Before leaving on a trip to the West Coast, I copied my return flight information onto my Google calendar: SFO to BOS, 12:50 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Now that I’m nearing the end of my visit to the Mythical State of Jefferson (see local landmark above), I’ve just checked the departure details by calling up the calendar on my cell phone. It tells me the flight departs at 9:50 a.m. and arrives at 6:30 p.m.

It could be worse, of course. As an eastbound traveler all that I risk is wasting three hours at the airport. If I were westbound, I might well miss my flight.

The developers of Google calendar would doubtless argue that automatic time-zone conversion is a feature, not a bug. If the event in question had been a conference call scheduled for 12:50 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, then 9:50 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time would indeed be the moment to dial in. Or, if I had a series of pills to be taken at fixed intervals, it might be helpful to have the program remind me at the correct times as I wander across continents. But in the case of today’s flight home, the result is just plain wrong.

It’s not only a Google calendar problem. A few weeks ago a friend was entering a schedule of talks into a Drupal web page for a conference that begins November 7, 2010. All the times were mysteriously shifted by an hour. A 1:00 p.m. talk on the input form became a 2:00 p.m. talk on the displayed web page. The key to solving this mystery is knowing that November 7 is the date daylight saving time ends in (most of) the U.S.

I am certainly not the first to encounter such problems. Peter Neumann’s RISKS Digest reports hundreds of computational mishaps involving time zones or daylight saving time, going back over the past 25 years. The issue is known to Google. But what is the right fix?

Some other calendar software offers the option of specifying a time zone for an event. To handle the airline case correctly, the program needs to allow for different zones for the start and the end times. And the Drupal problem suggests we may also need some means of indicating whether or not to adjust for daylight saving time. It gets very messy. Note that an event scheduled for 1:30 a.m. on November 7, 2010, will happen twice. An event at 2:30 a.m. on March 13, 2011, will never take place.

For years my own makeshift solution to these complexities was to live in a single time zone, no matter where I was. I carried a laptop, but I never changed its time-zone setting, even when I was away from home for weeks or months. When conversion was needed, it happened in my head. Even now the Google calendar display on my laptop gives the correct departure time from SFO, because the laptop doesn’t know that it ever left Boston. But in our new world of location-aware devices, pretending to stay home is no longer an option.

I begin to wonder if the whole railroad-age concept of time zones hasn’t outlived its usefulness. But I haven’t time just now to consider the alternatives. Right now it’s time to leave for the airport. I think.

BP has finally stoppered the Macondo well with a plug of mud and cement, but the gusher of spam continues to pollute inboxes everywhere. Maybe we need a relief well?

It’s been six months since my last spam update. The good news, I suppose, is that last summer’s huge spurt of spam has subsided. But I’m still getting 2,000 inanities a month. That’s six or seven times the rate I was seeing when I first started monitoring my spam intake in 2003. For the two years covered by the graph above, the cumulative total is 111,945 unwanted emails received.

Needless to say, most of those messages are utterly unremarkable. But as I reviewed the most recent batch of dreck, one series of emails caught my eye. In the past 24 hours I’ve received five copies of a spam with the subject line: “Solve this if you could…!!!!”:

For all Math’s champs, Accounting Experts & Number Numbssss… (including future champs too)

Find the 6th Number

1, 2, 6, 42, 1806, ____?

6th number is the password of the attachment.

The attachment mentioned in the last line is a zip archive that unpacks to reveal an .exe file, which I would not run even if I could. But I confess that I did stop to solve the little puzzle sequence. It’s not difficult, although it is a little harder than any of the series I use in the spambot filter on the bit-player comment form. Maybe I should add it to my repertory.

The explosion and fire that destroyed the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon on the night of April 20 was a run-of-the-mill industrial accident. In saying this, I don’t mean to make light of the disaster, in which 11 workers perished. Nevertheless, it’s important to recognize that events like this one have happened before. They happen all the time. Just two weeks earlier, an explosion in a West Virginia coal mine killed 29 workers. A refinery fire in Anacortes, Washington, killed seven on April 2. In February six workers died in a natural gas explosion at a power plant under construction in Connecticut. In January, leaking phosgene gas killed an operator at a West Virginia chemical plant. Looking back a few years further, a 2005 fire at a BP refinery in Texas City, Texas, killed 15 workers and injured 170 more. There was another fatality at the same refinery in 2008. Texas City was also the site of a fertilizer explosion in 1947 that destroyed much of the port and left almost 600 dead. Then there’s the Bhopal catastrophe, where toxic fumes from an insecticide plant suffocated thousands of residents of nearby neighborhoods.

