Good morning! And welcome to June. As is usual for this time of the year, Southern California is overcast and gloomy. Saturday I went sailing - overcast and gloomy. Yesterday I went cycling - same. Fortunately this is only temporary ... makes me happy I don't live in Seattle or the Netherlands :)
Hmmm... both Seattle and the Netherlands feel like places where they get a lot done. Whereas Southern California, not so much. So is gloom good for productivity?
I took this picture yesterday, while riding up to what was the Reagan Ranch, Northwest of Santa Barbara. Railroad tracks are weird, right? They're kind of like roads, but unlike roads they cut straight through everything, and don't branch (at least, not that much). They go wherever they go, but you can't change where they go, even if you don't know where they're going. It seems like people would build little vehicles to travel on them more often ... of course, there is always the danger of trains ...
Not gloomy at all: Life lessons from Clarence Thomas. Weird that he is underappreciated just because he's black; in another world, he would be justly celebrated.
Jeffrey Zeldman: My website is twenty years old today. "I was in love with HTML and certain that the whole world was about to learn it, ushering in a new era of DIY media, free expression, peace and democracy and human rights worldwide. That part didn't work out so well, although the kids prefer YouTube to TV, so that’s something." Awesome! And I've been subscribed to his feed nearly that long...
Tim Bray on link rot: the Web Decay graph. "I've been writing this blog since 2003 and in that time have laid down, along with way over a million words, 12,373 hyperlinks. I've noticed that when something leads me back to an old piece, the links are broken disappointingly often. So I made a little graph of their decay over the last 144 months." Yeah, I've noticed the same thing - and now I have to write a utility to generate the same graph :) Interestingly, it feels like links to blogs are more likely to persist than links to news sites.
My most recent pet peeve: mobile apps that send me "notifications" which don't notify me of anything. They just want me to click them ... but why?
I am looking at my phone screen and I have no fewer than four of these right now. Twitter and Pinterest want me to know about "things I might like", and MapMyRide and Sports Tracker want me to "reach my fitness goals". Well guess what you guys? Your reward for bothering me in this way shall be that I disable your notifications. If I want to find things I might like, I'll do that myself, and if I want to reach my fitness goals, I have to work out, not click on an app.
Sheesh. It's not bad enough they waste my time dismissing the notifications, I have to waste more time blogging about how aggravating they are.
Two of my favorite authors are Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. They've each written one of my very favorite books (Stephenson: Cryptonomicon, and Gibson: Pattern Recognition), and a lot of their other old stuff are classics (Stephenson: Snow Crash, and Gibson: Neuromancer). But sadly each has recently released a crummy new book, and I just can't get into either one (Stephenson: Seveneves, and Gibson: Peripheral). Blech.
As I look through my Kindle archives I find I'm experiencing a kind of SciPunk nostalgia; it seems all those older books are so much better than all these newer books. Is it really true that they were better, in some sense? Or have my sensibilities changed, so that no new book would seem good? Or maybe it takes some soak time before a book really feels good?
Today I was having lunch by myself, and I just could not bring myself to keep reading Seveneves. It is inventive but ... boring! There is no excitement, no mystery, no good and evil, and perhaps worst of all, no truly interesting ideas. You would think a book about the Moon blowing up and the end of the Earth would be chock full of cool new ideas, but [sadly] you would be wrong. I'm about a third of the way in, and it's a slog.
So I decided to switch back to reading Peripheral, which I had previously stopped reading because it, too, was ... boring! Gibson likes to keep you guessing, but in order to enjoy that you have to have a stake in figuring it out. With this story - or should I say these stories, because there are two - I can't seem to care; the effort to track it all just isn't paying off. Once again there are no truly interesting ideas. I'm about a third of the way in, and I don't care.
Sometimes you have to hang in there for a while before a book gets good. But the great books grab you from the first page and don't let you go; you can't wait to steal a few minutes to revisit their worlds. I've kind of struck out here. So I decided to re-read an old favorite in a different ilk, The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian. Plenty of great ideas in there, and many of them well worth revisiting. And thought provoking too. So be it.
Today I was in a new little mall and walked past a shiny storefront with a "for lease" sign. And I thought to myself, if that was *my* store, what would I sell? Imagine for a moment you could sell anything, what would it be?
Of course, you could sell "stuff", but what would people want? Clothes? Electronics? Food? People pay a lot for entertainment (books, music, videos, games), but so much of that travels as bits these days, not atoms ... hard to sell entertainment from a storefront in 2015. Sure, you can think of "needs", but those turn into commodities pretty quickly, what could you sell to satisfy "wants"?
Since people are motivated to like themselves, what could you sell them that would make them like themselves better?
You could fool people - sell mirrors that make you look thinner. Or you could genuinely help people... make them fitter, or smarter, or more confident. Or you could educate them; learning helps with many things, not least self esteem.
But maybe the answer isn't to change people, but to change the way they feel about themselves. How about a store that sells counseling services? Or a store that sells affirmation from others? What would that look like?
Our society is plagued with inflation on various fronts; we all know, for example, that an "A" isn't what it used to be. (And sadly, it seems this is just as true at "top" schools as it is at the "bottom".) SAT scores have been "normalized" to the point where they scarcely distinguish between the best students. And just about everyone gets an 8 or 9 on Dancing With the Stars. Etc. On top of it all, there is a serious sort of inflation taking place in wine scores.
