Log -- David Chess

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

I finished "Digital Fortress", and resisted the temptation to go into any really detailed criticisms in the I writeup. It's basically just junk-food; no point in analyzing exactly which artificial colorings make it so orange.

Bill points out Large Mayfly Hatch Caught on Radar (definitely worth looking at), and comments appropriately "Now I wonder what the weather radar looked like during the 10 plagues." Indeed! What color would they use for frogs?

Web geekery: I got tired of big letters and blueness, so I changed the CSS on the Sims Stories (just the stories, not the index page) to involve smaller letters and brownness. And I developed the (possibly short-lived) intent to upgrade my ancient syndication feeds (currently in RSS 0.92 and Atom 0.3) to modern versions (probably RSS 2.0 and Atom RFC4287 (which seems to oddly lack a notion of version, tsk)). We'll see how that goes.

Amazing Mathematical Fact o' The Day (from a footnote in a recent J. Phil.): the sum of an uncountable number of numbers, all of which are greater than zero, diverges!

This surprised me. The sum of a countably-infinite number of numbers >0 doesn't have to diverge, as in 1/2 plus 1/4 plus 1/8 plus 1/16 and so on forever adding up to 1 and all. But if you have an uncountable number of them (if you have, say, one corresponding to every real number between zero and one), then the sum eventually gets bigger than any limit you might pick.

This seems at first glance to have consequences. For instance if we were in a simple Newtonian universe, and I put into a box a pencil and told you that it was between two and three inches long, it'd be nice to say that there's a nonzero (greater than zero) probability associated with every possible length of the pencil, and (in a simple Newtonian universe) that means a number >0 associated with every real between two and three. And since they're probabilities they have to add up to 1 or less. And by the previous paragraph they can't (they add up and up forever, getting as much bigger than 1 as you like).

There are various ways out of this. One is to admit that things whose probability is zero can still happen; that's a bit uncomfortable. Another is to note that because of Quantum Mechanics and all there are only a finite number of lengths that the pencil can actually have (something to do with the Planck Length; I dunno), so the problem doesn't arise; this is a bit uncomfortable (and/or pleasing) because it suggests that all that there Quantum stuff, or at least something like it, had to be true of the universe, for what smells like a non-contingent mathematical reason.

Which is all pretty cool.

(Preternaturally attentive readers may have noticed that we don't really need the fact that the sum of uncountable numbers >0 diverges to get a problem here. Even if there were only a countably infinite number of lengths the pencil might have, we'd probably want to give them (or at least some infinite subset of them) the same >0 probability, and if you add up even a countably infinite number of the same >0 number, you diverge. And etc etc.)

How are you?

de facto schadenfreude au jus
Windows is the Final Boss. You died.
Sore. One and a half cubic yards of concrete should be left to the professionals, not mixed in small batches in an electric mixer from 60 lb bags. And how come it looks weird if I write "60 pound bags"?
sdfsd
How am I? Well, when a man loves a woman...yadda, yadda, yadda... and the doctor slapped me on the ass.

Probably because it might mean "60 one-pound bags", which wasn't what you meant.

(Now use de facto shadenfreude au jus in a sentence...)

Friday, July 14, 2006

A little thing I forgot to mention yesterday: on Wednesday we had a

big freaking tornado

come through the office park that contains the lab.

It was pretty unusual.

The whole story in great detail: there've been lots of storms lately, and at around 3:30 post-emma on Wednesday M called me up at work to say that the garage door opener wasn't working and the non-opener door was stuck and so the car was stuck in the garage. I said that the weather was looking pretty bad and I didn't have any more meetings that day so what the heck I'd come home and see if I could get the car out of the garage and then work from home for awhile.

I closed things up, and was just leaving the office at around 3:45 when M called me on my Cellular Phone to say that the Garage Door Guy was coming in half an hour and I didn't have to come home if I didn't want to. I was just saying that since I was all closed up anyway I might as well come home, when all the lights went out (it got pretty dark in the hallway there) and it got very quiet (except for people making "hey, the lights have gone out!" sorts of sounds), and then five seconds later the lights came back on and the machines all started back up again (the building's backup generator had cut in, I think), and I said bye to M and said I'll see you in half an hour or so.

So I got in my car and drove out of the lab lot, and looking down toward 9A it looked like there were cars backed up down there and I thought maybe a pole box down there had blown or something, so I went the other way, north up Skyline Drive, toward the traffic light.