Still another accident that belongs in this sad catalogue is the destruction of the Piper Alpha platform in the North Sea oil fields. Piper Alpha was not a drilling rig but a production platform; it pumped oil and natural gas from completed wells to a terminal in the Orkney Islands. On the night of July 6, 1988, a huge explosion shattered the main part of the platform, and a subsequent fire consumed the rest; 167 crew members died. The apparent cause was a miscommunication: The night shift tried to start up a pump, not knowing that the day shift had removed a crucial valve for maintenance, leading to a massive leak of flammable gas.

It’s a bitter truth: Industrial accidents are business as usual. Death on the job is a cost that we (as a society) are evidently willing to accept and pay. When a mine collapses or a sugar refinery explodes, we read the story in the newspaper and we watch the film at 11, and then we grit our teeth and move on. The Deepwater Horizon sinking is just another in this long series of mishaps.

And yet it’s also totally different. This accident has consequences that reach beyond the workers and their families. A hole in the bottom of the ocean has been spewing hydrocarbons for six weeks. The rate of loss could well be a million gallons a day. Efforts to control the well are still under way, but if they fail the spill might go on for another three months. All that makes for a nightmare that doesn’t drop out of the news cycle after the first 24 hours.

In this respect, Deepwater Horizon may turn out to be not another Piper Alpha but another Three Mile Island. The 1979 accident at that nuclear power station had lasting consequences: We haven’t built another nuclear plant in the U.S. in the 30 years since. (There are other reasons for the long lassitude of the nuclear industry, but TMI was a major factor.) Likewise, in the aftermath of Deepwater Horizon, it seems a fair guess that we won’t be drilling another deep offshore well anywhere near the U.S. coastline for years to come, and maybe decades. Maybe never.

A moratorium on offshore drilling, enforced by economic as well as legal and political pressure, looks like a perfectly sensible response to the current situation. But we deserve more. By all means, let’s do whatever necessary to avoid repeating this particular mistake, but at the same time let’s address the broader issue of why things all over the industrial landscape keep blowing up and falling down.

Will we ever learn what happened on the Deepwater Horizon? There are certainly a lot of investigators trying to find out. Three Congressional committees have heard testimony already. A board of inquiry formed by the Coast Guard and the Minerals Management Service is holding its own series of hearings. So is a state panel in Louisiana. On May 11 President Obama asked the National Academy of Engineering to look into the cause of the accident, then on May 22 he appointed a special commission to carry out yet another investigation. Meanwhile the Justice Department is studying possible civil or criminal penalties.

For all that effort, we sure haven’t learned much yet. The well is leaking, but BP isn’t. It’s amazing how they’ve managed to keep the public and the press at a distance; the one art they seem to have mastered is secrecy. Even friendly trade publications (e.g., Oil and Gas Journal, Offshore) have so far failed to penetrate the security cordon. In the end, though, the story will come out. We’re going to learn why that blowout preventer didn’t prevent a blowout. But I’m not so confident we’ll learn how to prevent the next blowout.

The only blowout preventer I’ve ever seen up close and personal was on a drilling rig near Oklahoma City in 2004. At the time, I thought it was quite a brawny-looking piece of gear, with all those rings of torqued bolts clamping the flanges together, and the big red hydraulic rams like pincers clasping the pipe. Apparently, this unit is puny compared with the BOP stack installed on the Deepwater Horizon well (“five stories tall” in news accounts). Still, the principle of operation is the same: If the well “kicks”—meaning that gas and oil begin to push their way toward the surface—the rams close off the well and keep everything sealed tight. Some rams are meant to choke off the annular space around the drill pipe; some are “blind rams” used when no drill pipe is present in the bore; the last resort is a pipe ram or shear ram meant to crush or cut off the drill pipe.

It sounds foolproof, but evidently not. Controls can stick, valves can leak, parts can break. I’ve read speculation that the shear ram on the BOP beneath the Deepwater Horizon might have failed because it happened to strike a thicker-walled section of drill pipe where two lengths of tubing are threaded together; I really hope that’s not a serious concern, because it would mean that every BOP on the planet has a failure probability of 3 percent. (Drill pipe comes in 30-foot lengths, and the thickened sections are about a foot long.)

