Futility Closet - 217-The Bone Wars

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 10,000 quirky curiosities from Nepal's flag to an unflattering tombstone. This is episode 217. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. The end of the Civil War opened a new era of fossil hunting in the American West and a bitter feud between two rival paleontologists who spent 20 years sabotaging one another in a constant struggle for supremacy.

Starting point is 00:00:38 In today's show, we'll tell the story of the Bone Wars, the greatest scientific feud of the 19th century. We'll also sympathize with Scunthorpe and puzzle over why a driver can't drive. In episode 204, we described how Mary Anning helped to lay the foundations of British paleontology in the 1820s. Half a century later, the discipline was expanding in America, and two of its main practitioners were Edward Drinker Cope of Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences and Othniel Charles Marsh of Yale. The two men had very different backgrounds. Cope came from a wealthy Quaker family in Philadelphia, and Marsh had grown up poor in upstate New York and ascended with the backing of a rich uncle. But they met while attending Berlin University in

Starting point is 00:01:23 Europe in 1863 and became friends. Early in their careers, they both worked on fossils from the Atlantic coast in the Midwest, and they even named species after each other. At the end of the Civil War, the Western U.S. opened up, and both of them saw the enormous potential in exploring it for fossils, both for their intrinsic value and for the light they might throw on Darwin's theory of evolution. With that huge field open before them, there should have been plenty of room for both men to succeed or even cooperate, but they were doomed by an odd factor, their temperaments. Cope was pugnacious and quarrelsome. He told one class, if any man leaves this room or enters after I have closed that door, he will be shot. He published almost 1,400 titles in his lifetime, but his hastiness led to constant mistakes. Marsh was nine years older, but he was

Starting point is 00:02:05 ambitious and egotistical. His colleagues respected him but disliked him. They called him the Great Dismal Swamp. His detractors said that he was autocratic and petty, that he published his assistants' work under his own name, and that he never paid them on time. Worst of all, both of them were mistrustful by nature, and each of them came to see the other as his competitor. This ruined everything. They began making separate expeditions to the west in the early 1870s, and they quickly found it was too small for the two of them. The basic picture was quickly clear. Cope thought Marsh was inferior, and Marsh thought Cope was careless. In the summer of 1872, they were working about 100 miles apart

Starting point is 00:02:39 in southwest Wyoming when they both discovered the remains of a new giant horned mammal. Cope rightly judged that they'd found the same creature, today it's called a Uintothyr, and in his haste to claim credit, he sent the text of his paper by telegram. Predictably, the telegraph operators made a hash of his names and descriptions, which led to what the journal Science calls probably the most bizarre of all paleontological notices. And it came to nothing. It appears that their colleague Joseph Leidy, who was working placidly nearby, had already discovered the same creature 16 days earlier. And it came to nothing. It appears that their colleague Joseph Leidy, who was working placidly nearby, had already discovered the same creature 16 days earlier.

Starting point is 00:03:11 To add to the confusion, Marsh found a Uintithyr skull of his own, and then confusingly gave it the same name that Leidy had already chosen. And Cope insisted that Uintithyrs were a kind of elephant, which is just wrong. They might have tried to patch this up and start over, but instead they started a tradition of trying to embarrass and humiliate each other in print. Marsh wrote, Cope had endeavored to secure priority by sharp practice and failed. For this kind of sharp practice in science, Professor Cope is almost as well known as he is for the number and magnitude of his blunders. Professor Cope's errors will continue to invite correction, but these, like his blunders, are hydra-headed, and life is really too short to spend valuable time in such an ungracious task, especially as in the present case, Professor Cope has not even

Starting point is 00:03:49 returned thanks for the correction of nearly half a hundred errors. Cope wrote to his father, as to the learned professor of copology in Yale, he does not disturb me, and I will not notice him again. And both refused to back down. Between August 1872 and June 1873, each of them published 16 different articles on Uintithiers. Neither paid any attention to the priority of the other scientific names, and both ignored any priority of Leidy's. The result was chaos in the nomenclature. Poor Leidy eventually got so exasperated at all this jockeying that he withdrew from vertebrate paleontology altogether, saying it was no longer a fit field of work for a gentleman.

