Fast Sloth, Spammed History, God and AI, Ambiguity Weary

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: Too fast, too furious — The Fast & Furious action movies now have a companion in the world of animal study. A team of biologists videoed a furious and fast – well, relatively fast – incident, which they […]

(Belated) Wedding congratulations to a Spam-Managerial Ig Nobel Prize winner

We have only just now seen news of the 2017 wedding of the manager of the Spam Museum. We offer our heartiest, most tasteful congratulations. Why this matters to us: The 1992 Ig Nobel Prize for nutrition was awarded to the utilizers of Spam, courageous consumers of canned comestibles, for 54 years of undiscriminating digestion. The wedding announcement, in […]

Ig-Nobel-winning spam pioneer indicted again

Sanford Wallace, who proudly and perhaps correctly claims credit for the early growth spurt of computer spam, is having yet another adventure with the legal system. Wallace likes to be called “Spamford”. He was awarded the 1997 Ig Nobel Prize in the field of communications. The Ig Nobel citation read “neither rain nor sleet nor dark […]

Ig Nobel Prize winner: $711 million

Sanford (“Spamford”) Wallace, winner of the 1997 Ig Nobel Prize for communications (“neither rain nor sleet nor dark of night have stayed this self-appointed courier from delivering electronic junk mail to all the world”), is in the news again. Reuters reports, on October 30, 2009 that: Facebook gets $711 million damages in anti-spam case Social […]