A 1997 article in Offshore lists a fascinating variety of other failure modes for deep-water wells. The article is by Larry H. Flak of Boots and Coots—a company often called in to deal with crises like this one. Flak is writing for an audience of oil-patch insiders, and I don’t follow all of his jargon. For example, there’s this wonderfully opaque passage:

Broached blowouts could happen with casing failure. Recently, an ultra-deepwater operator swabbed in a kick resulting in over 9,000 psi on the subsea BOPs. Fortunately, the casing was sound and set just on top of the sand. This allowed safe kick bullheading.

Even for those of us who have never bullheaded or swabbed in a kick, the message comes through: A lot can go wrong. A well is not just a hole in the ground; it’s a fairly complicated structure with multiple concentric layers of casing and drill pipe, which create several interconnected annular spaces; fluids under pressure can find many pathways to the surface. Flak points out that even the massive steel blades of a hydraulic ram can be torn to pieces by high-velocity streams of abrasive fluids, such as drilling mud. He concludes: “Blowout control options in ultra-deepwater are very limited. Blowout prevention is of paramount importance.”

When the story of the Deepwater Horizon accident is finally told, we’re going to hear at least two interpretations. In one telling, BP and its contractors were incompetent or negligent or criminally greedy; they screwed up. But the basic technology of offshore drilling is sound, and if only the companies had followed established industry practices and common sense, none of this mess would have happened. In the other version, BP and its contractors were incompetent or negligent or criminally greedy; they screwed up. But even if they had followed approved industry practices, a disaster like this was waiting to happen, because the technology of offshore drilling is fatally flawed. I really wish I knew which of these stories to believe. I worry that we lack the institutional means to decide between them.

•     •     •

I’m a great admirer of the National Transportation Safety Board. When an airliner crashes or a couple of commuter trains collide, the NTSB mounts a focused, scientific effort to understand the cause of the accident. Investigating accidents is all they do, and this turns out to be a key to their success; they are insulated from the responsibilities and temptations of regulating the industry, adjudicating legal culpability, assessing penalties or even enforcing their own safety recommendations. Separating the investigative and regulatory functions has worked brilliantly, and the board’s findings command wide respect. But the NTSB won’t be investigating the Deepwater Horizon blowout, because the event doesn’t fall within their statutory purview; it’s not a transportation accident. There’s also a Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB), which has had a similar role in the chemicals industry since 1998. You might think that petroleum would count as a chemical substance, but as far as I can tell the CSB will also be sitting this one out. Their mission statement says: “The CSB conducts root cause investigations of chemical accidents at fixed industrial facilities.” The Deepwater Horizon wasn’t “fixed.”

So here’s my call for action: We need a single agency, modeled on the NTSB and the CSB, with authority to investigate all accidents involving industry or infrastructure—everything from well and refinery fires to water-main breaks, power blackouts, mine cave-ins, bridge and dam failures, boiler explosions and sewage spills. I believe we’re under a moral imperative to learn all we can from every such accident, in the hope of preventing a recurrence. A permanent, independent agency with investigative authority, in-house expertise and technical resources looks to me like the best way to reach this goal.

After the 2005 refinery fire in Texas City, BP hired James Baker III (the former Secretray of State) to convene a special of inquiry into the company’s safety practices and culture. The Baker panel report observed that BP had an admirable record on personal safety but cited deficiencies in process safety. Personal safety says: Wear your hardhat, your eye protection and your steel-toed boots when you go out in the plant to open a valve. Process safety says: Make sure you open the right valve, not the one that’s going to create a fireball that engulfs the whole plant. The report remarks: “BP mistakenly interpreted improving personal injury rates as an indication of acceptable process safety performance.” On April 20, BP executives flew out to the Deepwater Horizon to celebrate a personal safety milestone on the rig: no loss-of-work accidents in seven years. The executives were still on board when somebody turned the wrong valve.

Note: I have posted a PDF of the oil and gas chapter from my book Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape on the book’s web site.

Update 2010-06-21: A superb report on the failure modes of blowout preventers was published this morning in The New York Times. The article is by David Barstow, Laura Dodd, James Glanz,  Stephanie Saul and Ian Urbina. Nothing they say is reassuring.