Starting point is 00:04:24 Compounding the trouble, Cope and Marsh seemed to have been terribly disorganized managers of people. Two of the men that Cope had brought turned out to have been hired previously by Marsh, who was furious, though possibly he'd brought that trouble on himself by making lax agreements with them. The men assured Marsh they were still his, but then one of them accidentally forwarded his material to Cope, who had to return the fossils to Marsh, which put everyone's hackles up even further. Marsh wrote to Cope, the information I received on this subject made me very angry, and had it come at the time I was so mad with you for getting away Smith, I should have gone for you, not with pistols or fists, but in print. I was never so angry in my life. Increasingly, each accused the other of bad faith, which made things still worse. Marsh wrote,

Starting point is 00:05:03 I have of late been subjected to a very unscrupulous rivalry and have thus lost more than half the discoveries for which I risked my life during my Western explorations. In a sort of spiral, each stooped to increasingly low practice and sometimes outright deception. In 1877, Marsh got a letter from a Colorado school teacher named Arthur Lakes, telling him about some enormous bones he'd found near the town of Morrison. He said they were, quote, monstrous, utterly beyond anything I had ever read or conceived possible. He had trouble getting a response from Marsh, so he sent some sample bones to Cope. When Marsh heard about that, he quickly hired Lakes and asked him to keep the finds a secret. Marsh sent Benjamin Mudge, a professor at the Agricultural College of Kansas,

Starting point is 00:05:41 to take a look at what Lakes had found. He cabled back, satisfactory arrangement made for two months, and added that Jones cannot interfere. By this time, they had a code name for Cope. Within weeks, Lakes and Mudge had sent a ton of bones back east, including the first remains of a Stegosaurus, and when they had finished with the beds, they filled in one of the most productive sites to keep Cope from digging there. And these squabbles were still sowing confusion in the nomenclature. At about this time, another Colorado teacher, O.W. Lucas, found bones near Canyon City and contacted Cope. Cope answered quickly, and Lucas sent him bones of a huge creature that Cope named Camarosaurus. Unfortunately, Lakes had found bones of the same creature earlier, and Marsh had already named it Titanosaurus. Marsh had published first, so he had the right to name it, but Cope pointed

Starting point is 00:06:23 out that that name had already been used for another animal, so Marsh changed the name to Atlantosaurus. And now the two paleontologists had begun openly trying to woo workers away from one another. Marsh tried to steal Lucas from Cope, and Cope tried to steal Mudge from Marsh. Neither man budged, but this angling only increased the air of mistrust. It seems such a shame. Like, you would think they went into this field for the air of mistrust. It seems such a shame. You would think they went into this field for the interest of science or benefiting mankind or humankind with new knowledge.

Starting point is 00:06:52 And there's just not a trace of dignity or honor anywhere in it. And it just becomes about their egos and their pride. And it's so needless, because it was, as I said in the beginning, they just had the whole field before them. In the history of science,

Starting point is 00:07:03 there's great opportunity, and there was nothing in the circumstances that required just had the whole field before them. In the history of science, there's great opportunity, and there was nothing in the circumstances that required any of this to happen. It's just thin skin and refusal to... Well, and egotism, it sounds like. Yeah, and it just rolls on and on for 20 years. In July 1877,

Starting point is 00:07:18 Marsh got a letter from two railway workers in Como, Wyoming, who said they discovered, quote, a large number of fossils there. Marsh sent a collector named Samuel Williston, who assessed the find, and wrote, the bones are very thick, well-preserved, and easy to get out, and added, I think for three months the matter can be kept perfectly quiet, and by that time I hope you will have the matter all your own. That might have been fine. Marsh asked the two men to send additional fossils and promised a monthly fee, and he asked them to keep cope out of the region. In the first year, they sent back 30 tons of bones, including those of Allosaurus, Diplodocus, Stegosaurus, and Camptosaurus. But Marsh didn't

