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457 sats \ 1 reply \ @jasonofbitcoin 13 Jan \ on: Weekend Book Recommendations BooksAndArticles
My paperback copy of 21 Futures just arrived:
https://21futures.com/
Things don’t just “cool down” in space.
There’s no atmosphere to transport the heat away. So something that gets hot in space, stays hot.
So when we put astronauts on the moon, and they’re in the sun and start heating up, their suits have to actively cool them down, or they’d heat up until they died.
When only a teenager, the future co-founder and guitarist of Black Sabbath, Tony Iommi, lost the tips of two of his fret-board fingers and was told he’d never play guitar again. He has since played with false fingertips that he constructed himself. In 2023 he was ranked 13th in Rolling Stone's list of the greatest guitarists of all time.
My dad spent his entire working life as an asphalt paving contractor. The engineering school I went to had a dedicated bituminous asphalt lab. Improvements in paving nowadays are only incremental, even using advanced modern materials. There's only so much you can do against thermal expansion & contraction along with massive uneven pressures from heavy loads.
But I suppose if you allowed a long enough time horizon, you could convince the powers that be to invest enough in roads today to avoid needing to replace them for a decade or maybe two. As you know, the incentives aren't aligned for that, though.
How dare you call it a DDoS. Pretty sure everyone involved is paying their internet bills.(Disclaimer: I do not endorse DDoS, just pointing out the hypocrisy)
Mastering Bitcoin, by Andreas M. Antonopoulos
[WARNING: Did you catch the "milk sad" incident a few months ago in which funds were lost due to people using the default 'bx seed' command to generate a bitcoin address? The default invocation of this command appears in the second edition of this book without any warning or disclaimer about its unsuitability for use with real funds! Always know the entropy source when generating seeds/keys for production use!]
"...what I was doing was demeaning to me and to those I sought, clumsily, to represent. I went on bended knee and begged the indulgence of centralized services, hoping to catch their sympathy or provoke their sense of shame, to extract a few temporary concessions that could make the tools they made a little bit more aligned with the desperate needs of their captive userbase.
"That's no way to defend inalienable rights. And those rights need to be more than defended: they need to expand to fit the challenges we now face."
"Our own consciousness cannot be rented from others, or temporarily conceded to us, with built-in police or backdoors or hidden ad men. We need to seize the means of computation, and that means ejecting all of these interlopers, and relocating it back into the personal domain we control: whether that's physically, or by using tools like encryption and zero-knowledge proofs to preserve our control when our data and processing power sits on others' hardware.
"That's the pyramid of digital rights for me: a firm foundation of decentralized, user-controlled technology, giving us broader cognitive liberty, internal privacy, freedom of self-expression, and freedom of self-determination. On top of that solid ground, we can build a society that's free and fair. And then we can have the ability and freedom to self-reflect, to talk, and to plot our better shared future together, free at last in our digital environment."
Aside from all the usual obstacles to adoption, one specific concern from one business owner friend of mine was about the risk of receiving stolen bitcoin as payment. Specifically, he was worried about law enforcement coming to retrieve/confiscate those UTXOs later. Liquidating all received bitcoin would be one way to handle this concern. I also asked him if the same risk doesn't exist with dollars/cash, because I have no idea.
Graham's Number is so big, that if you could hold all its digits in your head, the information density within your skull would exceed that of a black hole.
[Of course bigger numbers exist (infinitely many!), but for a long time Graham's Number was the largest number to ever be useful in a mathematical proof.]
The makers of the movie Ghostbusters (1984) originally asked Huey Lewis to do the soundtrack/theme song. He declined. So they got Ray Parker Jr. to do it... and after it was released, Huey Lewis sued Parker for plagiarism because it sounded so much like his 1983 song "I Want a New Drug".
Years later in 2004, the filmmakers admitted to having used Lewis' song "I Want a New Drug" as temporary background music and included those scenes in what they sent to Parker to help him write the theme song.