In the past few weeks I’ve had little time for bit-playing; I’ve been playing with atoms instead. I’ve been sorting and packing and toting atoms, then hauling them, rearranging them, offloading them, storing them. Lots and lots of atoms: maybe 10²⁹. Bits are so much easier to handle. My bitly possessions—some hundreds of gigabytes—fit comfortably in a shirt pocket. My atomic chattels are a bulkier burden.

All this atom-pushing was done in the course of moving my household from Durham, North Carolina, to Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’ve moved before, but this time the experience was unusually physical. In vacating my Durham home, I carried all my belongings out of the house and onto a truck—and I did it without helpers and without the use of carts or dollies or other wheeled implements. In other words, everything I own (except a car) I have now lifted up, cradled in my arms, carried 50 feet or more, and set down again. It took a day and a half.

What a goofy thing to do, eh? I even turned away offers of help. I guess I’m just a do-it-yourself kind of guy. In a strange way the labor was worth it: The process gave me a vivid and visceral sense of how stuff accumulates over a lifetime—how my possessions possess me. Late in the afternoon of the second day, as I loaded up the last few items and shut the door of the truck, there was a bright glow of satisfaction and accomplishment.

Yet I never want to do it again. When I arrived in Cambridge, I did not refuse the generous help of a younger, stronger friend. (Thanks, Mici!)

The total weight of my load was roughly two and a half metric tons. At least two tons of that mass consisted of “information goods”—books, periodicals, manuscripts and proofs, file drawers full of paper documents, photographs, musical recordings in various formats, art works. And this was the residue remaining after a two-year effort to lighten my load, mainly by transforming atoms into bits. In particular, I had scanned 22 drawers full of files, converting paper into PDFs and then recycling all the cellulose.

Before I lug my belongings out of this dwelling, I vow to jettison another ton or more. If only I could figure out how to digitize my clothes or my pots and pans.

As for my new home, everyone knows that Cambridge is the intellectual capital of North America. But I didn’t quite realize how high the standard had become. The sign in the photo below is on the garden gate next door.

The literate local canines seem to comply with this order, since the gate is always closed.

All my closest friends know about my strange obsession with the mathematics of mattress flipping. A few thousand other people also know my secret, since I have written about it in an American Scientist column (HTML, PDF), which later became a chapter in a book.

To recapitulate: Fussy housekeepers rotate their mattress twice a year to ensure even wear. But a mattress has three axes of twofold symmetry (roll, pitch and yaw). Rotating around the same axis over and over will not cycle through all four possible states of the mattress, so you need to vary the procedure. Perhaps you do a roll one time and a yaw the next. But in the spring you may have forgotten which way you turned last fall. Thus the quest for a “golden rule” of mattress flipping:

A golden rule of mattress flipping would be some set of geometric maneuvers that you could perform in the same way every time in order to cycle through all the configurations of the mattress. Following this algorithm might entail extra physical labor on each occasion–perhaps making multiple flips or turns–but at least it would eliminate the mental effort of remembering.

The rules of this peculiar game forbid putting any marks on the mattress (which would break the symmetry). If we abide by this constraint, the multiplication table for the group of flip operations looks like this:

R, P and Y indicate half-turns around the roll, pitch and yaw axes; I is the identity or do-nothing operation. This table is bad news for golden rules. We already know that no single operation will cycle through all four states of the system, and the table shows that every combination of two operations is equivalent to some single operation. Hence there is no golden rule.

There the matter stood until a few days ago, when I received a letter from Tim Knoll:

I just completed reading your collection of columns entitled “Group Theory in the Bedroom” and I wanted to offer up an alternative solution to the mattress flipping problem. I believe if you add one more operation to the mattresses you can achieve your “golden rule.” What you need to add is a second bed to allow a shift operation in addition to the rotations. If you have the second bed oriented in the opposite manner as the first bed (with the first having the headboard facing north, the second facing south) you can simply have an operation of a non-rotating shift from the first (north-facing) bed to the second (south-facing) and then do a shift in addition to a rotate about the pitch axis from the south-facing bed to the north-facing bed. This mattress juggling should also achieve the desired results using the roll axis in the second step. I unfortunately can’t implement this method in my own apartment since it is equipped with one queen-sized bed and one full-sized bed, but my tests using an index card seemed accurate.

Ingenious, no? But is it truly a golden rule? I’m going to leave that question for readers to decide.