Starting point is 00:07:49 pay the men consistently, and one of them switched Cope's team, and the competition heated up again. There were reports that if Marsh's man gathered more bones than he could use, he'd smash the rest so the other camp couldn't get them. Marsh's people got so paranoid that when a man arrived at their camp one day in 1878, they contrived to take a handwriting sample to be sure the visitor wasn't Cope in disguise. A year later, Cope really did show up at a Marsh dig. Lakes wrote in his journal that Cope, quote, entertained his party by singing comic songs with a refrain at the end like the howl of a coyote. After he'd gone, Lakes wrote,

Starting point is 00:08:18 I must say that what I saw of him I liked very much. His manner is so affable and his conversation very agreeable. I only wish I could feel sure he had a sound reputation for honesty. And so it went. Cope and Marsh ran expeditions every summer and then wrote up their fines in the winter, and increasingly they encouraged their armies of prospectors to engage in spying, sabotage, obstruction, bribery, theft, concealment, and destruction as each tried to hamper the other's progress. At one point, the two teams even fought each other by throwing stones. In time, Marsh began to pull ahead because he had better political connections. In the early going,

Starting point is 00:08:53 he'd worked on a government survey run by Clarence King, the enigmatic geologist we met in episode 194. When that evolved into the U.S. Geological Survey, Marsh was named the official vertebrate paleontologist, so now he had access to government funds and facilities and could hire even more collectors. In time, he rose to become president of the National Academy of Sciences. Cope had to finance his own work, and he watched Marsh enviously from the outside. He spent most of his time buying a journal, the American Naturalist, so he could publish more quickly, and he made some imprudent investments in mines as he tried to keep up. Both men had been spending money furiously. By 1888, Cope had spent about $100,000 amassing his collection, and Marsh spent over $200,000 between 1868 and 1882 alone. Cope resented Marsh's ascendancy, and he became bitter

Starting point is 00:09:32 and suspicious. When the government cut off some of his funding, he suspected that Marsh and John Wesley Powell, the director of the U.S. Geological Survey, were behind it. He wrote to his wife, a great deal depends on official position. It regulates everything, especially society. It makes less difference what a man knows than what office does he hold. Hence, inferior men like Powell and Marsh may have great influence simply because they have gotten position. It makes little difference how this was done. All of this came to a head in December 1889 when Cope received an order from the Secretary of the Interior ordering him to deposit his fossils in the United States National Museum since they'd been gathered while he was doing government work. But Cope had spent about $75,000 of his own money getting them. His work on the survey had been compensated with publication, not with a salary.

Starting point is 00:10:14 Indignant, he sought a sympathetic ear, and he found one in William Hosea Ballou, a reporter for the New York Herald. Cope gave him an interview and several letters from his scientific friends, and on January 12, 1890, Ballou published a nine-column story titled Scientists Wage Bitter Warfare. In it, Cope's resentment spilled over. He called Powell and Marsh partners in incompetence, ignorance, and plagiarism. He said Marsh was locking away government collections in the Peabody Museum at Yale and refusing to allow visiting scientists to see them, and keeping such poor records that it was impossible to distinguish the specimens. He said flatly that Marsh had kept the salaries of his field parties for himself, and that his published work was, quote, in part that of his employees, the remainder being a collection of plagiarisms. He said Marsh's paper on Cretaceous mammals was the most remarkable collection of errors and ignorance of anatomy ever displayed. Cope also included letters from