All along Skyline there were branches down (and I thought whoa, must have been windy), and then near the light there were two, no three, or actually more like five or six, trees down (one halfway across the road so I had to drive around it), and a couple of lightpoles down (and I thought whoa, must have been real windy), but the traffic was flowing, so I got onto 9A at the light and turned north and drove home.

I got the garage open by pushing out the plexiglas that I used to fix the window that the little boy broke with a basketball the other year, and the Garage Door Guy came (about an hour later than he said he would) and replaced the (rather expensive, sigh) circuit board (again; the first time it blew I put it on a surge suppressor, but that didn't help this time, and the Garage Door Guy said it was probably fried by a "brownout" rather than a surge, which seems like a thing that really shouldn't happen), and all was fine and I got some work done.

And, as I eventually gathered from the TV news and talking to other people, the reason the lights went out while I was on the phone to M at the lab was that a

big freaking tornado

had been passing by knocking down trees and lightpoles and a tire truck, and lifting up a state trooper in his cruiser and spinning it around, and blowing the walls off of the California Closets warehouse, and if (say) M hadn't called me about the Garage Door Guy I might have left five minutes earlier and have been out there driving more or less right in the middle of it.

And (somewhat less frighteningly) if I'd left about fifteen minutes later than I did it might have taken me hours to get home, because 9A and the Saw Mill Parkway and various other routes were closed down shortly after I drove up them.

So sheesh.

Anyway! It's time to make fun of Dan Brown some more. In my notes on his "Angels and Demons" I said that "he has supposedly wise and prominent people thinking and saying things at a People Magazine depth of understanding" (as in the physicist who's all "wow, you've converted matter to energy? That's amazing! Maybe the Bible is true!"), and the same emphatically applies to "Digital Fortress"; his ultra-smart super-educated elite characters don't seem to know very much.

Hale nodded thoughtfully. "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"
Susan looked puzzled.
"It's Latin," Hale said. "From Satires of Juvenal. It means 'Who will guard the guards?'"
"I don't get it," Susan said, "'Who wil guard the guards?'"

Now his character Susan here is like the NSA's best cryptographer, and she's engaged to this amazing Professor of All Possible Languages, and she's smart and educated and generally 133t, but not only has she never heard "quis custodiet ipsos custodes?", but even after someone's translated it for her in the middle of a conversation in which the meaning is blindingly obvious she doesn't get it.

Sheesh! (Again.)

It's not like Brown had to do it that way for the benefit of non-133t readers who might not be familiar with the phrase. He could have written, say:

Hale nodded thoughtfully. "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"
Susan winced. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes: who will guard the guardians? A piece of wisdom or a cliché, depending on how you looked at it; and one that superficially educated people always brought up at this point in the argument.
"It's not that simple," Susan said, "and you know it."

So it's hard to imagine why Brown did it this way. Maybe he thinks the phrase really is an extremely obscure piece of Latin arcana that both Susan and the reader should be grateful that he's revealed? Or maybe he wants to comfort us that even his smart 133t characters don't know lots of stuff. Or maybe he was just in a hurry.

But it's annoying.

From here, a wonderful page of Classic Texts In Computer Science (Hoare's "An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming", Iverson's "The Design of APL", Hughes "Why Functional Programming Matters", and so on and so on); great rainy-day reading.

From Medley, a disturbing Daily Kos story American Fascism. I mean yeah Godwin's Law and all, but still, this is nasty stuff.

And finally:

