The Fastest E-Mailer in the West

I sometimes respond to e-mails before they're event sent. :P

If you know me personally and you write to me by e-mail, and I do not respond in some form within a couple of days, I am probably dead. https://t.co/iCcuXGgGca

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) June 25, 2019

"Infinite Moments of Incredible Delight"

I just got a spam e-mail with the title of "Infinite Moments of Incredible Delight" (or something like that), and naturally the first thing I wondered about was which was the first moment that was no longer finite. Of course, it then struck me that that would make a great title for a paper (or section thereof) involving probability theory or power laws.

Lt. Morgan Freeman?

Today I received a spam e-mail from "Morgan Freeman", so I opened it and read the first couple of lines:

"Pardon my intrusion; my name is Lieutenant Morgan Freeman, presently I'm on active duty in Iraq. Please, I have an obscured business proposal that will be of mutual benefit to both of us."

The correct response is, of course, no response. But the second best response is "You were great in Bruce Almighty."

I didn't bother reading the rest of the long e-mail.

Quote of the Day: The Volume of My Text

The following was pointed out by e-mail by my collaborator Peter Mucha, who is not my department chair: "During my time as a department chair, I received roughly 20K *work-related* (e.g., not personal and not spam) emails each year... Mason occasionally accounts for just over 2K of those himself."

Damn! They Found My Super Secret Spy Name!

I just received a spam e-mail that starts in a very amusing way:

‎"Dear Dr. Not Found,

We would like to have an opportunity to work with you and develop monoclonal antibody libraries for your next target protein."

[The message is considerably longer, but I hope I have gotten the point across. :) ]

Headline: Oxford's IT Learning Programme Seeks to "Create More Pleasurable 'User Experiences' "

Let me quote directly from the beginning of an e-mail from Oxford's IT Learning Programme that advertises one of their upcoming courses:

"The need to (...) create more pleasurable 'user experiences' when designing technology has become increasingly apparent in recent years."

What on earth are they teaching at this university???