In case you don't know, Wines are traditionally scored on a scale from 1-100, where 100 is perfect, anything over 90 is amazing, and stuff below 80 is dishwater. When I first started paying attention, twenty years ago or so, it was unusual and special to find a wine in the 90s, and the high nineties was amazing. No longer, sadly; it seems just about any wine scores a 90 or more, good wines are routinely in the high 90s, and 100s, while still rare, are not unknown.
(In this connection, I reject absolutely the rebuttal that wines are getting better. Nope.)
There are two problems caused by this sort of inflation. First, of course, it makes comparison from year to year difficult. If a fine Stag's Leap Cab from 1997 scored 96, then how should we regard a new release which scores a 98? One needs a translation table, something that shows "98 in 2011" = "92 in 1997". Even with such a table, much is lost in the translation. The second difficulty is that as scores get compressed against 100, the available range of scores is diminished. In 1997 there were 10 different values available between great (90) and perfect (100). Now there are perhaps only 5, great being 95, and perfect still being 100. The compression at the top is the worst; with merely great wines getting 100s, how can we distinguish those once-in-a-lifetime wines which actually are perfect?
I just received an email advertising the latest release of Stag's Leap, with the subject line "potential 100-point 2012, a profound example of this iconic wine". It might be amazing, but to pretend it is a possible 100 points at initial release is a bit much. I'll probably still buy it but I don't have any way to compare it to vintages of the past. I guess I'll just have to do it the old way, and drink it.
A quiet Saturday, my first in a while; slept in and have been quietly coding on something new... in the meantime, let's see what all is happening "out there", shall we?
I recently had a chance to visit InTouch Health, who make "telepresence robots" for medicine. Incredibly cool. Check out this video of one of their robots in action... looks like the future is here!
Dana Stalder thinks the first battle in the mobile payments war is over (and PayPal have lost to "the networks"). Hmmm. I wonder if that's the right way to view it. I think of the participants as consumers, merchants, and banks...
CNN celebrates 35 years of CNN. Wow, 35 years! Can't quite believe it has been that long... I sure remember when they burst on the scene, with the first gulf war.
Hmmm ... this man is trying to get rid of "one man, one vote" in the Supreme Court. There's actually more to it than that, the argument is really about proportional districting; should each district be based on actual people, or registered voters. The latter, it would seem to me... so as not to include illegal aliens.
Wow, who knew? The EPA have ruled that fracking is safe. At least with respect to its potential impact on drinking water; the possibility that fracking causes earthquakes, very much in the news, was not considered in their ruling.
Disappointing, but not surprising: Tests show TSA misses 95% of weapons and explosives. The whole TSA is nothing more than a PR stunt for the government to convince us we're safe. And of course, it's a make-work project too.
Another quiet day of coding ... fortunately turns out you can watch cycling and code at the same time. Congrats to Bradley Wiggins for a new hour record: 54.526km.
Evan Williams explains that Medium is not a publishing tool, it's a network. Oh. I think it *is* a publishing tool - sort of a low-friction way for people to blog without having a blog - and he *wishes* it was also a network. Of course, with his history (Blogger then Twitter) you can see his perspective. Interesting.
A wonderful blast from the past: After Dark in CSS. The original screensaver ... flying toasters! + swimming fish!
So weird that even though I haven't thought about this for years and years, I remember it all. Somewhere in my head there are little clumps of neurons dedicated to remembering a screensaver.
I have a politically incorrect observation about Caitlin Jenner. Like anyone, he can change his name, and like anyone, he can dress any way he likes, and perhaps like anyone, s/he can express a preference regarding the pronouns which are used to refer to him, but so far she has *not* changed her gender. Doing so is possible but she has not yet done so. Therefore "she" is still male.
When I was a kid, a professional tennis player named Richard Raskind underwent sex change surgery, and he became she, and called herself Renee Richards. It was a big deal at the time because she was denied entry into the US Open on the grounds that she had been born a man. She sued in NY Supreme Court and won, with the decision that "this person is now female". I'm am conflicted about this, because s/he still had a Y chromosome, but there have been many sex changes since and our society seems to regard specific physical attributes as a proxy for gender.
Okay, this is the coolest thing ever, I *promise* it will give you chills:
What you are watching is a movie made from hundreds of actual still images of the dwarf planet Ceres taken by JPL's Dawn spacecraft. It looks like Intersteller but it's real, and it's right here in our solar system, just between Mars and Jupiter. Wow.
Be sure to watch fullscreen in HD for maximum chill factor :)
Boy, did Apple make a mess on Monday with their Apple Music announcement. This was the first time since Steve Jobs passed away that I really felt Apple doing stuff he would not have done. Let me count the ways:
It was the wrong venue. A major new music service, announced at a developer's conference? WWDC is a big deal these days, perfect for announcing new versions of OS X and IOS and watchOS, but incredibly wrong for Apple Music. It should not have been a "one more thing" at a dev conference, no way.
Beats 1 Radio makes no sense. So ... the future of music is a single station we all listen to, all the time. Riiight. This is exactly backward, the future of music is a million personalized stations. In fact, it's already the present of music, as presented via Spotify and Rdio and Pandora and Slacker and all the rest.
