Archive: March 5, 2014

<<< March 4, 2014

Home

March 6, 2014 >>>

Iditarod day 4 - leaders race while resters rest

Wednesday,  03/05/14  10:45 PM

Day four of the Iditarod ... and it's getting hard to follow the leaders.  There's a pack of leaders heading out of Ohfir, led by Jeff King and Sonny Lindner (at 64, the oldest musher in the face), and another pack of would-be leaders resting in Takotna, including favorites Aliy Zirkle and Robert Sorlie.  And then there's Martin Buser, who is way behind on the trail but moving again out of Rohn after having taken his 24-hour break already.  On paper he's now the one to beat, as he'll keep moving while the others rest, but only time will tell whether he'll be caught back before the finish by fresher teams. Tomorrow will be interesting, as the teams in Takotna hit the trail again, and we can start to see how much fresher / faster they are than Buser, who will be ahead of them.  And the day after we'll see the same with Jeff King and Sonny Lindner.  At that point everyone will have taken their break, and it will be head-to-head racing... except for the 8-hour break everyone has to take along the Yukon River :) (All Iditarod 2014 posts)

 

Wednesday,  03/05/14  11:08 PM

(Yawn)  Whew a long day, starting with a breakfast presentation to investors and finishing with a nice Chardonnay, with a four-hour meeting about JSON APIs in between.  Meanwhile, it's all happening... So, who is the reclusive billionaire creator of Bitcoin?  Turns out he's apparently been found, his name *is* Satoshi Nakamoto, and he's not a billionaire, except perhaps "on paper".  Excellent.  Meanwhile, Ars Technica have created Arscoin, their own custom cybercurrency, and the Winklevii have paid for a trip into space using Bitcoin.  Is this a great time to be alive, or what? NASA says it wants to go to Jupiter's crazy moon, Europa.  No word yet on whether you can hitch a ride if you pay in Bitcoin, but nothing would surprise me anymore :)  Don't you love Salon?  Just kidding.  Over the years they've gone from being an interesting source of liberal points of view to a sad shadow of their former selves.  I find the difference is that now their writers are ill-informed and stupid, where before they were just ... wrong :)  Speaking of wrong: Los Angeles becomes the latest city to ban e-cigarettes.  Seriously?  I live in a nanny state, and I don't like it.  From GigaOm: Lit Motors is awesome, but let's be realistic.  In which a new entrant in the electric vehicle market is celebrated and counted out all at the same time.  Obviously there's a steep ramp to success and many have failed, but let's root for them and not predestine their failure.  They will have to raise a little more than $1M to succeed, however...  Inhabitat: Mind-blowing photographs of Earth taken from space.  Way cool.

Return to the archive.