I get a lot of email, and a good percentage of it is spam. To help filter the spam from the ham I use software called SpamAssassin (http://useast.spamassassin.org/). SpamAssassin applies hundreds of tests to each incoming email and increases or decreases the mail's spam score depending on the result. If the total spam score for a message is above a pre-set threshold (4.0 for me) it gets put aside.

There are no new ideas in the message, I just don't know if the existing components have been previously combined in the way I'm proposing. If they have been I couldn't find anyone talking about it. Anyway...

Most websites live forever in obscurity getting a few hundred hits a day at best. However, if that same website gets linked to from a popular super-recommender like slashdot.org or boing-boing.net the hits can jump from 100s per days to 100s per minute. This phenomenon is called the slashdot effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect). On a server built with a low hit volume in mind it's pretty devastating, generally resulting in complete denial of service.

For the last five or so years I've been trying to imagine what it would have been like growing up with easy computing, and I don't think it would have been good for me. Back in 1988 when I first started seriously playing with computers they were hard to use. You had to learn a lot of obscure text commands, and most everything you tried to do required that you know how something worked that could reasonably have been abstracted away from you.

Road Rage Races are an idea I came up with a few years back that I'm trying to resurrect. I've updated the website (https://ry4an.org/rrr), and tacked on a new tag line: "Light travels at 299,792,460 m/s. Immaturity travels at 5 mph."

In a Road Rage Race the competitors start out in a centrally located parking lot in the Twin Cities area. They then race to one of five previously agreed upon destinations selected randomly at the time of the race start. The hitch being that this is done during the height of the evening rush hour keeping top speed in the 10 to 20 mph range.

Half Bakery (http://halfbakery.com) is a website where people can post poorly thought out ideas so they can be commented on, criticized, and (occasionally) praised by total (and generally snarky) strangers. It's a clique-y place that's often unkind to new arrivals, but I was lucky enough to get generally favorable reviews for a few of the ideas I've posted there. Here are a some of the entries I've created there in the past.

Text to speech programs do okay on words they know, but on longer words not in their 'dictionary' they have to sound them out phonetically which seems to be a really hit or miss operation. I wonder if one could hook up text to speech software and a polygraph sensor together to monitor the listeners reaction to the words being read.

I know I cringe when I hear something mis-pronounced and surely something in my mental wince is externally measurable. If the software detected a negative reaction to the way it pronounced a word it could try an alternate pronunciation the next time. Granted it would be a highly iterative process -- requiring many listeners for a each text sample so that the most-favorable response for each word can be found, but how many people listened to Harry Potter as a book on tape.