So, my dad and I have had a long-running debate over whether or not we should be including spam with so-called “Poison Paragraphs” in the corpus we hand-manage for “AnteSpam’s”:http://antespam.com/ Bayesian database.
I’ve long maintained that the right solution is to just bung it in there–the text that is generally being inserted is generally far too atypical of real emails to make a difference. Dad was more hesitant.
With this in mind, I tried to be gracious when he called to mention that NPR had “a story”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5624749, including an interview with “Paul Graham”:http://paulgraham.com/, the guy who “first proposed using Bayesian analysis”:http://paulgraham.com/spam.html, who confirmed that it really wasn’t a problem.