nor astronomy–randomly interrupted her lecture saying, “Thursday was a lunar eclipse. Did anyone else experience technical problems because of the lunar eclipse?” People had several problems that day–several brought up the Internet disruption. Someone had their computer crash. She explained that the lunar eclipse tends to cause those things.

If ever there were evidence of a confirmation bias, that’s it. I don’t profess to be a total expert, but I’m pretty certain that the moon being obscured by our shadow isn’t why our Internet link went down for a couple minutes. And yet she’s found plenty of evidence to support what’s probably an urban legend.

Understand?

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I had to read this headline about eight times before I understood it: Boyfriend on roof punches weaving driver.

And even after the eighth time, my mental image still didn’t match what I found when I read the story.

Actually, even having read it, I’m not sure I understand it. I mean, I understand it, but I don’t understand it. Why was he on the roof? Why was he punching her? Why didn’t she stop? Why was the car’s air bag inflated? (And a second “Why didn’t she stop?” is in order here.) And tell me “She eventually stopped the car and hit him with it, police said” isn’t unclear. It’s yet another, “I understand… the words” case. We can infer that she stopped the car, and then started it again to hit him. But it seems like poor reporting all around to rely on the reader to make these assumptions.

Arresting Firefighters

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This is wild. The fire truck pulls up to a car crash on the highway, and parks the truck to “shield” the emergency workers as they extract a victim from the car. The cop yells at the firefighter driving the fire truck to move so as to not obstruct traffic. The captain, who was actively working on the patient, yells for the fire truck to stay put, pointing out that they very deliberately parked that way for the safety of anyone involved. So the cop pulls the guy away from the patient and arrests him.

Of course, not all firefighters arrested are innocent.

Intuitive

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GRE, a (radio) scanner company that makes a lot of the scanners Radio Shack sells, also sells some under their own name.

This new one advertises an “Intuitive ‘Object Oriented’ User Interface Design,” which brings all the fun of OOP to a GUI. The picture of the radio reads “Press NEW to create objects,” and has three softkeys, labeled “NEW,” “EDIT,” and “GLOB.”

I’ll reserve final judgment until I play around with one, but, on the surface, this seems anything but intuitive.

Torture

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Dear Republican hard-liners: waterboarding is really unpopular. But I have an awesome idea. You can torture detainees even more, while fooling the Democrats into thinking that you’ve had a sudden change of heart.

Give free dental care to all detainees, paying special attention to fill cavities.

They used this huge needle to give me Novacaine. If I were giving an injection to a buffalo, I’d think the needle was unnecessarily large. Furthermore, they weren’t content with merely jabbing me with the needle. They stuck it way in, which was only mildly painful, until they must have jammed it into a vein or something, which caused excruciating pain. As I screamed in pain, the dentist apologized and shifted the needle ever so slightly.

They did one filling, and then the main dentist randomly left for about fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, her partner in crime was left to implement some extremely bizarre torture implement. All I saw was that a blue latex thing–a lot like a rubber glove, only a flat sheet of it, was fit over my mouth, covering it completely, while something sharp was jammed into my gums until I screamed out again in pain. “Oh, does that hurt?” She removed it, and I never saw it again, so I have absolutely no clue what that was all about.

Sick of seeing ridiculously scary weapons being brandished in my face, I kept my eyes closed most of the time. (Actually, it was more the cloud of tooth-dust rising out of my mouth, and a desire to keep it out of my eyes.) I eventually opened my eyes, to find what can only be described as a large metal pipe sticking out of my mouth.  As with a gum-piercer with a latex cover obscuring my entire mouth, that thing couldn’t have served any legitimate dental purpose.

They ended up giving me three shots of Novacaine, as she’d keep drilling into teeth that still had feeling. After the second one, they both left the room, probably to find more torture devices.

Meanwhile, as I sat there bewildered, some lady came in, handed me a small FM radio with headphones, and said, “Here, this sometimes helps.” Between being completely bewildered as to what was going on, and being unable to talk anyway, I nodded in appreciation and took the radio. It only got two radio stations–the same one that they had playing in the room, and a country station. But I figured it would drown out the noise of the drill, even though I think the implication may have been that the excruciating pain was al in my head, and listening to music would cause me to forget the fact that I had a huge hole in my gum and someone repeatedly taking a drill to a tooth that definitely wasn’t numb.

