Engineer’s Attempt at Writing

Wow spammers are getting more sophisticated every day. I used to get spam comments on my article that made absolutely no sense. It is usually some random string that made absolutely no sense what so ever. Today I saw a comment on one of my posts about Java and I was just about to approve the comments. Then some phrases caught my eye and I looked a little more closely and it turned out that the comment was a spam.

Another person who causually look at their comments can easily miss it and approve the comments. WordPress allows comments to be posted once you have approved it once. This means these spammers can easily post any other comments (i.e. links to Viagra or something) on your post.

I wonder if spammers use some program to automatically analyze your  post and then take certain words from your post to create a paragraph. Maybe they took the MIT program that automatically generates research paper to automatically genearte comments.

i have not done any math in a long time and man it can get pretty tough. there was this problem which i could not figure out how to solve no matter what. maybe i am getting dumber?

i don’t know exactly what is happening to my brain, but my brain cells are probably dying a lot faster than they used to. i fully believe that if i were still in college, then i could have solved the problem fairly quickly.

here is the problem:

how many numbers must be choosen from 1 to 20 (inclusive) such that sum is guaranteed to be even? let me clarify that when you choose a number, you can’t re-use it again. in addition, the numbers are chosen randomly (thanks vdsat). also you need to solve this in like 1 minutes.

oh another note, there are 26 letters in the alphabet, not 24 or 27 as i had originally thought.

I am reading a transcript of an interview with Palin and she just reminds me of  Ms. South Carolina. She is the lady who gave the following answer during the Miss Teen USA contest.

Question: Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the US on a world map. Why do you think this is?

Answer: “I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as uh, South Africa, and uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as. And I believe that they should, uh, our education over here! In the U.S. should help the U.S., or, should help South Africa, it should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future, for our children.”

Now if you compare that to this,

GIBSON: The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?

PALIN: I agree that a president’s job, when they swear in their oath to uphold our Constitution, their top priority is to defend the United States of America. I know that John McCain will do that and I, as his vice president, families we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on January 20, that will be our top priority is to defend the American people.

Maybe it is just me, but to me her answer to the question is all over the place similar to Ms. South Carolina’s answer. At least Ms. South Carolina has an excuse that she was nervous and it was her first time answering a question on national television.

Now what is Palin’s excuse for not giving an answer to the question? Given all of her claim of the tough decision she had to make as a mayor and governor, it should be pretty easy for her to give a simple answer.  You try reading the excerpts from her interview and you tell me whether she makes sense or not.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2008/Story?id=5782924&page=1

I was listening to NPR today as I was driving to work, and there was a discussion by a group of people about the presidential election. The people represented were African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and White Americans. They each gave their view about who they would vote for and why they would vote for that particular person.

Fairly obvious, the African American is going to vote for Obama and the White American is going to vote for McCain. Then each gave some interesting reasons. Now this post is not about who they will vote for and why they will vote for that particular candidate. The post is to express my disappointment that there were not any Asian Americans in the discussion group. I am not sure how many Asians are there in the US, but I am guessing we make up a decent number. Come on, our vote matters and what we want should matter to the candidates.
I think Asian Americans need to be more politically active.