non-standard deviation

John Scalzi, novelist, blogger and all-round interesting guy, was made

almost ridiculously happy

by the unanimous recommendation of a panel appointed by the International Astronomical Union (IAU)

that Pluto retain its title as a planet.

Which led Scott Westerfield, novelist, blogger and all-round interesting guy, to suggest (in the comments section of the above-referenced page):

Pluto sucks. The “international panel” sucks. You suck.

Which lead Scalzi to spend precious time — that could have been used finishing his forthcoming novel, The Android’s Dream — filming his 7-year-old daughter being funny, cute and just a little bit disturbing.

The film is a 7 Mb flash file, so it’ll take a while to download if you’re on a dial-up connection. But it’s worth the wait.

And yes, before anyone asks, this blog post is a deadline avoidance post. It probably took me less time to put together than it took Scalzi to produce his little film.

OTOH, my deadline’s closer and my project’s smaller. So I’m probably wasting as much time, proportionally speaking.

Peter Ammon, better known on-line as ridiculous_fish, had a problem:

Well, they found me. I knew it was only a matter of time. It happens to every blog. Comment spam, and a lot of it. But nobody told me it would be like this! I got about 200 messages an hour.

Now, Peter Ammon is a clever guy. Buzz Andersen, a fellow Mac OS X programmer and a pretty clever guy himself, calls Peter

one of the smartest people I’ve ever met

when he introduces him to others.

So, when Peter writes:

I mean, the attention is flattering, but still, my goodness! Let’s see what we can do about that.

You can be confident he’ll do more than produce Yet Another CAPTCHA™ tool.

And he did.

Peter’s anti-spam challenge system could be called a ‘MAPTCHA’ (Mathematical CAPTCHA), but most MAPTCHA’s are simplistic, and dull. Also, they require you do a tiny bit of simple arithmetic: enough to fool comment spam engines but not enough to make you feel clever (or stupid).

Peter’s MAPTCHA is not simplistic, definitely not dull (although you do have to think maths is, in and of itself, interesting to appreciate it), and does something really cool even though you don’t have to do any actual mathematics.

I’m not going to spoil the surprise: head on over and take a look yourself.