I get weird emails


Usually I would ignore these weird emails as nonsensical spam jibberish, but this one caught my eye for some reason:

from: Alana Madrid
to: [email protected]
cc: [Other Purdue Emails]
date: Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 7:55 AM
subject: or art not thou the hum of multitudes was there but multitudes of lambs

the sun descending in the west, earth rais’d up her head,the hum of multitudes was there but multitudes of lambs his arm is withered to its root;

So after some googling, these random poetic sounding phrases are from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, which are essentially religious poems. And payvand.com is an Iran news site.

Can anyone make sense out of this, or should I just ignore it as some crazy email?

Comments

  1. says

    Seems pretty random to me. Dunno much about Blake, other than his "Red Dragon" piece from the eponymous film; perhaps just some spambot trying to increase your interest in culture and arts. ;)

  2. says

    Seems pretty random to me. Dunno much about Blake, other than his “Red Dragon” piece from the eponymous film; perhaps just some spambot trying to increase your interest in culture and arts. ;)

  3. says

    Looks like pretty standard automated spambot stuff to me (they try to bunk the email with random high-quality writing to disguise a tiny call to action from anti-spam that is based on word frequency). But if that was all the message was, it is probably missing its payload. Maybe your uni servers stripped the attachment.

  4. says

    Looks like pretty standard automated spambot stuff to me (they try to bunk the email with random high-quality writing to disguise a tiny call to action from anti-spam that is based on word frequency). But if that was all the message was, it is probably missing its payload. Maybe your uni servers stripped the attachment.

  5. LS says

    That’s the wonderful thing about the Internet: there is no socially unacceptable. Only other people who think you’re weird.

  6. the_Siliconopolitan says

    I think answers to those questions are gonna require him to chip in a lot more. I feel comfortable making the sexist assumption of this being a guy. Hopefully not one with an impregnation fetish, though I doubt it …

  7. says

    I’d heard once that women are more likely to wear revealing clothing when they’re ovulating. I think I got that from Science News, too… but I’m not sure.Maybe the asker was science-minded and testing that hypothesis… or maybe the guy was just reeeeeally creepy. I dunno.Either way, I’ve sorta filed that idea away under “Most likely an old wives’ tale.”

  8. LS says

    What’s the minimum chip in requirement for intimate sexual information? =PAnd would this guy win like…a doodle or something if he was correct about all of it?

  9. says

    Inquiring minds want to know Jen! I read that with a look that can only be described as simultaneously awestruck and dumbfounded, I guess it takes all types of people right? maybe?

  10. says

    I just googled “Bayesian neural net” and found a shit-ton (roughly 4,000 pounds) of math. What kind of crazy guy would spend that much time predicting a woman’s ovulatory cycles?

  11. says

    A linear classifier will not work when there are a lot of features because it is basically based on linear regression model. A linear regression can not handle independent variables that are highly correlated with each other. There would be a lot of misfiring of neurons. A Bayesian network, on the other hand, is more suitable for the same task. It can made better if a good feature extraction algorithm is implemented.The only problem is there is no way for such a neural net to know if it gets the answer right or wrong. And the root cause is the nature of internet. It is like a separate reality where people can dump anything into it, and there is no way to verify the accuracy of the information.

  12. Graebg says

    No no.. it’s a scam. He sends that to 10,000 women, and probably ends up hitting 50-100 women who are trying to get pregnant and know they will be ovulating on june 17. They contact him, say “that was amazing, and I am vulnerable to Nigerian internet scams!” Very soon, the scammer offers a fertility therapy or counseling for a mere 300 dollars a month for six months.Totally weird.

  13. says

    “Did you start to ovulate on June 17? The picture of yourself online induce lots of signals in my ovulation-detection Bayesian neural net.”I read this email in the voice of Sheldon Cooper from the Big Bang Theory. :P

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