Starting point is 00:11:03 some of Marsh's former assistants. Samuel Williston had written to Cope, during most of my time while in his employ, I never knew Marsh to do two consecutive honest days work in science. The larger part of his papers published since my connection with him in 1878 had been either the work or the actual language of his assistants. He has never been known to tell the truth when a falsehood would serve the purpose as well. Powell, the director of the U.S. Geological Survey, shot back in the same article, calling Cope a species fiend. He wrote, Professor Cope's mental and moral characteristics unfit him for any position of trust and responsibility. In addition to his great vanity, which leads him into vicious species work,

Starting point is 00:11:37 he is inordinately jealous and suspicious of every other worker, and these two traits combined give him that hysterical temper and gift of voluble denunciation rarely found in persons of his sex. Marsh wrote a reply of his own, which appeared a week after Cope's attack. He said he'd had doubts about Cope's sanity as early as their first meeting in 1863. He wrote, if my language may seem severe, it should be remembered that for 10 years I have suffered these attacks in silence, because it seemed to be due to the positions I have held to abstain from all personal controversy. Among other things, he claimed that Cope had come to the Peabody Museum on a Saturday, entered his private rooms where Marsh's work was laid out, and published what he found there. He wrote, had Professor Cope been a man of honor, he would have

Starting point is 00:12:16 been humiliated by what he had done and made prompt reparation. On the contrary, he boasted of his act and has since continued to publish the results of what he saw, with many falsehoods added. And yet Professor Cope has the audacity to complain that visiting scientists are not allowed access to the specimens now at New Haven. Marsh also accused Cope of stealing fossils from a box that had been awaiting shipment in Kansas. He quoted statements from his own assistants denying the charges against him, and he told the damning story of a Lasmosaurus. In the 1870s, Cope had set up a skeleton of this Mesozoic sea reptile at the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences. Marsh examined it and noted that Cope had exchanged the tail for the neck. He wrote, when I informed Professor Cope of it, his wounded vanity received a shock from which it has never recovered,

Starting point is 00:12:56 and he has since been my bitter enemy. Cope was embarrassed by the Elasmosaurus story and tried to buy up every copy he could find of the journal in which the reconstruction had appeared. Marsh tried to publicize it even more widely. The newspaper battle went on until January 26th. Marsh claimed victory, but he lost the war. The public hadn't understood all the accusations anyway, and Marsh's political enemies used the feud to move against him. Congress cut his funding, and Powell at the U.S. Geological Survey sent him a telegram that simply read, Appropriations cut off. Please send your resignation at once. That was a huge blow. He'd had a large and expensive lab with a series of monographs in preparation,

Starting point is 00:13:33 and the money from his rich uncle's estate was just drying up. He'd lived in luxury for a decade, but now he had to mortgage his home and for the first time ask a salary from Yale. At the same time, Cope got a position with the Texas Geological Survey. His fortunes brightened throughout the 1890s as he was promoted to Joseph Leidy's old position as professor of zoology. But he grew ill toward the end and had to rent out one of his houses and sell part of his fossil collection to make ends meet. By the time he died in 1897, both men were financially ruined. It's hard to think of a charitable way to describe all this. One writer

Starting point is 00:14:05 says the feud has been unequaled for bitterness in the scientific world. If we need to declare a winner, it was Marsh who named 98 new species to cope 64. Both of those titles are astonishing. When the two men started, only nine species of North American dinosaur had been known. And their finds include many familiar names, Triceratops, Allosaurus, Brontosaurus, Diplodocus, and Stegosaurus. But their constant fighting and eagerness for glory cost them personally and sowed lasting confusion in the discipline. One writer sums up their hasty mistakes, placing the correct head on the wrong end of a body, cope, putting the wrong head on a body, marsh, naming the same animal twice, cope, describing a horn from a dinosaur as a new type of bison,

