Todd Stadler's blog

Bellycose

If you are observant (or bored), you'll have noticed lots of articles recently in which experts claim that Americans need to make their portions smaller in order to battle obesity.

But isn't that part of the problem? Ivory tower academians, most of whom probably aren't even obese, preaching at the populace with nary a care for what solutions are even practical?

Accordingly, I present here a list of suggestions on ways to fight obesity from the people who count, the non-experts.

• "I've always imagined some sort of magic Mars Bar would do the trick."

  ?C.J., Texas

• "The problem I have with suggested serving sizes is they tell you to use a golf-ball-sized serving of this and a tennis ball's worth of that. Hello? If I were exercising by playing sports, I wouldn't need to lose weight! I'd rather see serving suggestions like 'you should only eat one Oreo-Big-Stuff-sized serving of butter per meal' or 'the recommended portion size for a Twinkie is three Twinkies.'"

  ?T.B., New York

• "We could fight obesity mano a mano. You know, man-to-man."

  ?B.K., New Mexico

• "Tax cuts for the wealthy are the only way to stop this problem."

  ?G.B., Washington, D.C.

• "From an evolutionary point of view, obesity isn't even a problem. The fattest ? and therefore most out-of-shape ? animals would be the first ones caught by, say, a mountain lion. Therefore, as an evolutionary biologist, I think we need more mountain lions. Particularly in urban areas, like where my ex-wife lives."

  ?M.D., Pennsylvania

• "My pastor said my obesity was caused by my not giving enough to the church, but that doesn't explain why he's so fat. Between you and me, I think he put a curse on me because he's lonely."

  ?P.I., North Carolina

• "We have firm evidence that Iran has a biological program in place that causes obesity in Americans. What am I supposed to do, not defend America from this?"

  ?D.R., Washington, D.C.

• "They say a serving of meat should be the size of a deck of playing cards or a cassette tape. I have no idea how big that is, because I use my computer to listen to music and play solitaire. So I ate a beef tenderloin the size of my computer."

  ?L.J.S., Washington, D.C.

• "I think the problem is with people who use the word phat to describe things. I mean, they're practically glamorizing corpulence!"

  ?S.W., Ohio

• "We need a National Fat-Out Day in which people show their solidarity against obesitude by not eating fattening foods for the whole day. Okay, maybe just a few hours."

  ?A.B., Maryland

• "The reason people eat so much is because there's a glut of safe, affordable food in the market right now. That's why I've proposed the Healthy Eating Act, which gets the government out of the food safety regulation business and puts the control back with the people. It also eliminates funding for the bureaucratic nightmare that is the FDA. This will lead to safer food and yet less obesity, somehow. I'm sure of it."

  ?T.D., Washington, D.C.

• "I support the President's No Child With Big Behind initiative because it mandates a significant decrease in childhood obesity in the next ten years, and yet it does so without using any federal dollars. In fact, he even saved the American taxpayers money by eliminating funding for the President's Council on Physical Fitness"

  ?W.C., New York

• "I refuse to give my thoughts on the grounds that this has turned from a marginal humor piece ? ? la The Onion's 'What Do You Think' ? into a thinly-veiled attack on present-day politicians. Also, so what if I'm a little chubby? I've still got what it takes."

  ?G.D., California

[untitled #506]

Sometimes, people tell you they like fudge.

Other times, they don't.

Dude, make up your mind.

P.S. I love you, coffee!

a qmnf by any other name

You know what? The Web's name space is getting a bit polluted.

I realized this when trying to find a random gibberish URL through the keyword search at whois.net.

I expected that, by randomly (okay, all you computer and math geeks out there, stop breathing so hard — I realize it's not really random) pounding keys, I might find one or two domains that contained the resultant gibberish sequence.

So like any good typist, I happened to pick a sequence from the home row: lkjs. I was somewhat surprised to find that seventeen domains contain this sequence, only one of which — the Norfolk Jin Sei Kai Karate club — appears to not be a gibberish URL.

I was intrigued. Have all the good names been taken that domain name squatters have started registering random keystrokes? Or are these seemingly disposable domains being used for more nefarious purposes?

Apparently, not all of them are. Amazingly, myblahsdfkjkllsjdflksjlksjdflkjsldkfjasdf.com seems to be the URL for Tucson Airport Transport. Why a legitimate business would place their Web site at that address is beyond me.

But it got me to thinking. I figured that most three-letter domains are taken, due to the preponderance of TLAs in business names.