Music curation by experts? Bsssst, fail. Okay I get the argument in favor of people over algorithms, but not experts over friends. (And I say this as a lifelong Jim Ladd fan). Actually Apple have traditionally been on the side of algorithms anyway, Genius, etc. Felt retrograde.
Connect aka Ping 2.0? Yawn. This feels like Apple getting desperate. They just do not understand social networking, and should not try. Everyone already belongs to Facebook and Twitter (and Instagram). Nobody wants or needs a fourth network. They should have integrated with what is already there. The lessons of Ping (and Google+) were not understood.
[Added] The dog that didn't bark: artist royalties. The biggest challenge in the music industry - and one which has been exacerbated by subscription services like Spotify - is how to share the wealth back to the artists, especially those further down the long tail. How are they to be discovered? How can they get paid? Apple was silent on these issues, which should have been taken head on. Remember, iTunes saved musicians from Napster.
Worst of all, the whole thing felt like a mishmash. Not cleanly organized or communicated*. Clearly a big push-pull between Apple and Beats execs. Yeah Drake and Weeknd are cool, but where's the "there" here? Confusion breeds indifference. I'm clicking away already.
This slide says it all: three old things trying to be one new thing. And the Apple of today trying to be the Apple of 2007 (iPhone). In fact, trying to be the Apple of 2001 (iTunes).
My biggest takeaway is that this calls the entire Beats acquisition into question. I didn't understand it at the time, and now that we see where it went, we can see it was a mistake. It was Tim Cook and Eddie Cue trying to be cool by hanging with Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, and failing. Everyone involved has lost cred.
I predict the execs at Spotify, Rdio, and Pandora are celebrating. They must have feared Apple's entry into their space, and they must be relieved that it was so weak.
PS I will consider the other parts of Apple's announcements shortly, stay tuned. For a great recap, I recommend the Verge liveblog, which is not only informative but funny. High line: biggest news was open-sourcing Swift. First time I have thought that maybe I will want to / have to learn it.
[*Update: Reaction in the blogosphere is trending strongly negative. Much of the coverage is trying to explain what Apple Music is, not why it is amazing.]
Everything you always wanted to know about Bitcoin, but were afraid to ask...
<post type=informational alt=reference>
A little while ago, amid all the Bitcoin hype of 2013, I opened a Coinbase account, and I bought one (1) bitcoin. In the meantime I have read a bunch about Bitcoin, and occasionally I've sent a few Satoshis* to a friend to get them interested (or because they were already). I thought I kinda sorta knew how it all worked; there was this blockchain that functioned like a giant ledger in the sky, distributed over thousands of computers... and I thought it was cool. But I was wrong; I didn't know jack, and it is way cooler than I thought.
Like a lot of things, you only know what you don't know when you try to explain it. A friend asked me some simple questions and I could not give simple answers. What is a bitcoin? What is a bitcoin wallet? What is a bitcoin address? How do the keys work? What's all this about mining bitcoins? Etc.
After digging around a little, I've learned a little. And here's what I've learned.
Introduction to Bitcoin
During the early 2000s an informal group of theorists explored ways to exchange value online, without using any central authority. In a typical value exchange system, there is a trusted intermediary which validates transactions. In the case of most currencies the intermediary is a government, but it could be any organization. The goal of these discussions was to develop a system which substituted computational difficulty for trust, enabling a completely decentralized implementation.
In October 2008 a groundbreaking paper was published by Satoshi Nakamoto, entitled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. This paper is simple, only nine pages, and cleanly explains the entire mechanism of Bitcoin. There is little math and I highly recommend it to interested readers. Quoting from the abstract:
A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending. We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network.
The Bitcoin concept was analyzed and subjected to every kind of scrutiny. An open-source reference implementation was created called Bitcoin-Qt, today called Bitcoin Core, and ported to common platforms such as Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. The network grew like wildfire, and the rest is history :)
Keys
I'm going to start with keys, because that seems like a good place to start. Keys are used for encrypting information, "locking it" so that it cannot be accessed without having the key. Bitcoin is based on public-key cryptography, which uses pairs of keys. You can use either key to encrypt information, "locking it", and then you use the other key to decrypt it, "unlocking it" and making it available. Anyone can generate a key-pair anytime, and you can have as many as you want. One key in each pair is the public key, and the other is the private key. You can freely share your public keys, but you generally keep your private keys ... private.
So how are keys useful? Suppose you want to send some information to Alice, and you want to keep anyone else from seeing it. You can encrypt the information with Alice's public key. Since only she has the private key, only she can decrypt it. Now suppose you want to send something to Alice, and you want her to know it came from you. You can encrypt the information with your private key. Since Alice (and everyone else) has your public key, she can decrypt it, thereby verifying that your private key was used to perform the encryption. This is often referred to as signing the information, since it is like adding your [unique] signature. When information is exchanged online both of these things are often done together. You might send information to Alice, encrypted with her public key and signed with your private key. She decrypts the message with her private key to access it, and with your public key to verify it came from you.
Hashing
Okay, the next concept is hashing. This is the process of taking a big piece of information and making a unique small piece of information from it. (The result of hashing is sometimes called the digest.) There are various mathematical ways of doing this. For any given information, the digest can be easily computed and is always the same. It is difficult to work backwards, however; given a digest, you cannot easily figure out the original information. You have to try all the possible original values one by one, computing the hash values, until you find the right one. Most of the time this would take so long it is literally impossible.
