You’re being asked a math question as it tricks the spam bots that scour the web for blogs to leave comments on. If they manage to successfully leave one (i.e., it doesn’t get moderated into oblivion), they link back to their own site, which in turn slightly raises their google rating.

Before the math leetness, I had to individually moderate all of these comments (approximately 10 a day), which was agitating. I prefer this to blacklisting words, as that occasionally nukes legitimate comments… though if you are using the word “phentermine” (one of the previously blacklisted words) in a comment, I’m not sure I want to read it anyway.

Btw- why am I having to answer a math question when I comment?