With the third Novacaine shot, the whole right side of my face was numb. And my eye felt really funny. When they left again, I looked in the mirror and saw that it was halfway shut, while the other one was wide open. This was quite a distressing sight, so I mentioned it to torture-assistant lady. She made some neutral comment whose tone indicated, “I don’t want to concern you anymore than you already are, but I’ve never seen that before and it looks pretty scary.” The real dentist came back in and told me it was nothing to worry about.

On top of all of it, the assistant lady had really sharp fingernails that were digging into my cheek through her gloves the whole time. And the filling they used smelled like rubbing alcohol. The smell of rubbing alcohol isn’t that bad, unless it’s wafting directly into your nose, in which case it’s horrible: partially the smell, partially nauseating fumes.

Finally, my interrogators decided I’d had enough and released me. I left unable to really control my lips, with my jaw in excruciating pain, an unexplained cut in my lip, and with my upper lip having a horrible burning sensation.

Moral of the story: floss and brush your teeth! Twenty-seven times a day.

Emulating spamd for HTTP

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I won’t lie–I love OpenBSD’s spamd. In a nutshell, it’s a ‘fake’ mailserver. You set your firewall up to connect obvious spammers to talk to this instead of your real mailserver. It talks to them extremely slowly (1B/sec), which keeps them tied up for quite some time. (As an added bonus, it throws them an error at the end.)

One thing that really gets under my skin is bots (and malicious users) probing for URLs on the server that don’t exist. I get a lot of hits for /forum, /phpbb, /forums, /awstats… What they’re doing is probing for possible (very) outdated scripts that have holes allowing remote code execution.

It finally hit me: it’s really not that hard to build the same thing for HTTP. thttpd already supports throttling. (Note that its throttling had a more sane use in mind: limiting overall bandwidth to a specific URL, not messing with spammers and people pulling exploits, so it’s not exactly what we want, but it’ll do.)

Then you need a large file. I downloaded a lengthy novel from Project Gutenberg. It’s about 700 kB as uncompressed text. I could get much bigger files, yes. But 700 kB is plenty. More on this later.

It’s also helpful to use Apache and mod_rewrite on your ‘real’ server. You can work around it if you have to.

Set up your /etc/thttpd/throttle.conf:

**    16

Note that, for normal uses, this is terrible. This rule effectively says, “Limit the total server (**) to 16 (bytes per second).” By comparison, a 56K dialup line is about 7,000 bytes per second (or 56,000 bits per second).

Rudimentary tests show that having one client downloading a 700 kB file at 16B/sec places pretty much no load on the server (load average remained 0.00, and thttpd doesn’t even show up in the section of top that I can see), so I’m not concerned about overhead.

You can also set up your thttpd.conf as needed. No specific requirements there. Start it up with something like thttpd -C /etc/thttpd/thttpd.conf -d /var/www/maintenance/htdocs/slow -t /etc/thttpd/throttle.conf (obviously, substituting your own directories and file names! Note that the /slow is just the directory I have it serving out of, not any specific naming convention.)

Now what we need to do is start getting some of our mischievous URL-probers into this. I use some mod_rewrite rules on my ‘real’ Apache server:

# Weed out some more evil-doers
RewriteRule ^forum(.*)$ http://ttwagner.com:8080/20417.txt [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^phpbb(.*)$ http://ttwagner.com:8080/20417.txt [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^badbots(.*)$ http://ttwagner.com:8080/20417.txt [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^awstats(.*)$ http://ttwagner.com:8080/20417.txt [NC,L]

In a nutshell, I redirect any requests starting with “forum,” “phpbb,” “badbots,” or “awstats” to an enormous text file. I’m not sure if escaping the colon is strictly necessary, but it has the added benefit of ‘breaking’ the link when pasted, say, here: I don’t want anyone getting caught up in this unless they’re triggering it. I tend each with (.*), essentially matching everything. You may or may not see this as desirable. I like it, since /forum and /forums are both requested, and so forth. You could take that out if necessary. The [NC,L] is also useful in terms of, well, making anything work.

I want to watch and see whether anyone gets caught up in this. Since it’s technically passing the request to a different webserver (thttpd), it has to tell the client to connect to that, as opposed to seamlessly serving it up. I don’t know if the bots are smart (dumb?) enough to follow these redirects or not.

Note that /badbots doesn’t really exist. I inserted it into my robots.txt file, having heard that some ‘bad ‘bots (looking for spam, etc.) crawl any directory you tell them not to. I wondered if this was accurate.

The ending is quite anticlimactic: we wait not-so-patiently to see what ends up in the logfile.