My college buddy Brad dropped by this weekend. He had asked to see World of Warcraft right before he took off. Unfortunately, my speakers mysteriously stopped working. Everything was connected properly, the speakers were powered on, the light was green… but there was no signal whatsoever on the line out. Whatever was wrong with my speakers, there wasn’t time to fix it, so that was the end of that.

The next day, I conducted a rigorous analysis of the malfunctioning equipment and determined that… the volume was turned all the way off. Good thing I went to Engineering School.

I’ve noticed that my brain is getting less and less trustworthy when it comes to mathematical issues. I thought the decay would stop at, oh, solving simple PDEs, but no. Just today, Mom asked me a straightforward math question for the next edition of her book: “What are the odds of getting seven heads in nine coin flips?” The answer leaped to mind: “(9 choose 7) / (2^9)“. But the scary thing was, I didn’t know why. My brain is cluttered with mathematical machinery that can occasionally lurch to life and spit out answers, but it’s become disconnected from the rest of my thought processes. I might as well have determined the odds through Divine Revelation.

Since this was going into my Mom’s book, I went through an exercise to convince myself that (9 choose 7) really is the right way to count the possible combinations of heads. I then confirmed that by searching on the web. Whew. Which brings us to an even sadder tale: the first search result I got was not the legitimate Drexel University Math Forum site… but an impostor, Bonus.com.

The impostor’s home page is a cheesy blinky flashy games portal, so it’s not obvious at first glance why they would want to errr, mirror the Drexel Math Forums. You would expect to see a blinky banner ad over the borrowed content, but none appears. Actually, if you view source, there is a banner ad at the top… but the link to the image is broken! As Columbo would say, “Dis is a puzzler.”

A little more poking around uncovers the reason for our confusion — we were looking at the wrong page. Unfortunately, the site has been designed to defeat deep links, so I can’t provide a direct link. To get to the page we were supposed to see in all its blinky flashy glory, you need to search the site for “math”, scroll down to the bottom and click on “Ask Dr. Math”. Below that is a mirror of the entire Dr. Math site, framed and lookin’ fabulous.

Drexel’s Terms of Use are reasonably liberal, but Bonus.com still chooses to violate Drexel’s “Credit and copyright notice” and “Links and Framing” policies. Note that Drexel conveniently links to their Terms of Use on each Math Forum page, but Bonus.com has responded by cleverly removing the underlying URL (while leaving the link text itself intact). Just for chuckles, here’s the cache of the unframed mirrored page, courtesy of MSN Search^[1]. The banner ad isn’t visible because of the aforementioned broken image link, but if you view source, you can see the detritus left by Bonus.com (and MSN Search) at the top of the page. I wonder what Drexel University thinks about this?

Let’s find out.

1. You can’t help but wonder how Bonus.com fundamentally differs from the MSN Search cache. I think the answer is that the MSN Search cache A) provides the URL to the cached site, and B) makes it clear that the content doesn’t belong to MSN, but came up in the context of a search. If Dr. Math had chosen a design that did not display “Drexel” on every page, we would have no way of knowing that the pages belonged to Drexel U., not Bonus.com.