So I set off to find a four-letter sequence (no numbers or punctuation) that did not occur in a registered domain name. Not necessarily an active Web site, mind you, just a domain name somebody bothered to reserve.

My first attempts were rather unsuccessful. Running my fingers across the home row to produce sequences like asdf resulted in such wonderful domains as aasdfksdfsieu.com, a9s7df09as7df098asdf.com, aboutasdfasdfasf.net, and afdasfsadfasdfas.biz (the latter two of which sound like the kind of domain you get when your first choice was already taken). And, of course, the potato and potahto of the let's-hit-purt-near-every-key-on-the-keyboard URL, 1234567890qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm.com and 1234567890-qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm.com.

Continuing to play around, I next searched for registered domains containing the sequence "aaaa".

I expected to find a few domains with such a sequence, much as every phone book seems to have businesses named something like "AAAAA Aardvark Auto Repair", although the benefit is far more obvious in an ordered, static phone book.

Still, I was surprised to find such memorable domains as 1111111111aaaaaaaaaa.com, 11aaaaaepfhk.com, 1700-1900aaaantiques.com, and a-aaaa.com (whose motto must be "the hyphen stands for quality").

In an attempt to find a less popular sequence, I opted for a less popular letter, and let loose the full improbable fury of "qqqq" on whois.net's search engine.

But clearly, the same logic that led me to believe few to no domains would contain that sequence led other, perhaps more clever, people to register domains with it, perhaps in the hope of drawing in traffic from all the people searching for domain names containing "qqqq". Brilliant!

Thus, we have, more or less in order of my incredulity, aqqqq111.org, maiqqqqq.com, qqqqcasino.com, www.qqqqqqqqqq.com, www.qqqqqqqqqqq.com, www.qqqqqqqqqqqqq.com, www.qqqqqqqqqqqqqq.com, www.qqqqqqqqqqqqqqq.com, www.qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqoiuyoiuyoi.com, and, just to prove it can get sillier, qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq.com

Clearly, I wasn't going to find an unused sequence by repeating a letter, no matter how unpopular that letter may be. The allure of repetition must have been known by all the shrewd businesspeople who registered these domains!

So the kid gloves came off. I thought of really improbable four-letter sequences such as "qpoi" and "qnwm", but those showed up somewhere in the domain name space (the latter found in zsqnwmh.com, a name apparently cobbled together from the anglicized initials of its Chinese owners; leave it to the Chinese to ruin my fun).

I got more and more desperate, mumbling to myself, "surely no one has ever registered a domain with the unholy sequence "qjqj" (qjqj.com and qjqj.net) or "jqjq" (bq--3bigkxvxtdpvjqjqxeymqmfc.com, which, while not as extreme as the one with sixty-three q's in it, holds a special place in my heart for being most untypable).

And I don't even want to talk about "qjxj" (cqjxjt.com and qjxjy.com).

Finally, I decided it was contest time. Who could be the first person to find a four-letter sequence that did not appear in whois.net's list of registered domains?

I was all stoked, because everybody likes a contest.

But I decided that before I had to find something in my house to give away to one of my ten friends who reads this page, I had better do some research.

And by research, I mean "ill-conceived, brute-force programming".

I banged together a PHP script to query whois.net, starting at "aaaa" and, in theory, going all the way to "zzzz", some 450,000 queries later.

Except that, surprise, whois.net didn't like being incessantly queried like that, and so shut off access to my dumb little script.

Either that, or I really bungled the programming. It's so hard to tell the difference.

Either way, I managed to search for domains containing patterns "aaaa" through "aasp", an appreciable 485 queries, but still only one-tenth of a percent of all the possible sequences.

It really makes you stop and think about exponents, doesn't it?

Anyhow, of those 485 sequences, only six of them were not found anywhere in whois.net's database of registered domains: "aajq", "aajx", "aakq", "aaqd", "aaqf", and "aaqj".

Yes, eager domain name squatters, now is your chance! Run, run and register aajx.net or aaqdaaqfaaqj.aero or whatever it is you think will be resold for millions of dollars.

So 1.2 percent of the first 485 four-letter sequences are apparently not used in any registered domain names.

I have to imagine the percentage for the whole four-letter-sequence space would be a bit lower, as "a" is a fairly common letter.

But it all goes to prove what I said at first: the Web's name space is getting a bit polluted.

Oh, and that people are stupid.

But that goes without saying. Around here at least.