Futility Closet

Recognize this hotel room? Then you should call the Toronto police: A 9-year-old girl was sexually abused here two or three years ago.

Even though she's been airbrushed out of the photo, the room still has a haunted quality. The same girl was apparently photographed in an elevator, near a fountain, even in an arcade.

Stranger still are the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, dollhouse recreations of actual crime scenes. They were created in the 1930s by Frances Glessner Lee, a millionaire heiress who wanted to improve police skills in forensic pathology. Four puzzles are presented here, and the Baltimore medical examiner won't reveal the solutions — he's still using them in training seminars.

When Winston Churchill won a seat in Parliament at age 26, he grew a mustache to make himself look older.

"Winston," said a female opponent, "I approve of neither your politics nor your mustache."

"Madam," he replied, "you are not likely to come in contact with either."

A Buddhist walks up to a hot dog vendor and says, "Make me one with everything."

Steven Wright used to say, "I've been doing a lot of abstract painting lately, extremely abstract. No brush, no paint, no canvas. I just think about it."

With Mr. Picassohead you can make a Cubist portrait in about 60 seconds. I spent a little longer on this one, pretending to get the composition right, but it's hard to go wrong with drag-and-drop noses.

Even simpler is the Mondrian Machine — even a dead guy could produce a neoplasticist masterwork if you clicked the mouse for him.

I suppose the masters wouldn't approve of these pushbutton knockoffs; Picasso seemed to take a dim view of technology in general. "Computers are useless," he once said. "They can only give you answers."

Of course, if you have real talent, machines can be a useful tool, too. Art.com's artPad is a lot easier to use than real brushes and paints, and the gallery has some decent abstracts.

If you work in a spirit-crushing cubicle farm and can't remember the innocent joys of childhood, here's a compromise: Get a cube farm playset, including office furniture, a meaningless job title generator ("Domestic Engineering Associate"), and downloadable decorations.

If that's not highbrow enough for you, theory.org has Lego versions of social theorists Judith Butler, Anthony Giddens, Angela McRobbie, and Michel Foucault. Post-structuralism sold separately.

"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." — Decca Recording Company executive, turning down the Beatles, 1962

Last May, it was reported that more than 80 percent of all e-mails in the United States were spam. That's a rather amazing number, as many as 30 billion messages.

What's even more amazing is that 80 percent of this crap comes from just 200 operations. Two hundred soulless hucksters are costing us $10 billion a year in wasted time and computing resources. We even know who they are: They're listed in Spamhaus' ROKSO database, the Register of Known Spam Operations.

If they're so few, and we know who they are, why don't we prosecute them? Spammers are like electronic silverfish; they use the Internet's ubiquity to evade the legal system. Most anti-spam suits are filed in state courts, but spammers can slip geographic boundaries. Congress passed the CAN SPAM act in 2003, but it was so toothless that some activists now call it the "You Can Spam" act. The feds could request stronger snooping powers, but that makes civil libertarians (rightly) nervous.

For now, we all have to live with it, and celebrate small victories. This month the world's eighth most prolific spammer, Jeremy Jaynes, starts a nine-year prison sentence in Virginia. He'll be the first person ever imprisoned for spamming.

John Brignell is saving the world, one blockhead at a time. At Number Watch, the electronics engineer exposes numerical illiteracy in politics and the media.

Last month's number, for instance, was 0.00035. That's the percentage of customers who complained about smoking in an outdoor venue, and who nonetheless won a total ban, thanks to a campaign led by the local BBC station. This makes no sense, but most people didn't seem to notice.

I don't agree with everything Brignell says — he's a vocal critic of global warming concerns, for instance — but I applaud anyone who can knock some sense into 4,000 readers a month.

"The bow is a simple weapon, firearms are very complicated things which get out of order in many ways … a very heavy weapon and tires out soldiers on the march. Whereas also a bowman can let off six aimed shots a minute, a musketeer can discharge but one in two minutes."

That's Colonel Sir John Smyth in 1591, advising the British Privy Council to skip muskets and stick with bows.

InfoToday collected a lot of similarly farsighted advice into an online feature, appropriately called OOPS!

The Museum of Unworkable Devices debunks a whole fleet of perpetual-motion machines.