If you run a PunBB forum, you know how easy, light and fast it is. On the other hand, you probably also know how vulnerable it is to spam. Once your forum becomes a target, the speed with which spam appears is faster than the speed with which you can remove it despite of PunBB’s excellent user interface.

I recently got tired of this at our War Game Bunker forums, and looked for a solution to stop the spam. After digging through a list of PunBB plugins and addons, I found a simple way to combat both the forum message spam, a well as subscription spam, the two forms of PunBB spam that you are probably most familiar with.

1. Akismet for PunBB is a PunBB extension that uses the spam filtering service provided by Automattic, the company behind Wordpress (and bbPress, another excellent forum software). After installing it (you also need an Akismet API key, which is free), the messages posted on your forums are run through Akismet’s comprehensive spam filter, which I also use on all of my blogs. After I installed this to PunBB, all message spam stopped. The best thing about the extension is that for your peace of mind you can still review the blocked messages, thus enabling you to rescue messages that have been mistakenly marked for spam. Having said that, though, I have never encountered this problem during the two and a half years of using Akismet based spam filtering!

2. AntiBot, another PunBB extension, will meanwhile stop the PunBB registration spam, i.e. spambots from registering on your forums with suggestive names or homepage links. Note that AntiBot uses Captcha technology which, depending on your user base, may turn out to introduce accessibility problems to some, especially blind users. Perhaps in the future the release will include an audio Captcha to (partially) solve this problem, but in any case at this point I stick with AntiBot, as based on my experience it is the best way to stop PunBB registration spam.

Poor NASA. Just when they got rid of the “Mars face” mystery (see a related Google search) that of course was no mystery at all, another similar potential headache surfaces at Mercury. After all, what else can the following image, taken a few weeks ago by the space agency’s Messenger spacecraft, show than a clear likeness of a lawn mowing alien?

Can you see how it radiates cosmic love, and so tells us relax and take it easy? How it proves that the grass is always greyer on the other side of a big empty space?

New Scientist, of course, has a different focus on the whole story, but don’t believe them. It’s a government conspiracy. They are trying to bury the evidence. But the Truth is still out there. To be discovered by Mulder & Scully in July.

Sometimes I wonder if cats know more about Pavlov and Skinner than they let you to believe. Or, why else would a cat, when you are about to feed it, keep pushing its head against your thighs, as if cuddling you, if not to give you positive reinforcement for your actions? “Yes, feeding me makes you feel good, human, so you should do it more often” goes the cat’s brain. It is a very cunning tactic, indeed.

Well, one of our cats does that. The other one simply observes in silence, probably calculating the calories lost while doing what the first cat does, and the rate of impact of the reinforcement that it has on human beings, and deciding against joining its brother.

They are weird creatures, cats.

Since there is a relevant Eddie Izzard clip to every topic, here’s the one that fits this one: Pavlov’s Cats.

According to a Cornell University study, around 40 percent of deaths worldwide are caused by water, air and soil pollution. That should be about 7 deaths caused by pollution every ten seconds, if I’m not mistaken.

However, perhaps an even more alarming fact presented by the study is that around “57 percent [of the world's population] is malnourished, compared with 20 percent … in 1950″. Even if one considers the fact that the world population has in that time climbed from 2.5 billion to 6.5 billion, and that most of the population growth has happened in the so-called “developing countries”, it still sounds quite sad.

According to a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign study, traditional Chinese exercises Taiji and Qigong “cay increase the antibody response to influenza vaccine in older adults”.

For a few years now I have thought about trying Taiji, but have never quite got around to actually doing it. Maybe I should now, so that I’m ready to boost my immune system once I become an “older adult”.

According to an Alpha Galileo press release, Indians (those living in India, not those living in the Americas) may have discovered the infinite series sometime around 1350, a discovery commonly attributed to that 17th/18th century alchemist and magician, Sir Isaac Newton.

While one may do well to be somewhat cautious of claims like these, I for one would not be terribly surprised if the claims put forward by Dr George Gheverghese Joseph from The University of Manchester would actually turn out to be true. He also suggests that the Indian Kerala School, where the mathematical discovery was allegedly made before Newton, also knew about some other important mathematical concepts, begging to ask the question whether the birth of modern mathematics really happened in Europe after all.

As I said, I wouldn’t be all that surprised if it didn’t.