FROM: OFFICE OF THE GOVERNOR
CENTRAL BANK OF NIGERIA.
SUBJECT: FUNDS DELIVERY.
THIS INTERVENTION IS AS A RESULT OF NUMEROUS APPLICATIONS AND ATTEMPTS BY SOME GROUP OF PEOPLE HERE AND OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD TO ABUSE THE INTERGRITY AND REPUTATION OF OUR APEX BANK, THE CENTRAL BANK OF NIGERIA. HOWEVER, IN ORDER FOR THE BANK TO PROTECT HER IMAGE AND THAT OF THE MINISTRY OF FINANCE, THE MINISTER OF FINANCE AND THE GOVERNOR OF (CBN) HAS BEEN MANDATED TO INFORM YOU THAT WE ARE IN RECEIPT OF AN APPLICATION FOR FUND RELEASE/DELIVERY TO YOU.
FURTHERMORE, BE INFORMED THAT COMMERCIAL BANKS IN THIS OUNTRY,INCLUDING OTHER OFFSHORE FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS WHO CLAIM TO HAVE THE MANDATE OF THE CENTRAL BANK OF NIGERIA TO TRANSFER FUNDS TO HER BENEFICIARIES ARE NOT AUTHORISED TO TRANSFER ABOVE TWENTY MILLION FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS OUT OF THIS COUNTRY WITHOUT DUE CLEARANCE FROM MY OFFICE IN THE CENTRAL BANK OF NIGERIA.SO IF EVENTUALLY YOU ARE IN CONTACT WITH SUCH GROUP OF PEOPLE YOU BETTER STOP FURTHER COMMUNICATION FOR YOUR OWN INTEREST. ALSO, TO ACOMPLISH THE ABOVE,I HAVE STARTED UPDATING YOUR FILE/APPLICATION FOR THE RELEASE/DELIVERY OF YOUR FUND TO YOU. MY OFFICE IS WORKING ON THE INSTRUCTION FROM THE PRESIDENCY, FEDERAL EXECUTIVE COUNCIL,AND THE NATIONAL COMMITTEE FOR BANKERS FORUM THROUGH MY OFFICE TO DELIVER THE FUNDS IN CASH DIRECTLY TO YOUR DOORSTEP BY DIPLOMATIC MEANS YOU HAVE ENDORSED THE PAYMENT DELIVERY ORDER (P.D.O) THE MONEY WILL BE CONCEALED IN TWO METAL BOXES AND WILL BE LABELED AS PERSONAL BELONGINGS SO AS TO OBTAIN FULL DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY COVERAGE TO ENSURE A HITCH-FREE DELIVERY. THIS ARRANGMENT IS BEING IMPLEMENTED IN ORDER TO BEAT THE ACTIVITIES OF FRAUDSTERS. I SYMPATHISE WITH YOU FOR THE DELAY IN RECEIVING YOUR MONEY DUE TO YOUR INABILITY TO LOCATE THE PROPER INSTITUTION RESPONSIBLE FOR SUCH SERVICES IN THIS COUNTRY.
THE MODE OF OUR OPERATION IS AS FOLLOWS:-
1.YOU ARE TO INFORM THIS OFFICE THE NAME OF YOUR NEAREST INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TO ENABLE US ENROUTE THE DIPLOMATIC TICKET CORRECTLY, YOUR CURRENT ADDRESS ANDYOUR PERSONNAL TELEPHONE NUMBERS [CELL PHONE].
2. YOUR PRESENCE WILL ALSO BE NEEDED AT THE AIRPORT TO RECEIVE THE DIPLOMAT ON ARRIVAL SO THAT BOTH OF YOU WILL MOVE STRAIGHT TO YOUR NOMINATED BANK TO LODGE THE FUND INTO YOUR ACCOUNT. ALSO YOU WILL BE REQUIRED TO ENDORSE CERTAIN VITAL DOCUMENTS CONFIRMING THE INTACT RECEIPT OF YOUR FUNDS, AS THIS WILL ENABLE US TO WRITE REPORTS BACK TO THE OFFICES INVOLVED IN PASSING THE BILL THAT HAS RESULTED IN YOUR BEING PAID. MY OFFICIAL I.D SHALL BE SENT TO YOU FOR DOUBLE ASSURANCE OFTHE SOURCE OF THIS LETTER.FINALLY, UPON CONFIRMATION OF YOUR READINESS TO RECEIVE YOUR MONEY, WE SHALL AS SOON AS POSSIBLE START PROCESSING THE NECESSARY DOCUMENTATION TOWARDS THE SAFE DELIVERY OF THE CONSIGNMENT TO YOU IN YOUR COUNTRY ON RECEIPT OF THIS MAIL
AWAITING YOUR PROMPT RESPONSE ONLY ON THIS EMAIL ADDRESS : [redacted]@yahoo.gr
REGARDS,
KEVIN C. OYIBO
SECRETARY
THE GOVERNOR, CENTRAL BANK OF NIGERIA

Unusually long, but I really like the touch in the second paragraph there where it says that if I'm dealing with any other 419 scammers, I better stop further communication with them for my own interest. A feature I haven't seen before; I wonder if it confers any extra evolutionary fitness.

(I was tempted to write back, but I resisted.)

Let's see. I also went into the Big Tub of Water this evening, which was fun. It's all cleaned up and cleared up and sparkling and lethal again, and I spent a nice half an hour in the cool water netting out a few leaves and a bunch of pine needles and stuff, and watching the sun set.

