Polysemy, ambiguity and spam recipes

Once in a while, I check my mail sent to my Gmail account using the online interface. I generally go directly to the spam folder to make sure that the spam filter has not been over-zealous, and sometimes just for laughs.

Some advertising makes it through my default Adblock Plus config but what keeps me from blocking the frame is the (certainly limited but not non-existent) entertainment value of this sponsored links section. Most of the text ads deemed "contextually" relevant to the mail classified as spam have to do with unsolicited mail. Some, however, are pretty much off target and that makes them way more interesting: the relevance computation is evidently based on "spam" construed as gelatinous mystery/porky meat.

Spam Confetti Pasta
French Fry Spam Casserole
Spam Vegetable Strudel
Spam Veggie Pita Pockets
Spicy Spam Kabobs
Savory Spam Crescents
Spam Primavera
Spam Imperial Tortilla Sandwiches
Spam Fajitas
Spam Skillet Casserole
Spam Quiche
Spam Hashbrown Bake
Ginger Spam Salad

Yikes.

Resolving ambiguity originating in polysemy is no easy task. And yet, one could assume that the engine used by AdSense to process keywords and calculate ad relevance would know what "spam" means when it is a label associated by Gmail itself to an electronic message, don't you think?

Synaesthetic

Last week, Zimbolli sent me a message entitled "synaesthetic", which Thunderbird classified as Junk. Attracted by the unusually learned subject line, I did open the message body, only to find the not-so-unusual male enhancement promises and the following URL:

www[dot]pill22[dot]com

Isn't it ironic that a spammer would try to make it difficult for a robot (and to some extent for a human being) to figure out the website they are rooting for? Usually, it's email addresses you disguise by spelling out the dots, not URLs.

Anyway, while idly looking around for examples of synesthesia in poetry (Rimbaud, Verlaine and Baudelaire first came to my mind, but I was looking for examples in English), I stumbled upon something I had never heard about in all those years I spent studying/playing early music: the "ocular harpsichord" and the "color organ". It turns out that sound and light shows are not a 20th century invention at all! Jean-Michel Jarre's musical family tree includes people like Telemann or Rameau (late 17th-18th centuries), who wrote pieces for keyboard instruments capable of producing sound and light to go with the sound. Of course, it's not like musicians until then had ignored the emotional power of simultaneous sensory perceptions from different sources (auditory and visual in this case), but I thought it was interesting that it would be synthesized in a single instrument.

Something that I surely must have heard about in all the years I spent studying literary theory and cultural history but just "re-"discovered is Newton's theory of color and music. The theory compares the vibrations resulting in the different color shades on the spectrum and the vibrations resulting in the different musical notes in Western scales. It is schematized in the color wheel, published in Opticks in 1704, on which you can see letters corresponding to a Dorian mode scale starting on D separating the sectors displaying the spectral colors.

Many thanks to Zimbolli (or whoever that was) for piquing my interest and for reminding me that Google, YouTube and Wikipedia are my friends.