Starting point is 00:14:50 marsh, giving an elephant-like trunk to a rhinoceros-type animal, cope, describing separate bones of the same animal as an amphibian and a reptile, marsh, and giving six different names to an animal already described by another scientist, cope and marsh. These confusions and misconceptions persisted for years, and the few damaged the reputation of American paleontology in Europe for decades. Even poor Joseph Leidy, who had been the dean of American paleontology in the 1840s and 50s, saw his legacy permanently reduced. When Henry Fairfield Osborne investigated this sad story some years after it finished, he found not only that the constant squabbling had driven Leidy permanently out of the field, but that neither Cope nor Marsh had mentioned him even once in

Starting point is 00:15:25 their own works. We got a fair amount of follow-up to Episode 212's discussion of the difficulties that computer programs can have with names and addresses. So this week, I'm going to cover some of the updates on names, and next week, I'll see what I can do with addresses. In episode 212, I had discussed several ways that computer forms can fail to handle the great variety in people's names, such as by only having boxes for a first and a last name, or by rejecting names that are only one letter. Daniel Summers, an experienced software developer who has very ably managed the Futility Closet website for many years, wrote to say, I think a lot of the criticism of name fields on websites are missing a few very pertinent points. One, many people are confused by complex web forms.

Starting point is 00:16:22 Writing a truly capable validating form for validating names would result in a form that would be completely confusing for the average user. So Daniel notes that given the need for simple forms that most people can understand, and the likelihood of these forms being used by, say, a U.S. or similar audience, then you end up with the first name, last name kind of form that some people criticize. Daniel also said, Two, bots and automated hacking tools are a real concern. Why should a website mind that someone creates an account with the last name O?

Starting point is 00:16:57 Because it's just as easy to create A through Z as well. To be sure, length-based rules are short-sighted, but you have to admit that the ability to cite one or two people whose real names fall afoul of the rule does not disprove that the rule is greater than 99% effective. Ideally, there would be some way to identify the origin of the name, which would let the fields and validation rules apply to that origin. This would take care of problem number one. Number two becomes more of an issue depending on the scope of the site. Commenting on a blog? You should be making something up anyway. Signing up for your bank or making a boarding pass? Yes, they should be verifying the actual name. At any rate, I just wanted to provide a bit more from the other side

Starting point is 00:17:36 of people who have written forms with first, last names and moved on. So thank you, Daniel, for speaking up in defense of programmers and software developers. We do think that it's often important to hear from both sides on an issue. Yeah. And on the topic of having a name that is a single letter, Jamie Cox wrote, my stepfather, born and raised in the U.S., has the first name A and middle name B. He is often obliged to explain that these are not initials. In his youth, he and another young man were caught fishing without a license. Rather than issue a ticket or arrest them, the kindly officer escorted them to the office to give them the opportunity to buy fishing licenses, which they gratefully accepted. The license clerk asked his first name.

Starting point is 00:18:21 Middle name? B. The skeptical clerk put her hands on her hips and convinced that these miscreants weren't planning to give their real names said, I suppose you're going to tell me your last name is C. And Jamie didn't mention whether his stepfather encounters that much trouble with computer forms, but I'm going to guess that he would. In episode 212, I had mentioned that one of the falsehoods that programmers may incorrectly believe about names is that names won't contain naughty or offensive words. Rene Bourassa, whose last name ends with A-S-S-A, wrote, Hello, Sharon, Greg, and your trusty sidekick, Sasha.

Starting point is 00:19:01 I am finding these conversations about the limitations on computer programs fascinating, and I love that they keep coming up in the podcast. While life is not black and white, computer programming by design has to be. I just wanted to share my personal story on the matter. When I first started using the internet, many websites would not let me use my last name as a username, citing that no foul language was allowed. And Renee helpfully told me how to correctly pronounce her last name and said, and I would like to think it is not foul at all. Also on that topic, several listeners wrote in about something that happened about two weeks after episode 212 came out. Michelle wrote, Dear Sharon, Greg, and number one podcast,