And that was nice.

	log (2006/07/14 to 2006/07/20)
older log newer log reply about archive search random home words site news talking place login Familiar spirit:	Wednesday, July 19, 2006 I finished "Digital Fortress", and resisted the temptation to go into any really detailed criticisms in the I writeup. It's basically just junk-food; no point in analyzing exactly which artificial colorings make it so orange. Bill points out Large Mayfly Hatch Caught on Radar (definitely worth looking at), and comments appropriately "Now I wonder what the weather radar looked like during the 10 plagues." Indeed! What color would they use for frogs? Web geekery: I got tired of big letters and blueness, so I changed the CSS on the Sims Stories (just the stories, not the index page) to involve smaller letters and brownness. And I developed the (possibly short-lived) intent to upgrade my ancient syndication feeds (currently in RSS 0.92 and Atom 0.3) to modern versions (probably RSS 2.0 and Atom RFC4287 (which seems to oddly lack a notion of version, tsk)). We'll see how that goes. Amazing Mathematical Fact o' The Day (from a footnote in a recent J. Phil.): the sum of an uncountable number of numbers, all of which are greater than zero, diverges! This surprised me. The sum of a countably-infinite number of numbers >0 doesn't have to diverge, as in 1/2 plus 1/4 plus 1/8 plus 1/16 and so on forever adding up to 1 and all. But if you have an uncountable number of them (if you have, say, one corresponding to every real number between zero and one), then the sum eventually gets bigger than any limit you might pick. This seems at first glance to have consequences. For instance if we were in a simple Newtonian universe, and I put into a box a pencil and told you that it was between two and three inches long, it'd be nice to say that there's a nonzero (greater than zero) probability associated with every possible length of the pencil, and (in a simple Newtonian universe) that means a number >0 associated with every real between two and three. And since they're probabilities they have to add up to 1 or less. And by the previous paragraph they can't (they add up and up forever, getting as much bigger than 1 as you like). There are various ways out of this. One is to admit that things whose probability is zero can still happen; that's a bit uncomfortable. Another is to note that because of Quantum Mechanics and all there are only a finite number of lengths that the pencil can actually have (something to do with the Planck Length; I dunno), so the problem doesn't arise; this is a bit uncomfortable (and/or pleasing) because it suggests that all that there Quantum stuff, or at least something like it, had to be true of the universe, for what smells like a non-contingent mathematical reason. Which is all pretty cool. (Preternaturally attentive readers may have noticed that we don't really need the fact that the sum of uncountable numbers >0 diverges to get a problem here. Even if there were only a countably infinite number of lengths the pencil might have, we'd probably want to give them (or at least some infinite subset of them) the same >0 probability, and if you add up even a countably infinite number of the same >0 number, you diverge. And etc etc.) How are you? de facto schadenfreude au jus Windows is the Final Boss. You died. Sore. One and a half cubic yards of concrete should be left to the professionals, not mixed in small batches in an electric mixer from 60 lb bags. And how come it looks weird if I write "60 pound bags"? sdfsd How am I? Well, when a man loves a woman...yadda, yadda, yadda... and the doctor slapped me on the ass. Probably because it might mean "60 one-pound bags", which wasn't what you meant. (Now use de facto shadenfreude au jus in a sentence...) Friday, July 14, 2006 A little thing I forgot to mention yesterday: on Wednesday we had a big freaking tornado come through the office park that contains the lab. It was pretty unusual. The whole story in great detail: there've been lots of storms lately, and at around 3:30 post-emma on Wednesday M called me up at work to say that the garage door opener wasn't working and the non-opener door was stuck and so the car was stuck in the garage. I said that the weather was looking pretty bad and I didn't have any more meetings that day so what the heck I'd come home and see if I could get the car out of the garage and then work from home for awhile. I closed things up, and