Bitcoin uses a particular hash algorithm called SHA256, which has 256-bit digests. That means there are 2256 possible digest values; for comparison, there are approximately 281 atoms in the universe.
Bitcoin Addresses
When value is exchanged in the Bitcoin system, there is a sender, a receiver, and an amount. To receive value, the receiver generates a key-pair. The public key is hashed and encoded as a 35-character string called a Bitcoin address. An example of an address is: 1HizFzbRj9nxa3ErX2fjTRsYRReRhkJ5Jr. (This is an address for me, if you would like to send Bitcoin to this address, please do :) Bitcoin addresses are sometimes displayed as QR codes, as shown at right. (That's my address, again.)
Bitcoin addresses are a destination for value. They are public, they are anonymous, and they are characteristic of one particular receiver. They can be permanent, but it is generally recommended that receivers create new addresses every time they receive value, to preserve their anonymity. Note that it is not possible to determine the public key from the address, since it is a digest. It is possible to verify that a given public key corresponds to the address, by re-hashing the key.
Transactions
A transaction is a transfer of Bitcoin value from a sender to a receiver. A transaction is generated by the sender, and contains one or more inputs and one or more outputs, along with the Bitcoin address of the receiver. The inputs are references to outputs from previous transactions. The outputs are Bitcoin addresses to which the inputs' value are to be transferred.
I know this is a bit vague, bear with me, I'll explain more in a minute. The key concept is that each transaction simply builds on previous transactions. Alice sends you Bitcoin, and you receive an output. You send Bitcoin to Brian, and you pass the output you received from Alice to Brian as an input. Brian sends Bitcoin to Criss, and she receives the output you sent to Brian. And so on... there are just transactions, with inputs, outputs, and destination addresses.
You might be wondering, how are transactions validated? (Put another way, what prevents malicious or fraudulent transactions from being created?) When a sender creates a transaction, they sign it with the private key for each input. (The private key that is paired with the public key used to create the address at which the input was received.) The public key for the corresponding output is stored in the previous transaction, and is used to authenticate the signature. This validates that the sender is the current "owner" each of the inputs, and is authorized to transfer them.
Bitcoins
Okay, here's where it gets a bit weird. What *is* a bitcoin? A bitcoin has no physical or digital existence. It is purely a chain of transaction records.
So, what is a bitcoin "worth"? Like anything, it is worth what others are willing to pay for it. The exchange rate between Dollars and Bitcoins has fluctuated wildly, but is currently around $230/BTC. (BTC is the abbreviation for one bitcoin, there are also mBTC = thousandths of a bitcoin , uBTC = millionths of a bitcoin, and Satoshi* = one hundred millionth of a bitcoin.)
So what does it mean to "own" a bitcoin? It means you have possession of a key-pair which corresponds to the address to which the bitcoin was last sent. Having the key-pair means you can send the bitcoin to someone else.
And the key question (n.p.i.), where do bitcoins come from? (Put another way, what is at the start of the transaction chain for a given bitcoin?) Stay tuned, I'll talk about mining in a minute. But first let's talk about the blockchain which makes all this possible.
The Blockchain
The central innovation of Bitcoin is the concept of a blockchain which records every transaction, ever**. The entire blockchain is public, and every "full node" of the network has a complete copy. Because everyone can see every transaction, there is no need for trust. A dishonest node will be "out voted" by honest nodes. In addition the reward for being an honest node generally exceeds the possible benefit of being dishonest.
As the name implies the blockchain is a sequence of blocks. Each block contains a time-sequence of individual transactions. The size of blocks is variable, but currently limited to 1MB. A bitcoin node generates a new block every 10 minutes. (We'll talk about what "generates" means a little later.) An average transaction is about 400 bytes, which means the network as a whole is limited to about 40 transactions per second. Increasing the maximum size of blocks and therefore the maximum system transaction rate is under discussion.
As noted above, a transaction is a transfer of Bitcoin value. When a transaction occurs, the sender of value broadcasts the transaction to the network of nodes. Each node that receives it validates the transaction and stores it in a new block which it is assembling. When the block is full or if ten minutes have elapsed since the start of the block, it is added to the blockchain. Each block contains a hash of the previous block, ensuring the integrity of the chain.
Mining
Nodes in the bitcoin network are doing a lot of work - they have to receive transactions from senders and validate them, performing a lot of computationally expensive cryptographic math in the process. Why do the work? There is a reward for creating new blocks: a node which creates a new block gets new bitcoins! The first transaction in each block sends a reward to a bitcoin address owned by the node. This is the start of the transaction record for new bitcoins, and it is the way new bitcoins are created. The process of generating blocks and receiving new bitcoins as a reward is called mining.
Hmmm... I can hear you thinking... What would keep anyone from operating a node and mining new bitcoins? Well, nothing. And in fact, everyone who is running a "full node" on the system is doing exactly this. But...