Starting point is 00:19:43 Sasha. I came across this BuzzFeed article and thought about the episode where you discussed people whose names are not recognized by software programs. It made me giggle and I wanted to share. My wife and I love your show and we look forward to it every Monday. Keep up the awesome work. And the BuzzFeed article from August 28th was titled, This Woman with a Rude Last Name Started the Best Thread on Twitter. Natalie Wiener, a reporter for a sports website, tried to set up an account on MaxPreps, a website that covers high school sports. Her attempt earned her the error message, offensive language discovered in the last name field. Wiener took to Twitter, posting a shot

Starting point is 00:20:23 of the form and the error message and tweeting, this is without a doubt the best thing that's ever happened to me. The tweet went viral as many people let her know that she was definitely not alone. One reply said, as a person named James Butts, I know these problems. Jen Dick tweeted, ha, I had the same damn thing happen to me today when I tried to RSVP for a webinar. Philip Sporn wrote, when I got my computer, I had the same damn thing happen to me today when I tried to RSVP for a webinar. Philip Sporn wrote, When I got my computer, I had to set my last name as Sprawn because Sporn contains offensive language. Paul Gay posted a screenshot of his attempt to buy health insurance, which showed a window pointing to his last name that said, Word not allowed. You have entered a profanity or a not allowed word. Please change

Starting point is 00:21:05 it. And so on. Okay, two things. One, this means it's somebody's job to think up words that might be offensive. Yes, I guess so. And two, this is a serious problem. If your name is gay, your name is anything. Right. Please change it. You can't just... Change it, right. So that's going to, especially these days, you have to, you're spending your whole life filling out web forms. I mean, what do you do? I don't actually know. But what Wiener did was she tweeted at MaxPrebs, help, my name is too offensive for your site. And they replied, teenagers can get creative.

Starting point is 00:21:37 For now, please use W. We are going to unblock your last name, but it may take a few days. So that was possibly a rare instance where somebody was told to just use one letter for their name. And then, I mean, you have to sort of trust them that they are going to come back and make it right. And it just takes, you know, days. You have to make a note that they're supposed to fix that. It's just much more complicated. It's hard enough if your name is Ross, but if your name is Wiener, it's just like 10 times harder. Apparently it is. Justin Gores, who sent that same article to Greg and Sharon and the one in charge, which does rather sum up our household, also said of the article, I sent this to a friend of mine and he replied that his wife once worked with someone named Kathy Raper who had this difficulty. Oh, my.

Starting point is 00:22:22 Yeah, that cannot be a very fortunate last name. his difficulty. Oh my. Yeah, that cannot be a very fortunate last name. But again, you have to, you know, you have to use something and you can't use a different name on every site. Mitchell Granat, whose last name is pronounced like the rock, unless I'm Swedish, in which case I should say Granat, wrote, thought you would enjoy this Twitter thread where many people with some unusual names and some rather normal ones shared their war stories. Also, there is a discussion and link to the genericized name of this problem, the Scunthorpe Problem. All hail futility. And Mitchell helpfully sent links to the original Twitter thread that sparked the BuzzFeed article,

Starting point is 00:23:00 as well as a Wikipedia article on the Scunthorpe Problem. This is defined by Wikipedia as the blocking of websites, emails, forum posts, or search results by a spam filter or search engine because their text contains a string of letters that appear to have an obscene or unacceptable meaning. And this problem results from the fact that computers can easily identify a string of text, but properly interpreting the string in all contexts

Starting point is 00:23:21 is a rather difficult task. The name of the problem comes from the town of Scunthorpe in North Lincolnshire, England, where in 1996 residents of the town were prevented from creating accounts on AOL because the town's name contains a string of letters that spell a rather rude word. And that's a little amusing, but I was thinking, well, it was 1996 and it was AOL. But apparently poor Scunthorpe had a similar problem with Google a few years later, when Google's safe search filters blocked any businesses that had Scunthorpe in their names. A CNET article from 2004 reported on how a great number of completely inoffensive websites

Starting point is 00:23:59 found themselves censored by this optional Google feature that was designed to block sexually explicit sites. The electronics retailer Partsexpress.com found themselves blocked because their name contains the string S-E-X, as did ArkansasExtermination.com. And it wasn't just Scunthorpe businesses that found themselves censored. Sites containing place names such as Essex or Sussex were also blocked. Which is a lot. Which could be a lot, yeah.