was just leaving the office at around 3:45 when M called me on my Cellular Phone to say that the Garage Door Guy was coming in half an hour and I didn't have to come home if I didn't want to. I was just saying that since I was all closed up anyway I might as well come home, when all the lights went out (it got pretty dark in the hallway there) and it got very quiet (except for people making "hey, the lights have gone out!" sorts of sounds), and then five seconds later the lights came back on and the machines all started back up again (the building's backup generator had cut in, I think), and I said bye to M and said I'll see you in half an hour or so. So I got in my car and drove out of the lab lot, and looking down toward 9A it looked like there were cars backed up down there and I thought maybe a pole box down there had blown or something, so I went the other way, north up Skyline Drive, toward the traffic light. All along Skyline there were branches down (and I thought whoa, must have been windy), and then near the light there were two, no three, or actually more like five or six, trees down (one halfway across the road so I had to drive around it), and a couple of lightpoles down (and I thought whoa, must have been real windy), but the traffic was flowing, so I got onto 9A at the light and turned north and drove home. I got the garage open by pushing out the plexiglas that I used to fix the window that the little boy broke with a basketball the other year, and the Garage Door Guy came (about an hour later than he said he would) and replaced the (rather expensive, sigh) circuit board (again; the first time it blew I put it on a surge suppressor, but that didn't help this time, and the Garage Door Guy said it was probably fried by a "brownout" rather than a surge, which seems like a thing that really shouldn't happen), and all was fine and I got some work done. And, as I eventually gathered from the TV news and talking to other people, the reason the lights went out while I was on the phone to M at the lab was that a big freaking tornado had been passing by knocking down trees and lightpoles and a tire truck, and lifting up a state trooper in his cruiser and spinning it around, and blowing the walls off of the California Closets warehouse, and if (say) M hadn't called me about the Garage Door Guy I might have left five minutes earlier and have been out there driving more or less right in the middle of it. And (somewhat less frighteningly) if I'd left about fifteen minutes later than I did it might have taken me hours to get home, because 9A and the Saw Mill Parkway and various other routes were closed down shortly after I drove up them. So sheesh. Anyway! It's time to make fun of Dan Brown some more. In my notes on his "Angels and Demons" I said that "he has supposedly wise and prominent people thinking and saying things at a People Magazine depth of understanding" (as in the physicist who's all "wow, you've converted matter to energy? That's amazing! Maybe the Bible is true!"), and the same emphatically applies to "Digital Fortress"; his ultra-smart super-educated elite characters don't seem to know very much. Hale nodded thoughtfully. "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Susan looked puzzled. "It's Latin," Hale said. "From Satires of Juvenal. It means 'Who will guard the guards?'" "I don't get it," Susan said, "'Who wil guard the guards?'" Now his character Susan here is like the NSA's best cryptographer, and she's engaged to this amazing Professor of All Possible Languages, and she's smart and educated and generally 133t, but not only has she never heard "quis custodiet ipsos custodes?", but even after someone's translated it for her in the middle of a conversation in which the meaning is blindingly obvious she doesn't get it. Sheesh! (Again.) It's not like Brown had to do it that way for the benefit of non-133t readers who might not be familiar with the phrase. He could have written, say: Hale nodded thoughtfully. "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Susan winced. