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In compliance with the COPPA act your account is currently inactive.

At first I thought that for some strange reason my website (BrawlStages.com) had been shut down by The Man for violation of some obscure law. Reading further, I pieced together that I was being forwarded an email from one of the forum’s users that had been sent to him by my website. The forwarded email continued:

Please print this message out and have your parent or guardian sign and date it. Then fax it to:

By this point in the email I was thinking that there was some sort of scam going on. My next move was to google “COPPA act”, which apparently stands for “Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act act”, and is a real thing. By this point I’m very confused, because my forum does not enforce COPPA.

As it turns out, yes it does.

The forum I use is a prepackaged thing that I downloaded, and the first question it asks you when you try to sign up for an account on the forum is whether or not you are at least thirteen years old. I had never really paid attention to this question, nor explored what happens if you say you are not thirteen or older. As you can probably guess by now, it gives you a form that you are supposed to have your parents fill out so you can email or fax back to the site admin.

The email continued. (I’ve changed the names and other personal data before posting it here).

—————————— CUT HERE ——————————
Permission to Participate at BrawlStages.com

Username: Ralph23
Password: asdf1234
Email: ralph23@hotmail.com

I HAVE REVIEWED THE INFORMATION PROVIDED BY MY CHILD AND HEREBY GRANT PERMISSION TO BrawlStages.com TO STORE THIS INFORMATION.
I UNDERSTAND THIS INFORMATION CAN BE CHANGED AT ANY TIME BY ENTERING A PASSWORD.
I UNDERSTAND THAT I MAY REQUEST FOR THIS INFORMATION TO BE REMOVED FROM BrawlStages.com AT ANY TIME.

Parent or Guardian (print your name here): __hank___________________

(sign here): ______________ralph____

Date: ______wed 24 dec 2008_________

—————————— CUT HERE ————–i dont understand this part—————-

Once the administrator has received the above form via fax or regular mail your account will be activated.

Logging into the admin panel on my website, I indeed found this user with an inactive account. I activated it.

But a few things got me about this whole thing.

Firstly, BrawlStages.com has been up and running for almost a year now, and this is the first time I’ve ever gotten one of these emails. Every other kid who’s signed up in the last nine months has either gotten to the parental content form and decided it wasn’t worth it, or has (smartly) lied and said he’s thirteen. The fact that this kid actually went to the trouble of getting his parents to sign and email me the consent form is kind of amazing.

Secondly, I have no proof that the email actually did come from his parents. I changed the names but left the first-names-only quality and capitalization intact, and it does kind of look like a half-assed forgery. I have to assume that it is genuine, because if the kid was going to go through all the trouble of forging a parental content form, why wouldn’t he just say he was thirteen? Nevertheless, the underlying ineffectiveness of COPPA shines through.

Finally, this whole process has been contradictory to COPPA’s stated intent to protect children. When I told a coworker about this transaction, the first thing he said was “String him along. I have no evidence your parents gave you permission to visit this website. Please have them fax a signed note to….” Even ignoring the fact that I accidentally gave away the kid’s name and email address when I pasted the email to my coworker, it would arguably be a cakewalk to string him along — he’s under thirteen and apparently gullible enough to think I’m going to check into whether all my new forum users are really how old they say they are, neither of which I would have known if he had just lied about his age like the rest of the internet. And then he would have been safe among the faceless crowd, instead of the one 12-year-old who made me activate his account by hand. I’m about a million times more likely to fuck with him now than if he hadn’t sent in that consent form — all he’s done is made himself a target.

Go COPPA.

In the first part of this dream, which I don’t remember quite as vividly as the second part, my family and I were travelling down a small path in a small forest. Our destination was the beach on the other side of the forest, which you could clearly see from the path’s further edge — the forest was probably not more than 40 meters wide. Despite the brevity of the path, my family managed to get ambushed by a brown bear along the way. Most of us ran toward the beach, but my dad was trapped on the other side of the bear, who started roughing up the former. I borrowed a pistol from a guy who lived on the beach, ran back to the bear, and shot it three times in the back. At first, this merely angered it and drew its attention to me, but the bullet-induced blood loss eventually did him in before he could get to me. My dad was okay. All of us went back to the beach.