Knoll also points out that even if the new “shift” operation doesn’t yield a golden rule, it does succeed in getting two mattresses flipped with the same mental effort that would otherwise be needed for one mattress. This raises a further question: Why stop at two beds? What about mattress flipping in a barracks, where many beds are lined up in a row? And then there’s the job of flipping mattresses in the Hilbert Hotel, which has infinitely many beds. Does the mental effort per mattress go to zero in this limit?

Today I learned of the death of Herb Grosch, proud provocateur and mischief-maker of the computing industry. Anybody who ever knew Herb, however slightly or briefly, has a story to tell, so here’s mine.

Grosch held senior positions at major household-name companies (IBM, General Electric) as well as in the U.S. government; he also spent time at MIT and Columbia and was editor of Computerworld. But through it all he cultivated the role of the outsider, or even the outcast; he saw himself as a lone wolf; at IBM they labeled him a “wild duck.” He boasted that he was the second scientist ever hired at IBM (after Wallace Eckert) and, more important, was the first employee with facial hair. Even when he was an insider he was an outsider. Grosch was elected president of the Association for Computing Machinery–but as a dissident candidate, opposing the slate annointed by the nominating committee.

The free-spirited maverick is a celebrated figure in American culture, but not always a well-rewarded one. Wild ducks don’t get tenure, or a pension.

My brief encounter with Herb came ten years ago, when I was working on an article (PDF) about the uses of ternary notation in computing. I read somewhere that Grosch had proposed a ternary architecture for the Whirlwind, Jay Forrester’s enormous early electronic computer. The idea of a base-three machine probably seems weirder today than it did in the early 1950s, but all the same the proposal was not adopted, and most histories of the Whirlwind project say little or nothing about the ternary option. I had no luck finding a copy of Grosch’s memo on the subject, so I tried getting in touch with him directly. With the help of friends I tracked him down, though not in the first place I looked. He was in Riga, Latvia.

Grosch couldn’t supply a copy of the memo; most of his papers, he said, were buried in a landfill in Switzerland. The best he could do was point me to a passage in his autobiography, summarizing a conversation with Forrester:

I said what might be genuinely gainful would be to store a ternary digit in each core, and calculate in base-three rather than binary fashion. There were materials–some kinds of permalloy, as I remember–that had north, south and neutral stable magnetic states. I told him I had taught my Poughkeepsie evening classes at IBM about a special kind of base-three arithmetic I called “signed ternary,” in which zero was in the middle of the number range. In this curious system there was no need for algebraic signs, no problem about the sign of zero, and you rounded perfectly by dropping digits.

Jay being a stiff type, I refrained from calling the ternary digits “tits,” a name which had been the source of much boyish amusement in the Poughkeepsie classes.

By the way, I’m still looking for a copy of that memo. Here’s the reference: Grosch, H. J. R. 1952. Signed ternary arithmetic. Memorandum M-1496, Digital Computer Laboratory, MIT.

Of course I had to ask Herb how and why he’d found his way to Latvia. It was a long story, involving a small NSF grant, archives of Datamation magazine, a collection of Soviet-era computer hardware in an attic at Latvia University, and a romance that Herb hoped would develop into his fifth marriage. But the grant ran out, the marriage plans faltered, and Herb was heading back to U.S. in dire need of employment. His hopes, he said, were “not much above fast-foodery: editing, or tech writing, or even clerking at Barnes and Noble.” He was 82 at the time.

In the end, he did not have to stoop quite so far as editing or tech writing, or Barnes and Noble; he became Adjunct Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. But that posting didn’t last long. A few years later he turned up in Toronto, teaching the history of computing, but by then I’d lost touch with him.

In a “Dear Everybody” message some years ago, Grosch wrote:

I begin this letter on the fourth of six recent Binary Days, 01.11.01…. The next Binary Day will be nine years from now, 01.01.10, and I will write again then if I survive. Shorter recipient list, I assume!

Herb did make it until 01.01.10. He died January 25th. For more on his life and works, see the ACM obituary and a web site at Columbia maintained by Frank da Cruz.

It seems the great spam tide of 2009 is ebbing. The graph records numbers of spam messages per month received by my email accounts; obviously this is just a personal tally and your milage may vary. The percentage of Russian-language spam in my inbox has fallen off somewhat, from more than half last fall to less than 40 percent in January. (For context see my earlier bit-player spam reports: Aug 2009, May 2009, Mar 2009, Nov 2008, Oct 2008, Jun 2008. Also two American Scientist columns: Jul-Aug 2007 and May-Jun 2003.)

