Happy birthday Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace (23 March 1749 – 5 March 1827), French mathematical physicist (who incidentally, did invaluable work in geophysics). He was pretty hard-headed and probably didn’t really have any imaginary friends, but nonetheless Laplace’s Demon is my 3rd in the series of Imaginary Friends of Science. In 1814, when he envisioned an entity such
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#linocut #printmaking #histsci #MastoArt #Laplace #LaplacesDemon #physics #determinism #ImaginaryFriends #Science

Welcome new imaginary friends glenn.finch@bsdly.net and stewart.ashton@bsdly.net to the cast of millions at https://nxdomain.no/~peter/traplist.shtml (served up to us today by mxtest@serverscannerpro.com and mxtest@emailengineexpert.com, respectively).

My favorite new imaginary friend (aka spamtrap) today was however Noreplyadmin@bsdly.net, a faked sender address.

Logs for the interested at https://nxdomain.no/~peter/blogpix/new_imaginary_friends_20250306.txt

The other horribly nonsensical thing I saw during the last 24 hours was the error messages GNU Emacs emits when it is faced with a file of a size that exceeds its expected per-buffer memory allocation.

Fortunately a sane solution was found for that particular problem (split that big hand generated log into smaller pieces) - search for "this log directory" in https://nxdomain.no/~peter/traplist.shtml #spamtraps #greyptrapping #spamd #antispam #cybercrime #imaginaryfriends

For some reason I just looked up my now just over 2 year old piece "The Things Spammers Believe - A Tale of 300,000 Imaginary Friends" https://nxdomain.no/~peter/spammers_believe_in_300k_imaginary_friends.html (prettified, tracked https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-things-spammers-believe-tale-of.html) and realized that number will soon roll past the next big round marker. #spamtraps #traplist #spam #antispam #openbsd #pf #spamd #cybercrime #bottomfeeders #imaginaryfriends

This morning had me notice a new episode of the type described in "The Despicable, No Good, Blackmail Campaign Targeting ... Imaginary Friends?" https://nxdomain.no/~peter/despicable_no_good_blackmail.html (or prettified, tracked https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-despicable-no-good-blackmail.html), the first in quite a while, I might add.

Data so far to be perused at https://nxdomain.no/~peter/wankstortion/20241009/ (now refreshed & gzipped).

Happy birthday to #physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879)! He dreamt up his demon to deal with the very odd 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (which is not a law like others, and can not be derived from first priciples). It states that two bodies of different temperature brought together in a closed system will reach thermal equilibrium; or, you cannot use a cold thing to heat a hot thing; 1/
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#sciart #linocut #printmaker #MaxwellsDemon #ImaginaryFriends #thermodynamics #MastoArt

331133 is a truly bizarre number in this context (https://nxdomain.no/~peter/traplist.shtml) also https://nxdomain.no/~peter/spammers_believe_in_300k_imaginary_friends.html or tracked with nicer formatting https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-things-spammers-believe-tale-of.html but will likely change (increase) soon #spamd #spamfighting #spamtraps #imaginaryfriends #openbsd

This print "Occam's Razor" is about the Law of Economy or Parsimony postulated by Scholastic philosopher William of Ockham (1287–1347), "pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" or entities should not be needlessly multiplied. More simply this law, or really, rule of thumb is that the simplest explanation is usually right.
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#linocut #printmaking #OccamsRazor #typography #sciArt #philosophy #histstm #imaginaryfriends #science #cryptids