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes: who will guard the guardians? A piece of wisdom or a cliché, depending on how you looked at it; and one that superficially educated people always brought up at this point in the argument. "It's not that simple," Susan said, "and you know it." So it's hard to imagine why Brown did it this way. Maybe he thinks the phrase really is an extremely obscure piece of Latin arcana that both Susan and the reader should be grateful that he's revealed? Or maybe he wants to comfort us that even his smart 133t characters don't know lots of stuff. Or maybe he was just in a hurry. But it's annoying. From here, a wonderful page of Classic Texts In Computer Science (Hoare's "An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming", Iverson's "The Design of APL", Hughes "Why Functional Programming Matters", and so on and so on); great rainy-day reading. From Medley, a disturbing Daily Kos story American Fascism. I mean yeah Godwin's Law and all, but still, this is nasty stuff. And finally: FROM: OFFICE OF THE GOVERNOR CENTRAL BANK OF NIGERIA. SUBJECT: FUNDS DELIVERY. THIS INTERVENTION IS AS A RESULT OF NUMEROUS APPLICATIONS AND ATTEMPTS BY SOME GROUP OF PEOPLE HERE AND OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD TO ABUSE THE INTERGRITY AND REPUTATION OF OUR APEX BANK, THE CENTRAL BANK OF NIGERIA. HOWEVER, IN ORDER FOR THE BANK TO PROTECT HER IMAGE AND THAT OF THE MINISTRY OF FINANCE, THE MINISTER OF FINANCE AND THE GOVERNOR OF (CBN) HAS BEEN MANDATED TO INFORM YOU THAT WE ARE IN RECEIPT OF AN APPLICATION FOR FUND RELEASE/DELIVERY TO YOU. FURTHERMORE, BE INFORMED THAT COMMERCIAL BANKS IN THIS OUNTRY,INCLUDING OTHER OFFSHORE FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS WHO CLAIM TO HAVE THE MANDATE OF THE CENTRAL BANK OF NIGERIA TO TRANSFER FUNDS TO HER BENEFICIARIES ARE NOT AUTHORISED TO TRANSFER ABOVE TWENTY MILLION FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS OUT OF THIS COUNTRY WITHOUT DUE CLEARANCE FROM MY OFFICE IN THE CENTRAL BANK OF NIGERIA.SO IF EVENTUALLY YOU ARE IN CONTACT WITH SUCH GROUP OF PEOPLE YOU BETTER STOP FURTHER COMMUNICATION FOR YOUR OWN INTEREST. ALSO, TO ACOMPLISH THE ABOVE,I HAVE STARTED UPDATING YOUR FILE/APPLICATION FOR THE RELEASE/DELIVERY OF YOUR FUND TO YOU. MY OFFICE IS WORKING ON THE INSTRUCTION FROM THE PRESIDENCY, FEDERAL EXECUTIVE COUNCIL,AND THE NATIONAL COMMITTEE FOR BANKERS FORUM THROUGH MY OFFICE TO DELIVER THE FUNDS IN CASH DIRECTLY TO YOUR DOORSTEP BY DIPLOMATIC MEANS YOU HAVE ENDORSED THE PAYMENT DELIVERY ORDER (P.D.O) THE MONEY WILL BE CONCEALED IN TWO METAL BOXES AND WILL BE LABELED AS PERSONAL BELONGINGS SO AS TO OBTAIN FULL DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY COVERAGE TO ENSURE A HITCH-FREE DELIVERY. THIS ARRANGMENT IS BEING IMPLEMENTED IN ORDER TO BEAT THE ACTIVITIES OF FRAUDSTERS. I SYMPATHISE WITH YOU FOR THE DELAY IN RECEIVING YOUR MONEY DUE TO YOUR INABILITY TO LOCATE THE PROPER INSTITUTION RESPONSIBLE FOR SUCH SERVICES IN THIS COUNTRY. THE MODE OF OUR OPERATION IS AS FOLLOWS:- 1.YOU ARE TO INFORM THIS OFFICE THE NAME OF YOUR NEAREST INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TO ENABLE US ENROUTE THE DIPLOMATIC TICKET CORRECTLY, YOUR CURRENT ADDRESS ANDYOUR PERSONNAL TELEPHONE NUMBERS [CELL PHONE]. 2. YOUR PRESENCE WILL ALSO BE NEEDED AT THE AIRPORT TO RECEIVE THE DIPLOMAT ON ARRIVAL SO THAT BOTH OF YOU WILL MOVE STRAIGHT TO YOUR NOMINATED BANK TO LODGE THE FUND INTO YOUR ACCOUNT. ALSO YOU WILL BE REQUIRED TO ENDORSE CERTAIN VITAL DOCUMENTS CONFIRMING THE INTACT RECEIPT OF YOUR FUNDS, AS THIS WILL ENABLE US TO WRITE REPORTS BACK TO THE OFFICES INVOLVED IN PASSING THE BILL THAT HAS RESULTED IN YOUR BEING PAID. MY OFFICIAL I.D SHALL BE SENT TO YOU FOR DOUBLE ASSURANCE OFTHE SOURCE OF THIS LETTER.FINALLY, UPON CONFIRMATION OF YOUR READINESS TO RECEIVE YOUR MONEY, WE SHALL AS SOON AS POSSIBLE START PROCESSING THE NECESSARY DOCUMENTATION TOWARDS THE SAFE DELIVERY OF THE CONSIGNMENT TO YOU IN YOUR COUNTRY ON RECEIPT OF THIS MAIL AWAITING YOUR PROMPT RESPONSE ONLY ON THIS EMAIL ADDRESS : [redacted]@yahoo.gr REGARDS, KEVIN C. OYIBO SECRETARY THE GOVERNOR, CENTRAL BANK OF NIGERIA Unusually long, but I really like the touch in the second paragraph there where it says that if I'm dealing with any other 419 scammers, I better stop further communication with them for my own interest. A feature I haven't seen before; I wonder if it confers any extra evolutionary fitness. (I was tempted to write back, but I resisted.) Let's see. I also went into the Big Tub of Water this evening, which was fun. It's all cleaned up and cleared up and sparkling and lethal again, and I spent a nice half an hour in the cool water netting out a few leaves and a bunch of pine needles and stuff, and watching the sun set. And that was nice.
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