Starting point is 00:24:27 The clothing business A Little Girl's Boutique was blocked for containing the word girls. The owner of the business said, Traffic from Google can make or break a business. Here I am, a mom of four children, creating an at-home business that sells little girl dresses and accessories in order to spend more time with my children, and I have been's some human judgment in here. Someone thought the word girls would be offensive in almost every, I mean, in the majority of cases where it's used? Well, on the other hand, if you are trying to keep sexually explicit sites, right, out of the reach of children, if you're a parent who wants to do that, how do you set what the parameters for that are going to be?

Starting point is 00:25:15 That is tricky. Without vetting them one by one. Following Natalie Wiener's viral Twitter thread, Motherboard posted an article on the topic on August 29th with the title, Life on the Internet is Hard When Your Last Name is Butts, and said that the Scunthorpe problem has never really been solved. The article noted that the original Scunthorpe issue on AOL was dealt with by having the AOL systems use Scunthorpe for the town, which isn't really a great solution. sconthorpe for the town, which isn't really a great solution. Similarly, some people, such as Clark Aycock, have had jobs where the IT departments would have to create special rules on their servers just to keep their email from being rejected as spam. If you have the wrong

Starting point is 00:25:55 last name, you can be in a lot of trouble. Michael Veal, a researcher in machine learning at University College London, said that the sconthorpe problem is so challenging because a really effective obscenity filter would need to be able to understand a word in context, which isn't something that even the most advanced machine learning algorithms can do well enough yet. Veal said, cock, a bird, and dick, the given name, are both harmless in certain contexts, even in children's settings online, but in other cases parents might not want them used. even in children's settings online, but in other cases, parents might not want them used.

Starting point is 00:26:29 As an example of how much trouble programs can have distinguishing acceptable uses or not, Veal noted that people can often find creative ways to get around algorithms, such as by using brand names like Google's or Skype's to refer to groups that they want to target for abuse. Veal said, these are the last terms that big platforms want to block and the technologies really aren't good enough at reading the context. That's kind of

Starting point is 00:26:49 clever. On the topic of overzealous censoring software, Daniel Summers also let us know about the clubbutic problem. The Telegraph ran an amusing article on this topic in 2008, which said that this error is caused by poorly programmed anti-obscenity filters that automatically replace words considered rude or offensive with more acceptable variants. So, for example, the A-S-S in classic gets replaced with B-U-T-T, resulting in clobotic, a word that is said to be the first identified instance of this error. The Telegraph article said, The problem is fairly widespread.

Starting point is 00:27:30 Google searches turn up 3,810 results for clobotic, 5,120 for con-breast-itution instead of constitution, and 1,450 for bud-ociated press, a corruption of the U.S. news agency, the Associated Press. The Telegraph article mentions a website called juicy.org that I couldn't currently find, but it seemed to have been particularly plagued by this issue. At the time that the Telegraph article was written, there were articles posted on that site that mentioned, for example, secret Central Intelligence Agency plots to butt-buttonate foreign leaders, a law p-butted by Congress, and an article with the title,

Starting point is 00:28:16 What Did the British M-Buddy Do for This British National Overseas P-Butt Port Holder? British National Overseas Pabutport Holder. Also noted in the Telegraph article were problems on a U.S. Christian news site that had programmed its filter to replace the word gay with homosexual, which resulted, for example, in an article about the sprinter Tyson Gay that began with, Tyson homosexual was a blur in blue. This whole topic did make me glad that my last name is Ross until someone decides that that's going to violate some rules somewhere, right?