With many nodes in the system, and multiple nodes receiving the same transactions, what's to prevent many, many duplicate blocks from being added? And what keeps the number of new bitcoins from exploding? There is a mechanism which makes creating new blocks harder. Inside each block is a nonce, a value which means nothing and can be arbitrarily chosen. A node creating a new block must chose a nonce which makes the digest created by hashing the block smaller than a threshold value. The node has to try each possible nonce in turn, perform the hash, and check the value. The nonce inside bitcoin blocks is 32 bits, which means there are 4 billion possibilities. There is no mathematical shortcut to this, there is a lot of computational work to create a new block and earn new bitcoins as a reward.
As the network gets larger and more nodes are trying to create blocks, the maximum hash threshold gets smaller, making the computational work harder. The target is to create a block every ten minutes. Every time 2016 blocks have been created, the nodes cooperatively agree on a new threshold. As more nodes join the network, blocks are generated more quickly and the threshold is lowered, making creating new blocks more computationally difficult. The competition is intense. Some organizations have built huge datacenters full of specialized computer hardware just to mine bitcoins.
When bitcoin was first launched, the reward for creating a new block was 50 bitcoins. Every time 210,000 blocks are created, the reward is halved. The current reward is 25BTC. It is projected that in mid 2017 the reward will be halved again, to 12.5BTC. After 21 million bitcoins have been generated - projected to occur in 2024 - that's it, there will be no more. The value of each bitcoin will probably appreciate over time, and if you believe that, you might feel owning bitcoins is an investment.
Transaction Fees
As described above, as nodes receive transactions and assemble them into blocks, they are paid for their effort with new bitcoins. But as mentioned, the difficulty of generating blocks keeps increasing, and the reward keeps decreasing, and will eventually be zero when all bitcoins have been mined. So another mechanism exists to reward nodes, transaction fees.
Bitcoin fees are the hidden ugly reality of what is otherwise a beautiful idea. This is where the rubber really hits the road, because if fees are too high the payment network won't be used. And weirdly for a payment system, the sender pays the fees, rather than the receiver. (Of course, the receiver could agree to accept a lower payment amount to cover the transaction fee, but that’s … complicated.) The fees are typically small, but typically nonzero.
The Bitcoin network has a few rules around fees.
If any output of a transaction is less than .01BTC, a fee of .0001BTC is mandatory. This is apparently to discourage “dust” from polluting the blockchain.
If a transaction is larger than 1,000 bytes, a fee of .0001BTC per 1,000 bytes is charged. Transaction size is not directly under a sender’s control, because a seemingly simple transaction could involve many bitcoins. For example, if you receive lots of small amounts and then pay a large amount, your client might send a whole bunch of small amounts. Bitcoins are never aggregated, each one is tracked separately.
There is a concept of transaction priority, computed as:
sum(value * age) / size
Sparing you the details, if a transaction priority is high enough it can be free. The target is any transaction worth at least 1BTC which is at least one day old can be free. Otherwise you pay .0001BTC per 1,000 bytes, rounded up.
As you can see, ugly. When the sender sends a transaction, it must precompute the fee, and then the transaction is sent with a proposed fee amount. Each miner node which receives the transaction can accept the transaction and send the fee to itself, or refuse the transaction. You can try sending a zero-fee transaction (ZFT) and see if someone accepts it, and currently it is likely that someone will, but they don’t have to. If you send a fee according to the rules above, then they must accept it. If you request a ZFT it can take longer to be confirmed in the blockchain because many miners may pass on accepting it.
As an experiment I've sent myself bitcoins requesting a ZFT, and they are typically confirmed within 15 minutes. So currently it can be done. However it is likely that over time ZFTs cannot be counted upon.
Wallets
This brings me to the final subject of my '101" overview, Bitcoin wallets. A wallet is software which performs three functions:
It stores and manages your key-pairs and addresses.
It sends bitcoin to others.
It receives bitcoin from others. (Where by "receive" we mean it verifies that you have received bitcoin from others; the ultimate reference for who owns what is the blockchain, as described above.)
When Satoshi Nakamoto first released the "reference implementation" in early 2009 (now called Bitcoin Core), it included a simple wallet, and that version is still around today with a few polishes. There are tens of others now, some for desktops (Windows and Mac OS and Linux), some for mobile platforms (IOS and Android), and many which are web-based (running on a server hosted by others, providing a web UI). You can use a Bitcoin wallet without knowing any of the details described above, and if you're interested I definitely encourage you to do so.
So where do you get Bitcoin? You can buy some using dollars or some other government-backed security, from a Bitcoin exchange, or you can exchange something of value with someone who sends you bitcoin in response. Or you can get some "free" at a Bitcoin faucet, which are websites that distribute tiny amounts of Bitcoin, generally in exchange for your contact info or attention. (Faucets were started as a way to seed the use of Bitcoin, but these days they aren't needed for that anymore and tend to be scam-ish, so be careful!)
And what do you do with Bitcoin once you have it? You can buy things with it, pay people for services, or even hold onto it as a somewhat speculative investment. Or you could send some to me, at the address above :)
* A Satoshi is the smallest unit of bitcoin which can be exchanged, one hundred millionth of a bitcoin.
** Where "ever" means since January 2009, when the first Bitcoin transaction occurred. The first "real" transaction didn't occur until May, 2010, when Laszlo Hanyecz bought a pizza for 10,000 BTC.
And so last Thursday Megan graduated high school, yay! Our last one, now an "adult" and off to college... quite a moment.