I would also like to draw attention to a recent article on the economics of spam: “Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion,” by Chris Kanich, Christian Kreibich, Kirill Levchenko, Brandon Enright, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Vern Paxson and Stefan Savage, Communications of the ACM 52(9):99-107 (available online if you or your library is a subscriber). (Preprint link, thanks to Arvind Narayanan in the comments.) Kanich et al. adopt a clever and mildly controversial strategy: They parasitize an existing spam botnet and alter outgoing emails so that embedded links point back to the investigators’ own web servers, rather than those of the spammers. They write:

Using this methodology, we have documented three spam campaigns comprising over 469 million emails. We identified how much of this spam is successfully delivered, how much is filtered by popular antispam solutions, and, most importantly, how many users “click-through” to the site being advertised (response rate) and how many of those progress to a “sale” or “infection” (conversion rate).

Of the 469 million messages, 347 million were part of a campaign advertising pharmaceuticals. The bottom line: 28 “sales” (no money actually changed hands, and no products were delivered) with an average purchase price of about $100. This is a conversion rate of less than 1 in 10 million, which leaves some doubt about the profitability of the operation. Kanich et al. note that spam-for-hire services would charge roughly $25,000 to send 350 million emails, an order of magnitude more than the revenue generated in this campaign. Yet the mere continued existence of spam argues that the actual costs must be much lower. Kanich et al. speculate that the spammers are a vertically-integrated enterprise: They own both the botnet and the pharmacy.

Finally, I want to update my comment on comment spam. Three months ago I installed the Akismet filter to intercept spam comments submitted to bit-player. The filter has been performing fairly well, blocking about 200 spam comments so far, letting a dozen or so slip through, and falsely imprisoning a couple of legitimate comments. (Advice to commenters: Avoid ALL CAPS.)

Looking through the archive of impounded messages, I am more perplexed than ever about the social and economic basis of this phenomenon. The URLs that constitute the payload of the spam point to a weird miscellany of topics. Someone out there thinks that the readers of this blog are interested in hypnotism, in bathroom faucets and shower enclosures, in garage doors and currency conversion. Most of all we are a musical bunch: Fully a third of the spam comments promote merchandise related to pianos.

Unlike email spam, the comment spams are not generated by an automaton; there are living human beings at the other end of this communication channel. And apparently the spam writers are not hired merely for high-speed, wholesale captcha-solving. In many cases there is ample evidence that the commenter has read the article and understood it, and may even have something interesting to say about it.

It occurs to me that this circumstance gives me an opportunity to open a dialogue. So I now address myself directly to the comment spammers: If you are reading this post because you’ve been hired to plant comments and URLs here, or if you’re doing it for your own commercial gain, I have a proposition for you. Please leave a comment attached to this post, explaining what you’re doing and why–and, if possible, for whom. Tell us what a successfully planted link is worth, and how much you get out of it. If your comment is sufficiently interesting and informative, and if it seems genuine, I’ll let it through the Akismet filter, and you’ll have your chance to sell my readers a piano or a garage door. (This offer applies only to comments attached to this article, and I’ll be the sole judge of what’s interesting, informative and genuine.)

If you’d rather communicate privately, send me an email at brian@bit-player.org.

I got caught Wednesday night in the national pre-Thanksgiving traffic jam. As I was approaching Baltimore, an electronic signboard announced:

Of course I immediately thought: But everyone will read the sign and take I-695, so that road will be jammed too. Then I thought: But everyone who reads the sign will realize that everyone else will also read the sign, and so they’ll not choose 695. Then I thought….

Hmm. There’s something familiar about this problem.

I’m not telling which road I took, but I can report that it was the only congestion-free segment of my trip.

Someone out there is being paid to post comments on bit-player.org–and doubtless on tens of thousands of other blogs as well. The comments are mostly bland and inoffensive, sometimes effusive, always hastily composed. “Thanks for article..good work,” they say. “Amazing!!” “i like your article and i will be wating your net article….”

The payload attached to each of these comments is a link to a web site that someone wants to promote. Some of the sites are selling goods or services; others are billboards full of pay-per-view ads; a fair number are mysterious to me, being written in languages I don’t understand. I would not be astonished to learn that some of the sites are distributing malware.

