The Wall Street Journal (link courtesy Ed Cone) reports on one Gabriel Ortiz, whose grand idea is StupidFilter, set up to create
an open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in written English. This will be accomplished with weighted Bayesian or similar analysis and some rules-based processing, similar to spam detection engines.
This is a different approach to a significant problem from this Al Gore-inspired solution:
A wonderful side benefit of Gore’s [carbon] offsets is that the idea is so transferable. For example, Gore and those of his ilk may be offended by all the carbon emissions polluting the air. Others of us are put out by all the noxious, moronic emissions polluting the airwaves. A grand irony it is that one of the chief sources of those emissions sparked this idea — moron offsets.
Here’s how it would work, in a nut’s … er, a nutshell. If you’re a veritable smokestack of moronic ramblings, inane opinions and bug-eyed rants, and you’d rather not sacrifice your venting lifestyle for the sake of rationality, then moron offsets are just the ticket for you. Just pay someone else to “scrub the air” with good sense after you belched forth some gassy nonsense, and you won’t have to bother rethinking anything.