There were the usual speeches, and as usual the students were a lot more interesting than the administrators. I've just recently re-read The Most Human Human (great book!), and it struck me that indeed it is surprise which makes things interesting, and surprise was the difference between the students' speeches - which tended to focus on more specific things I didn't know - and the administrators', which were just blah blah blah platitudes about the students moving on to change the world.
Anyway in Megan's case I have no doubt that she *is* moving on to change the world; anyone who knows Meg knows this.
I couldn't be more proud of her; smart, self-confident, funny, beautiful, and interesting, in the sense of always being surprising, always having a new point of view, a new approach.
As I think about Meg's graduation, I think about all the other kids who graduated from her high school, and all the other high schools which had graduations. So many people, all going through this critical transition from kids to adults. For many of them it was one of the most important days in their lives so far, and they will no doubt remember them forever.
Having blogged for so long, I can also now remember Alexis' graduation, now four years ago, and Jordan's graduation, now (gasp!) eleven years past. It does indeed bring tears to my eyes rereading those reports and reliving those days.
Also impressive was the incredible "everything inflation" on display. In her class of 570 students, 104 had 4.0 averages, and there were 35 valedictorians. Roughly half of the kids graduating wore academic distinction sashes. And the administrators literally bragged about how few kids failed to graduate. Huh?
Ah ... when I was a kid ... getting a 4.0 was incredibly hard, only two students in my whole school were able to do it (I did not). There was one (1) valedictorian. And if you didn't pass all your classes, you simply did not move on to the next grade, no muss, no fuss.
You will have seen, last Thursday was Meg's graduation, but last Friday was equally as important; the fourteenth anniversary of Bicycle Day, the first day following Meg's open heart surgery in 2001 that she was allowed to ride a bike again. I was just going through some old posts celebrating this, and wow, how those years have flown by.
This is a picture of me and Meg on the original bicycle day, off to take a ride :)
Today was Flag Day, did you celebrate? I did, by putting up a flag on our garage ... and then going sailing; ended up in a great match race with a long time friend. Perfect.
Meanwhile, it's all happening...
How cute is this? An announcement from a friend and his wife: "announcing a new addition to the group ride". Awww...
For you, and so I can find it later: GPSVisualizer.com. The perfect way to "see" a ride once you have a GPX file for it. Either a ride you've actually ridden - from the GPX file generated by your GPS - or a ride you're planning - from RideWithGPS.com, etc. Very cool.
And speaking of ride visualizations, I've been watching the Criterium Dauphine, and ITV4 (a UK television channel) have a great way of showing a ride route in 3D. Check this out! Makes me think perhaps I could take a GPX file and figure out how to actually print the ride visualization on my 3D printer. Stay tuned :)
By the way the Dauphine was a great stage race this year; congrats to Chris Froome for winning, and to Tejay Van Garderen for making it close.
Are you ready for The Martian, the movie? I've raved about the book already - yes, you *must* read it - but now, looking at the trailer, this looks like it's going to be excellent. Ridley Scott is the Director, by the way.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the Philae lander has woken up! YAY. You will remember, this is the little guy who landed on Comet 67/Churyumov seven months ago. He landed on his side and ran out of power, but scientists were hopeful that as the comet orbited closer to the sun he'd rebuild power and wake up. And this has apparently happened!
No word on what shirts the scientists were wearing when this happened :)
Did you know Los Angeles used to have a bunch of canals? Check it out: The Lost Canals of Venice of America. Most of that area is now Marina Del Rey...
A great day, as me and my good friend Mark performed "geriatric surgery" to extend the life of my 36-year old racing sailboat... and meanwhile, let's see what else is going on:
This is so real (and actually kind of funny): Jerry Seinfeld and the Progressive Comedy Pause. "Tell a joke to a liberal. Between your punchline and his laughter, there is a Progressive Comedy Pause. In this second or two, the liberal will process the joke to make sure he is allowed to laugh..." Hehe :)
Consider this cartoon; I think it's funny, but perhaps a Progressive would have to think about it for a while to decide whether they're allowed to laugh. Go ahead, you know you want to...
O'Reilly: Consensual Reality. "We're on the cusp of an era in which each of us perceives the world around us differently because of technology." Yep, and Visual Search is going to be a big part of it.
Good news from Apple: webkit content blockers. Aka, we'll finally be able to have "Adblock for IOS". If you ever surf on an iPad you immediately discover your desktop Adblock protects you from a whole world of crap.
I just installed Microsoft Visual Studio 2013. Man, is it ugly.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,
but we can all agree on ugly
This "flat" trend in computer user interfaces where we have primary colors, no shading, no affordances, no visual features of any kind has to have bottomed out now, right? Hopefully the pendulum will swing back and we can have pretty user interfaces that are easier to use again.
I have been messing around with Bitcoin, as you know, and decided it would be "fun" to build a full Bitcoin node from scratch. The latest version for Windows, as checked into Github, uses VS2013, so I figured why not install it. (My everyday version of Visual Studio is 2010.) So I did. And so I hate the way it looks.