During the process of getting settled into the beach, my friend Ian and his family showed up. We wandered into the water, and watched the aquatic life. I observed one large fish eat a dozen or so smaller fish and spit out their skeletal remains. Not too long after that, Ian and I suddenly and without explanation got booted backwards through time. Most of the rest of this dream was spent with the two of us trying to come up with ways to use our knowledge of the future to get rich. It culminated with me running excitedly, panting, into Ian’s room and having this conversation:

Dave (running into Ian’s room): Ian! Ian!!
Ian: What?
Dave: What year is it?!
Ian: 1993.
Dave (throwing his arms up into the air): GOOGLE STOCK!

It was at this point that I woke up. It was 6:30.

Several Times Over the Past Year
I spent some time thinking about the prank I would pull on Mike this year. I like to have this kind of stuff ready in advance, because some pranks require planning and they always get better the more you think them through. After some discussion with my girlfriend Meg, I had a pretty solid plan formulated in my head. I will not be revealing this plan because, as you will find out, I did not end up getting to pull it on Mike due to circumstances, and I may want to use it in the future.

March 13, 2007
Mike sends me a gmail chat message asking if I want to help him pull a prank on our other roommate Nick this year. The prank is to throw him a surprise birthday party on a day that is not his birthday (which is a reference to one of our favorite episodes of Sealab 2021). The twist here is that we’d be doing it on March 31st, a day before April Fools, because nobody suspects it then. I respond negatively to his idea, thinking that this is too close to his actual birthday (April 9th) to work as a fake birthday party. I don’t think throwing an actual surprise birthday party a week and a half in advance is that unheard of. At any rate, Mike is extremely insistent that it’s a good idea, so I offer my support. March 31st is when one of our game days is happening, so he assures me that even if the prank falls through, there will be a game day to make up for it.

Mike starts a gmail thread about the prank on Nick including everyone that will be coming to our apartment the 31st for game day (except Nick, of course). This gets me thinking, if I’m going to organize my prank on Mike, I’m going to need to get my shit together, so I subsequently start a gmail thread about my prank on Mike, including a smaller core set of friends.

March 14-30, 2007
Much planning is done on both fronts, and by the 31st, shit is about to go down.

March 31, 2007
As it turns out, Nick had to go into work. This works out wonderfully for our prank on Nick, as it gives us lots of time to prepare. A few of the inner circle and Mike and I spend some time buying such things as “Happy Birthday” balloons, cake ingredients, and noisemakers. During the day, I send an offer to pick Nick up from the T station, for the public reason that it will get him home faster for gaming, for the secret reason that I need to stall him for Mike’s prank and give everyone time to set up everything and then hide, and for the double-secret reason that I need to confer with him in confidence about my prank on Mike.

Over the course of the day, several friends of ours show up, and we play some Citadels as well as some Wii games. When 7pm comes, I’m ready to do this thing. Nick gives me a call when he’s about to be at Porter. I meet him and his coworker Casey at the T station, we pick up some liquor, and return home.

As we enter the apartment, he walks into the room where everyone is hiding, and I hear a shout of “SURPRISE!” which I join in on. I follow him into the room, and see a banner hanging on the wall which says “Happy Birthday Nick & Dave”. Yeah, I figured while I was out getting Nick they might just tack me onto the prank. I tell him we’ve got birthday cake. Then Nick says something which I find strange: “You knew about the cake?” I’m thinking “YOU knew about the cake?”, as Mike tells us that BOTH of us were the subject of this prank — there was a separate gmail thread that included Nick but not me. Both of us were fully aware of what was going to happen today, and thought the other one was in the dark. At the T station, while I thought I was stalling Nick for time, he thought he was stalling me for time.

Mike and Nick and I walk into the kitchen to have our cake, and find the rest of the game day group standing around the kitchen table, dressed in black. The cakes on the table have three graham-cracker tombstones with “R.I.P.” on each written in black frosting. Matt hands each of us a rose, and the group tells us that today is our funeral. Mike’s girlfriend Elaine and my girlfriend Meg exchange sympathy cards saying how sorry each of them is about the other’s loss. I look to Mike, and he just gives me this “I have no idea either, dude” look. As it turns out, there was another super secret gmail thread that neither Mike nor Nick nor I were a part of, where the rest of our circle of friends planned this ultra secret prank on all three of us.

As it turns out, I wasn’t able to complete my prank on Mike for reasons I cannot give out, but there will be other opportunities.

