The Sith are a chaotic organization. They thrive on emotional chaos, they spread chaos to meet their ends… but when they get in charge, they impose order on everyone else.

The Jedi are extremely ordered. They try to purge emotions, they deny attachments. They’re hidebound by tradition. The organization is very structured. And yet they fight not to impose order but to protect it. The Jedi actually strive to preserve the balance of law and chaos.

I’m actually reminded a bit of Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion series, in which the cosmic balance between order and chaos is treated as its own faction. The Eternal Champion, in his various incarnations, always fights for the Balance, bringing order to Chaos worlds and chaos to Order worlds.

So the Sith are chaotic, but impose order, while the Jedi are ordered, but fight for balance. The problem, of course, is that the Jedi are not balanced themselves. Anakin does three things to correct this:

1. He destroys the old Jedi order
2. He destroys the Sith (two decades later)
3. Destroying the Jedi ensures that Luke and Leia, heirs to the Force, will grow up as people first, Jedi later.

Luke and Leia have the opportunity to re-create the Jedi without all the baggage that dragged the old Jedi order down… and they can rebuild it with Jedi who are actually in balance themselves.

One item I noticed was a copy of the Microsoft Technet Flash newsletter. I thought this was odd, since I’d gotten a copy of the same newsletter and it hadn’t been labeled. In fact, it turned out that my copy only scored 0.3 points, and the other hit 6.4! (5 points indicates probable spam.) What could explain such a disparity?

Answer: two very small differences.

First, it came through a half hour later, after the message had been reported to DCC. Since DCC is technically a list of bulk mail and not a list of spam, it’s theoretically not a false positive. That added 1 point.

Second: The text must have been slightly different, because the other copy triggered a rule that looks for the phrase “no cost” or “no charge.” That not only added 1.7 points, but altered the message enough that the Bayesian classifier was less certain it was legit – a shift from 0% to 1-9% likelihood of being spam. So instead of subtracting 4.9 points from the score, it only subtracted 1.5 — a net gain of 3.4 points.

Of course, these differences wouldn’t have been an issue if the message hadn’t been formatted in a very spam-like way. Before Bayes made its adjustments, the copy sent to me would have been 5.2 points — just over the threshold. Someone else seemed to be getting the text-only version (it didn’t trip any HTML rules) and the final score was -1!