Here's VS 2013, in all its flat glory:
For comparison, here's Visual Studio 2010, open on the same project:
See what I mean? There is shading, the buttons look like buttons, the scrollbars look like sliders, etc. VS2010 was not only better looking, but easier to use. For further comparison, here's my previous go-to version, good old VS2005:
I will say that VS2008 was an improvement over VS2005, but only by a little. (I did like the window interface of VS2005 better than the tabbed interface of VS2008, but that's another story.) And going even further back, here's Visual Basic 6, part of the version of Visual Studio which was released in 2000:
Yep, that fifteen-year-old user interface is better looking than VS2013. Blech.
Even the VS2013 icon is ugly! Check out the icon evolution at the top of this post. I'm surprised they didn't just use a purple rectangle, but maybe that will come in VS2015.
So, apparently the Warriers have captured the NBA title. And I have apparently successfully avoided the entire basketball season, college and pro. Not sure why that happened, but I'm not sorry. Huh.
Canada, tomorrow's superpower. Hmmm, feels like that needs a question mark. They definitely have natural resources, good government, and a good culture. But what about the financial resources to defend themselves? Seems like geography is helpful, but so is their big brother to the South...
This is just beyond weird: Invitation to a microaggression. "The University of California, headed now by former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, has gone insane with political correctness. The confirmation comes via its new 'faculty training guide,' which has conveniently listed some microaggressions to be avoided in the classroom, including: 'I believe the most qualified person should get the job.'" This pendulum has most definitely swung too far to the left.
You must watch this: massive excavator assembles hot dog. Somehow, this is an ad for gas station hot dogs, not how damn good of a job that excavator is doing.
Love this drawing by Escher, "Drawing Hands", aka the C Compiler. One of my very favorites from one of my very favorites. (Found via the Flight feature, in this post from 2003, regarding a Google Doodle which celebrated Escher's birthday...)
Interesting book review on Ars Technica: Digital Gold (how Silicon Valley and Wall Street arrived at a new gold rush called Bitcoin). I'm super intrigued by Bitcoin. {Thanks for the feedback on Bitcoin 101, and stay tuned for Bitcoin 102 :) }
Route 50: Driving America's 'Loneliest Road'. "There are no points of interest. We don’t recommend it... We warn all motorists not to drive there, unless they’re confident of their survival skills." Sounds compelling, somehow.
Snoop Dogg for CEO of Twitter. Click through, it's not such a terrible idea. "The most important decision I’ve made in business? The choices of people I have around me." Well, yeah.
The new, new economy is a little weird: AirBnB is now worth more than Marriott. I get the value of services like Uber and AirBnB that connect consumers to people with excess capacity, but the service itself doesn't seem like it would be as valuable as the capacity. This feels frothy...
From SpaceX: the Why and How of Landing Rockets. Seriously cool, both the content and the fact that this company chooses to share this kind of information about what they are doing, and why. The article includes this amazing video of their last attempt, which was -> <- this close to being successful:
Their next attempt is on Sunday, as part of an ISS resupply mission; I'll be watching live and rooting for them!
Nick has a blog called Unenumerated, and comments on a very underrated invention. (Hourglasses) For a longer treatment of the same subject, see A Measure of Sacrifice, in which the measure of time is seen to be important as a measure of investment and created value.
This is pretty depressing; 62 years of congressional cooperation in a single GIF. The red and blue dots represent congresspeople, and the lines indicate "cooperation", as measured by voting the same way on pending legislation.
It is interesting to speculate, what has caused this decrease in cooperation? There are no doubt many reasons, but I suspect mass media is the biggest factor. Politicians on both sides have been polarized...
Apropos: John Hindraker on Politics in the Era of Symbolic Liberalism. John posts from a right-wing stance, but it can equally be argued from the other side. Appearances have become far more important than actions.
Note: they have not yet pulled WWII apps, despite the undoubted symbols of hatrid (swasticas etc) present...
Philip Greenspun considers Apple Music: A good reminder not to listen to computer scientists. "Certainly nobody predicted that a company such as Apple would be able to take 30 percent of the recording industry’s revenue because the record companies were incapable of setting up their own servers." How interesting, right?
To more fun matters ... Have you see this? Remove cat before flight. I love it! (Such a classic cat move, right?:)
Brad Feld wonders Why isn't PGP built into Gmail? Yeah, good point. In fact, why isn't PGP standard everywhere? I've been having a discussion with friends which *might* lead to IP, and we're having it on Slack instead of email, to keep it private.
Jeffrey Zeldman: Deep Tweets No 613664902180413440. "Usability testing doesn't reveal problems in your product so much as it uncovers arrogance in your thinking." Indeed.
I've been reading a lot about space lately - Ashlee Vance's Elon Musk biography, which is excellent, by the way, a must-read for all of you (!), and Robert Zubrin's The Case for Mars, also excellent, despite having first been written in 1996 and updated in 2011, both following on Andy Weir's wondeful The Martian - and I'm struck by the moving timeline between Science (what we know how to do today) and Science Fiction (what we wish we could do tomorrow).
Wow, Q2 is done! Whew. And onward ... spent the day coding, riding, and bitcoin-ing. And now blogging...
It's quite fun glancing through a Flight of past quarter end posts ... many of them report I'm getting ready to watch the Tour. Which I am! Cannot wait, this year should be a good one.