Years ago, the first wave of comment spam was powered by scripts that flooded blogs and wikis and forums with hundreds of postings full of program-generated gibberish and long lists of links. That abuse was stopped by captchas and other simple filters, like the one I’ve been using here on bit-player. Another important defense is the “nofollow” tag, which instructs search engines to ignore links in comments, thereby eliminating the incentive of gaining PageRank points.

The comment spam arriving now is not generated by a Perl script. Somewhere in the world a person is being paid to read these very sentences, then to prove his or her humanity to the Turing-test filter, and finally to write a few words in response and sneak in a paid link. I’m both fascinated and appalled to learn that the Internet economy can support this activity. What’s the going rate for writing comment spam? Is it worth a penny to get your link briefly exposed to the vast daily readership of bit-player.org? How about a tenth of a penny?

I have a sinking feeling that the people doing this work are themselves victims of a scam, and that they’ll never see even the tenth of a penny. They have probably succumbed to a 21st-century version of the ads I used to see on matchbook covers: “Work at home! Make $500 a week stuffing envelopes in your spare time!”

Of all the ways that poor and desperate people are exploited, this is not the worst. Presumably the work is safe and sanitary, and it even rewards literacy. Some of my comment spammers would surely have interesting ideas to contribute if only they had the luxury of time.

All the same, this kind of commercial graffiti is not something I want to encourage. The available countermeasures include prohibiting all links in comments, holding all comments until a moderator approves them, or requiring commenters to register with a verifiable email address. None of these options appeals to me, but I may have to consider them if the problem persists. For now, though, I’m going to continue the human approach–manually deleting spammy comments as quickly as I can get to them. I am also closing comments on all but the 10 most-recent items on bit-player; the spammers seem to favor older posts.

I have to add that spotting comment spam is not always as easy as you might think. Consider this comment, which came in response to a story about editorial changes at Scientific American magazine:

Many times, when i read your American Scientist columns, I have asked myself that is any other country’s scientist didn’t give anything to the world?

The text of the comment is pertinent to the topic; it raises a question that’s entirely appropriate in this context; and there’s clear evidence that the author has actually been reading bit-player (and even my American Scientist columns) rather than merely spewing comments at random. This is someone I would like to be able to welcome into the community. But the link associated with the comment was an ad for a web-hosting service, and another comment from the same IP number advertised a different service. Was I wrong to hit the delete button?

You’re welcome to comment below, but without spammy links, please.

Sometime this morning, a web page that I visit occasionally changed its appearance from this:

to this:

The images are grabbed from Firefox on OS X; same effect in Safari. Some CSS forensics reveals what’s gone wrong here: Google has added a “height:28px” property to the style for the two buttons, and boosted their type size from 13 pixels to 16. (Type inside the search box is also given the giant billboard treatment.) Apparently the height property prevents the browser from using those cute jelly-bean widgets for the buttons.

Can we strike a bargain, Google? I’ll let you take over the world and track my every movement; I’ll sign over all my copyrights and promise never to block your advertising, if you’ll just give me my widgets back. Go ahead and Be Evil; just Don’t Be Ugly.

Or am I going to have to override you in userContent.css?

Update: Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President for Search Products & User Experience, explains:

For us, search has always been our focus. And, starting today, you’ll notice on our homepage and on our search results pages, our search box is growing in size. Although this is a very simple idea and an even simpler change, we’re excited about it — because it symbolizes our focus on search and because it makes our clean, minimalist homepage even easier and more fun to use. The new, larger Google search box features larger text when you type so you can see your query more clearly. It also uses a larger text size for the suggestions below the search box, making it easier to select one of the possible refinements.

For Firefox users who find the “supersized” page a nonimprovement, I offer the following quick hack:

@-moz-document domain(google.com) {
  .lsb, .gac_sb {
	font-size:13px ! important;
	height:inherit ! important;
	}

  .lst, .gac_m {
	font-size:14px ! important;
	}

}

Add these lines to your userContent.css file (see the Customizing Mozilla site for further instructions). This seems to fix the widget problem and the input-field text size, but all the drop-down gadgetry is still a mess and maybe the dropdown menu of suggestions. This will break if Google’s next whim is to change the class names “lsb,” “lst,” etc. If anyone has a cleaner solution, please pass it on.