Skynet

You’ve probably heard of the “Internet of Things”—the cool kids call it IoT—but if you’re like most people, all you know is that it has something to do with kitchen appliances that can order groceries for you. skynet_t_shirt_textual_tees

Like so many of us, jaded by decades of technological miracles, for years I mostly ignored IoT as just another TLA in the never-ending cacophony of buzzwords, but now that I’ve put some time into learning what it’s all about, the scales have fallen from my eyes. It’s not just smart coffeepots and burglar alarms the call your iPhone. I’m coming around to the view that it’s ultimately going to rival the Internet itself in scale, and may well result in epochal changes to the human condition.

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Other People’s Dreams

“Memories were meant to fade. They’re designed that way for a reason.” Mace, Strange Days (1995)

strange-days

Strange Days, 1995, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, never got the acclaim it deserved. For that matter, nor has Bigelow.

Anyway, when Strange Days starts, our antihero has fallen on hard times in the aftermath of a love affair. He’s barely making it, a disgraced ex-cop addicted to a new illicit technology that replays the recorded experiences of others directly into your brain. He’s both an addict and a dealer in the underground market for experience clips recorded by people pulling robberies, having sex, racing cars, or simply being whoever they are that you aren’t.

Clips are illegal in Bigelow’s dystopian LA, both because they’re addictive and because people stage socially destructive experiences in order to make them. Other people’s experiences are what our guy sells, but they aren’t his vice; he obsessively replays clips he made of himself with the girl he lost, endlessly reliving their happy moments.

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Watta Bargain

A startup called N-Gen technologies is running an interesting crowdfunding campaign for a natural gas-fueled, Stirling engine-powered appliance for generating your own electricity at home. N-Gen doesn’t use the S-word in their fundraising materials but they do in their patent (more below.) They claim it’s going to change the world, cutting out the power company and letting you generate your own power safely and efficiently, immune from power failures. Could it? Hard to be sure, but they have working prototypes, and it’s nifty technology. The crowdfunding prospectus is worth a look; it reads like the disclaimers for a pharmaceutical ad. Who knew there were so many ways to lose your money?

Before we look at this claim, what the heck is a Stirling engine, anyway?

hot-air-engine — A model Stirling engine kit by howtobuildplans.com

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The Lightning Network

The Lightning Network, now coming online, is being touted as the savior of the increasingly sclerotic Bitcoin infrastructure. It is not a new coin, but rather a way of using Bitcoins, and purports to solve, or at least mitigate, several of the most grievous problems Bitcoin is exhibiting as it matures: rising transaction fees, agonizingly slow transaction confirmation, severely limited scalability, and exponential growth in the cost of maintaining the blockchain.

lightning

I’m only going to summarize enough here to make some points about the project. You can get a nice rundown in layman’s terms from Wired. Probably the best source, if you have some technical background and not much time, is the Lightning Network’s page, which has a recorded presentation that summarizes the underlying mechanisms at a level somewhat above the cryptography. If you really want to understand the gruesome details, try the original paper. The cryptography is not developed from the ground up, but if you have the basics already, it’s very readable. There’s also a brief piece in Bitcoin News about the first real-world purchase using Lightning Network, which happened earlier today (January 21, 2018.) Continue reading “The Lightning Network” →

Jackie Brown

I just watched Jackie Brown again. It’s a great movie—maybe Tarantino’s last good movie before all the silliness. Made in 1997, but it takes place in 1995. So many little things have changed. Holy $#*+! it’s already a period piece!

Landlines, beepers, and phone machines
Arcade games
Wristwatches
Smoking indoors, home, car, police station, bars, etc.
Cigarette machines
Cassette tapes and record players
Sam Goody record stores
Revolvers
She’s a “stewardess”
Kangol hats
Sandals and socks

Bitcoin Market Cap

I was just (January 3, 2018) checking on today’s price for Bitcoin—what can I say, I’m morbidly fascinated by the spectacle of thousands of people shooting craps with their retirement savings—and was once again struck by the sheep-like acceptance of the term “market cap” by financial wonks. Does nobody else object to the crypto-currency mafia appropriating this term and using it in a wildly misleading way? It is the miracle of decentralization that nobody is legally responsible for the sales pitch.

market-cap

First of all, the idea of market capitalization applies to equities. It is the number of outstanding equity shares in a company multiplied by the current price of a share. Its main use is for sorting companies into buckets by size, with the aggregate value of the shares being a rough proxy.

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The Blues

Ted Lewis was the godfather of British crime fiction—Raymond Chandler, Jim Thomson, and Mario Puzo rolled into a single Brit. There have been plenty of others since, but the entire genre in Britain traces back to Lewis. He’s less well known here in the US than in England, perhaps because English noir is so bound up with the particulars of the landscape, argot, and style. Nevertheless, many Americans will know Mike Hodges’ memorable 1971 film adaptation of Lewis’s 1970 novel “Jack’s Return Home” entitled “Get Carter”, starring Michael Caine (The novel was later re-published in 1990 as “Get Carter to match the movie.”)

Even today, fifty years later, the vicious milieu of Guy Ritchie’s films hearkens directly back to Lewis, much as every movie about the Mafia one way or another must acknowledge Mario Puzo, even if only to reject him.

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Work Like an Egyptian

All_Gizah_Pyramids — The Pyramids of Giza

Photo courtesy of http://liberato.org Ricardo Liberato

I just saw yet another documentary on building the pyramids. Once again, it was all about the age-old question of how they got all those blocks up there. It’s been a favorite subject of archaeologist and crackpot alike since the return of the scholars who went to Egypt with Napoleon’s army in 1798.

These notes are about how implausible most of the last couple of hundred years of theories are, and how strange is the persistence of the same basic idea, given that simple solutions that would actually work are fairly obvious.

A more plausible way is presented here.

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Update

The previous long post about the Bitcoin bubble was already going out of date by the time I spell checked it. I was inspired to write it a week ago when the price was almost $17,000, but by the time I finished it, spell checked it, opened a WordPress account, and posted it, a week had slipped by, and the price had gone up to almost $20,000 and then dropped to it’s current $13,500. It dropped by more than $400 just while I was writing this—what, 20 minutes? It’s December 23 2017 at 2:58 PM.

4b8

In an abstract way, I hope it collapses to the ground before even more sheep transfer their hard earned money to whales, but I don’t have a dog in the fight. That must sound mean spirited, given all the people who will get hurt, but every hour it lives, the number increases only increases. It’s mathematically impossible for the total amount of pain to go down or even stay the same. Continue reading “Update” →

The Bitcoin Frenzy

A couple of people asked me this week if they should be investing in Bitcoin. I didn’t quite know what to say but I get why they’re asking. The price of a Bitcoin jumped from $1000 to $17,000 this year. It was up almost 20% last week alone. (I wrote that a couple of days ago, and today it’s almost $19,000.) If you Google Bitcoin you’ll see a ton of links celebrating its arrival as a serious investment, telling you how to make millions on it, imploring you to shift your IRA to Bitcoin, etc. download (1)

The short safe answer to the question is, if you have to ask someone like me, then don’t do it unless it’s a pure lark—a trip to Vegas. The long explanation is below. Meanwhile, for God’s sake, don’t bet the retirement account.

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