To review: Over the previous few weeks, there were the following gmail conversations going on
A public one announcing the game day for the 31st
One sent to everyone except me about Nick’s birthday party prank
One sent to everyone except Nick about my birthday party prank
One sent to everyone except Nick and me explaining how the prank was going to work on both of us at the same time
One sent to everyone except Mike about my prank on him
One sent to everyone except Mike, Nick and me about the super secret funeral prank

1. Finding berries is exceedingly hard if you are red-green colorblind. To simulate what this might look like to a red-green colorblind person, I took an image containing some berries, split it into component RGB channels, and overwrote each of the red and green channels with the average of the two, then combined it all back into a master image. Here is the result. It is indeed hard to spot berries with no red-green information. Hooray for survival of the fittest. (You can click on the image for the original version.)

2. Most* display devices are unable to reproduce all colors. This almost certainly includes the monitor you’re looking at right now. CRT and LCD monitors show colors in the sRGB colorspace, which is some subset of the colors that the human eye can perceive (sRGB is an accepted standard). For a visual example of this, see the following image grabbed from Wikipedia.

I’m not sure I fully understand what is going on, but the outer curve encompasses the CIE 1931 color space**, which if I understand correctly is the most widely accepted approximation of the range of colors humans can see. The inner triangle encompasses the range of colors that can be expressed with sRGB. The big losers here are greens and cyans, though partcularly bright versions of other colors miss out as well. There are alternative RGB colorspaces that are used, though none as widely as sRGB. One popular such example is Adobe RGB, which is accepted to be much better than sRGB. RGB colorspaces need not even be used; there is also CMYK (Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Key[black]) , HSV (Hue-Saturation-Brightness), and others, though each of these has shortcomings as well. For example, CMYK is much better at displaying Cyan, but worse at displaying Red, as you might expect. In the above picture with the curve and the triangle, imagine if the points of the triangle were rotated about 45 degrees and you can get an idea of the kinds of extra colors you’d get and ones that would go missing.

For a more interactive example of how your monitor is unable to produce cyan, here is an interesting picture. In case you were never 6 years old and don’t know how these work, put your face near your monitor and stare at the white dot in the center of the red circle for about a minute. You should notice a faint blue aura around the circle start to form. As this happens, slowly move your face back from the monitor and it will get bigger. This color you are seeing is “true” cyan and cannot be displayed by your monitor — the approximations in sRGB are showed on the right for contrast.

I’ve always been fascinated by esoteric programming languages, though I didn’t until recently know what to call them. The poster child of the esoteric languages is Brainfuck, a programming language whose programs consist entirely of the following eight characters: <> + – [ ] . ,

Any characters other than these eight are ignored by the interpreter (including whitespace). Here is an example brainfuck program:

++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]>++.>+.++++++
+..+++.>++.<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.------.--------.>+.>.

It simply outputs “Hello World!” to the screen.

But one-dimensional code is so passé. All the real coders are using two-dimensional languages, for example PATH. PATH programs look somewhat like pictures, and if you look at them you can trace the path of the program visually around it, in two dimensions. I did a little experimentation in PATH but then settled on Befunge as my esoteric language of choice because it allows for user interaction (which PATH does not).

Here is an example Befunge program:

vv  <      <
    2
    ^  v<
 v1<?>3v4
    ^   ^
>  >?>  ?>5^
    v   v
 v9<?>7v6
    v  v<
    8
 .  >  >   ^
^<

It generates random numbers.

Unfortunately, there was no interpreter for Befunge written in PHP (that I could find) so I wrote one. It’s called Bephunge and it’s awesome.

I am currently working on a Befunge program that allows two humans to play Tic-Tac-Toe. This could probably be done in about 5 minutes in any typical programming language, but then it wouldn’t blow my mind.

In Wales, there is a village by the name of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. Unsurprisingly, according to Wikipedia, this village has the longest place name in the UK. More surprising is that Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch Station, pictured above, is not the longest station name in the UK; this title was stolen by Gorsafawddacha’idraigodanheddogleddollônpenrhynareurdraethceredigion Station in North Wales, a station name specifically designed to steal the title.

In English, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch means “St Mary’s church in the hollow of the white hazel near to the rapid whirlpool and the church of St Tysilio of the red cave”.

I would absolutely love for somebody to tell me how they decided on these prices.

Anyway, it got me thinking. Why don’t I bet everyone I know a lot of money that I’ll outlive them? In my worldview, I will never die, therefore I will necessarily win this bet. However, in their worldview, they will never die, but I will, thus they will win the bet. In other words, this is a bet that both of us will happen to win. In doing so, everyone comes out ahead. Confused yet? Me too.