Category Archives: oddness

oddness

Odd Thoughts

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This weekend as I was mowing the lawn, I pondered the question of what, if anything, plants think. It is a common theme in speculative and science fiction that plants have thoughts. Generally, plants like trees are pictured as having deep and ponderous thoughts while weeds are pictured along the lines of the flitting hummingbird with short and frivolous thoughts. My suspicion is that both ideas bear more than a trace of anthropomorphism. So my question to ponder was: “What do the flowers on a lilac bush think?”

This chain of illogic was brought on by the sight of the dried and sere remnants of the flowers on the lilac bush in the back yard. Like all lilac species, the blooms on my bush last only for a few short weeks in the spring. During that time they are present in profusion with a wonderful and powerful aroma. However, by this weekend, they were mostly brown shells with somewhat less than one out of a thousand little blooms still living. So the question that came unbidden to my mind was what the one still growing bloom in a bundle of flowers on the plant was thinking. Was it celebrating the life of its brothers and sisters now departed? Was it living in fear that it too would soon pass from this world? Or was it soaking up the last of the sun’s rays as it ended its brief life?

What kind of thoughts would go through your mind if you had to watch all your brothers and sisters die in a short span, but you were still hanging on like that lonely flower? I could picture all kinds of mental reactions. The real problem I had is that it is truly hard to escape the prison of our own anthropomorphism and attribute really different thoughts to the plant. Or to put it in the converse, it is really hard to think of a possible thought for the flower that has not already been expressed by or about some human being.

So I’ll ask you – what do you think was going through the mind of the poor surviving flower? You can assume that the flower had a mind. I’m willing to grant that as a given. Call me a throwback to all the funky Russian journals full of Kirlian photography from the 60’s claiming to see plants thinking. Or just call it a topic to consider. And please don’t tell me it was thinking of schemes like those that fill my spam folder. I figure only humans are that depraved and gullible. {*grin*}

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Comment Moderation?

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As I travel the blogosphere, I am puzzled by those blogs that moderate the comments. It is curious to me that some people feel that they have to moderate the comments and others just have the standard minimal captchas as a machine generated spam weeder. It seems to bear no relationship to the volume of visitors or number of comments or any other visible causative agent. So that of course left my mind running through the possible reasons that an author would chose to moderate the comments. I can understand perfectly the need for private blogs, etc. It’s just the comment moderation that seems a bit odd.

The very first possibility that came to mind was the simple prevention of machine based comment spamming (otherwise know as botnet attacks). That seems suspect because I haven’t yet seen any raw spamming of an unmoderated blog that has reasonable captcha authentication. I have even seen a couple of sites that have no captcha requirement, but simply put up an error message every time a comment is posted, forcing the comment author to re-submit the comment before it is accepted. It would seem that such sites would be extremely vulnerable to spamming, but I have not seen hints of it happening yet. Maybe the time delay to re-submit is enough to deter the machine spammers.

The next possibility that came to mind was cyber-stalking activity. People being stalked on the internet might feel vulnerable to allowing comments from the stalker to appear on the blog, implying a relationship that does not exist in reality. The problem with that hypothesis is that anyone being seriously cyber-stalked has probably moved the blog private so they can control who is reading what.

Then of course there is the possibility that they are simply trying to avoid offensive comments. But that would seem to fall under the same category as the first possibility. It also seems if it was going to be a real problem, it should have been apparent on the blogs which are not moderated (even some of the sex related ones which would be the obvious target). The only way this idea makes sense is if certain posters draw certain types of commentators. I suppose this is possible.

Another thought that came to mind was the need of some people to be in absolute control of their environment. I.e. in words of the vernacular, they are control freaks. I cannot think of any reasonable refutation for this possibility.

Along similar lines is the fear of the possibility of disagreeable comments, be they pornographic, spammish, whatever. Just the fear that it might happen could be bad enough to tempt some people to turn on the moderation button.

The final possibility that comes to my mind is the presence of one or a small group of people with a target relationship to the blog author that have been problematic in the past. This could include the Ex from h*ll that leaves bitter and vituperative comments, the former friend that just wants to snipe, you name it. This actually seems like a reasonable cause for moderation.

I’ll close with a request of those of you who read this blog: why did you decide to either moderate or not moderate your comments? Were any of my guesses close to the mark? Am I just an insane idiot? No wait! don’t answer that!