Starting point is 00:28:50 Thanks to everyone who writes into us. If you have anything to add to any of our discussions, please send us an email at podcast at futility closet.com. It's Greg's turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. I am going to give him an interesting sounding situation, and he's going to try to work out what's going on, asking only yes or no questions. This puzzle comes from David Malky. A man is driving along an empty Arizona highway when his car overheats.

Starting point is 00:29:32 He stops by the side of the road, turns the car off, opens the hood, and kills time while he waits for the engine to cool down a bit. After about 30 minutes, he tops up the radiator, gets back in the driver's seat, but then cannot immediately drive away. Why? Wow. All right. Is that... Okay, the reason he can't drive away, I take it, has nothing to do with the radiator or the engine?

Starting point is 00:29:50 Right. Would you say it has something to do with the car itself not performing correctly? I would not say that. Is there something... All right, so the car, in other circumstances, in this condition, would run correctly. Yes. So there's something about All right. So the car in other circumstances in this condition would run correctly. Yes. So there's something about his location. Is the fact that it's in Arizona important? Yes. The heat? Yes. So the heat has had some effect on the car while he was waiting? No. Do I need to know more about the immediate surroundings where he happened to pull over? No. Like he didn't, I don't know, run over something or...

Starting point is 00:30:27 Correct. Okay. Something stopping the car from moving. No. Read it again. He wants to drive off, but can't. After about 30 minutes, he tops up the radiator, gets back in the driver's seat, but then cannot immediately drive away.

Starting point is 00:30:42 Does that have anything to do with him himself? He's not able to drive for any reason. If you replace him with another driver, could that driver just drive off? I think not. Most likely not. I mean, I could make up exceptions or something, but let's say in general not.

Starting point is 00:30:57 Then another driver would have the same problem. Okay, so the problem doesn't lie with the man himself. Correct. Do I need to know anything about him, by the way? No. Are there other people involved? No. Okay, and it's just the man himself. Correct. Do I need to know anything about him, by the way? No. Are there other people involved? No. Okay.

Starting point is 00:31:07 And it's just the one car? Yes. And I did say it was important that it was in Arizona. Does that have something to do with the legal regime in Arizona? No. It's worth asking. And you said it wasn't the heat, exactly. That's close.

Starting point is 00:31:22 He is close. Yes. But you asked if the heat had an effect on the car, and I said no. On the road? No. Heat, heat, heat. He was pulled over for 30 minutes. Yes.

Starting point is 00:31:37 About. Yes. What can happen to you in Arizona in 30 minutes that's related to heat? David gives a hint that the location and time of day is important. So you've got

Starting point is 00:31:49 the location part. Is this near a landmark or something else that Arizona is known for? No. Is it just the fact that Arizona is largely desert or a lot of it is?

Starting point is 00:32:00 That could contribute to it. Or hot, just like an unusually warm state. It is. Okay, is there anything more than that about Arizona? Somewhat. I'm going to say Arizona is pretty sunny.

Starting point is 00:32:12 And because it's desert, there's not a lot of shade usually. So let's say that's what's important about Arizona. Um, is it that the, something about the interior of the car is too hot to let him operate it? Close. Something like that? Something like that. Something about the steering wheel?

Starting point is 00:32:34 Close. Yeah, it's not the car itself, but something else got too hot. Inside the car? Yes. Something inside the car got too hot. But it's not part of the car. Something that the driver dropped into the car? Yes. Something inside the car got too hot. But it's not part of the car. Something that the driver dropped into the car while he went to mess with the radiator.

Starting point is 00:32:52 His keys? Yes, and the sun beat down on them. And then he found them too hot to pick up. And David adds, inspired by true events. Oh my God. Not the overheating part, but the hot keys part. So this actually happened to him. So thanks to David for that puzzle. And if anyone else has a puzzle they'd like to send

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Futility Closet - 217-The Bone Wars

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