Slate says The iTunes Era is Over. "Apple Music is here, and you might never buy a song again." That might be true, but it might not be because of Apple Music, it might be because of Slacker, Pandora, Spotify, etc. So I installed IOS 8.4 immediately, and tried Apple Music immediately. And got pretty confused immediately. Could not figure out the difference between My Music, For You, New, and Radio (which has my music, including new stuff, for me ...). Will need to experiment a little. I did try listening to Beats1, a button for which takes up most of the initial screen. Not bad, until it was, and then I immediately looked for Next. Ha! Radio ... oh yeah, no Next button.
My first impression has been reinforced. Back to Slacker for me (the Machine Head channel :)
Gerald Vanderleun: The Eight Stages of Scam. References the Great Cholesterol Scam 1955-2015, and compares it to the Great Global Warming Scam. The core observation is that those pushing the scam are not interested in truth, they are interested in profiting from a crisis.
An interesting note from Justice Thomas, in his dissent on the Obergefell Supreme Court case: "The Court’s decision today is at odds not only with the Constitution, but with the principles upon which our Nation was built. Since well before 1787, liberty has been understood as freedom from government action, not entitlement to government benefits." I'm entirely in favor of LGBT Marriages, but they should be construed as contracts between consenting adults, not licenses issued by the state.
Related: Love Among the Ruins. "The barbarians are at our gates. But inside our offices, schools, churches, synagogues and homes, we are posting photos of rainbows on Twitter. It’s easier to Photoshop images of Justice Scalia as Voldemort than it is to stare evil in the face."
I'm equally guilty; today's big news was Greece defaulting on a €245B IMF loan, and I'm posting about a new music service. (I did build a Bitcoin client from scratch today, does that count?)
Interesting question: Why didn't Voyager visit Pluto? "Astronomers decided that in order to optimize their science at Saturn, they'd need an orbit that brought Voyager 1 up close with Titan. But that flyby also would put Pluto out of reach after the spacecraft lifted out of our solar system’s ecliptic plane." Hence New Horizons, a new spacecraft which is visiting Pluto ... in a couple of weeks!
Mark Suster: Do Less. More. Okay. This seems like a good variation on "focus", with which I entirely agree.
Cory Doctorow: Why I'm Leaving London. "The short version is that we want to live in a city that's a livable place to work, where we can raise our family, and where we can run our respective small businesses." How interesting... He's moving to LA! Welcome :)
Good morning! And welcome to June. As is usual for this time of the year, Southern California is overcast and gloomy. Saturday I went sailing - overcast and gloomy. Yesterday I went cycling - same. Fortunately this is only temporary ... makes me happy I don't live in Seattle or the Netherlands :)
My most recent pet peeve: mobile apps that send me "notifications" which don't notify me of anything. They just want me to click them ... but why? 
Today I was in a new little mall and walked past a shiny storefront with a "for lease" sign. And I thought to myself, if that was *my* store, what would I sell? Imagine for a moment you could sell anything, what would it be?
In case you don't know, Wines are traditionally scored on a scale from 1-100, where 100 is perfect, anything over 90 is amazing, and stuff below 80 is dishwater. When I first started paying attention, twenty years ago or so, it was unusual and special to find a wine in the 90s, and the high nineties was amazing. No longer, sadly; it seems just about any wine scores a 90 or more, good wines are routinely in the high 90s, and 100s, while still rare, are not unknown.
LifeHacker: 
I have a politically incorrect observation about Caitlin Jenner. Like anyone, he can change his name, and like anyone, he can dress any way he likes, and perhaps like anyone, s/he can express a preference regarding the pronouns which are used to refer to him, but so far she has *not* changed her gender. Doing so is possible but she has not yet done so. Therefore "she" is still male.
<post type=informational alt=reference>
When value is exchanged in the Bitcoin system, there is a sender, a receiver, and an amount. To receive value, the receiver generates a key-pair. The public key is hashed and encoded as a 35-character string called a Bitcoin address. An example of an address is: 
And so last Thursday Megan graduated high school, yay! Our last one, now an "adult" and off to college... quite a moment. 
As I think about Meg's graduation, I think about all the other kids who graduated from her high school, and all the other high schools which had graduations. So many people, all going through this critical transition from kids to adults. For many of them it was one of the most important days in their lives so far, and they will no doubt remember them forever.
I just noted 
You will have seen, last Thursday was Meg's graduation, but last Friday was equally as important; the fourteenth anniversary of Bicycle Day, the first day following Meg's open heart surgery in 2001 that she was allowed to ride a bike again. I was just going through some 
Today was Flag Day, did you celebrate? I did, by putting up a flag on our garage ... and then going sailing; ended up in a great match race with a long time friend. Perfect.
How cute is this? An announcement from a friend and his wife: "announcing a new addition to the group ride". Awww... 
And speaking of ride visualizations, I've been watching the Criterium Dauphine, and ITV4 (a UK television channel) have a great way of showing a ride route in 3D. Check this out! Makes me think perhaps I could take a GPX file and figure out how to actually print the ride visualization on my 3D printer. Stay tuned :) 
A great day, as me and my good friend Mark performed "geriatric surgery" to extend the life of my 36-year old racing sailboat... and meanwhile, let's see what else is going on:
Consider this cartoon; I think it's funny, but perhaps a Progressive would have to think about it for a while to decide whether they're allowed to laugh. Go ahead, you know you want to... 
I just installed Microsoft Visual Studio 2013. Man, is it ugly.
I love this: 
This is pretty depressing; 
