Having recovered from my diversion into Bitcoin, including figuring out how to build Bitcoin Core with Visual Studio, I am on to my next technical investigation, how to extract HD video from a Tivo, edit it, and encode as an MP4.  Stay tuned :)

This is so beautiful: The IBM 1620, an affordable "scientific computer" from 1959.  Where by affordable we mean, $88,000, which would be $715,000 in 2015.  Still looking at those old pictures, it was probably worth it. 

No word on how fast it could run Handbrake to encode MP4 video :)

Detroit News documents the decimation of one city block.  I'm unclear on why news media use the phrase "predatory subprime lenders".  These are businesses which makes loans to "subprime borrowers", people who would not otherwise be able to purchase property because they don't have a sufficient down payment or cannot afford the monthly payments. So the interest rate is high, to compensate for the risk.  With such loans often the borrower can't afford the payments, doesn't have much or any money invested as a down payment, and hence abandons the property. Then the lender has to foreclose. This doesn't seems surprising or "predatory". 

PS the comments are most instructive.  Many readers seem to feel racial preferences had something to do with lender decisions to foreclose.  I'd like to see evidence of that - correlation does not imply causality.

On deck this week: New Horizons mission to Pluto!  You can warm up by watching this video from Wired.  I can't wait! 

You can read more about the mission on NASA's New Horizons mission website.  Coolest thing I learned: after its five-month-long encounter with Pluto, New Horizons will go on to explore other non-planets in the Kuiper Belt, including two over a billion miles beyond Neptune.  To give you an idea of the distance, it takes light 5 hours to travel from Earth to Pluto.

Inside JFK's abandoned TWA terminal.  Wow, frozen in time, and super cool.  TWA had a sad history, but use of this terminal was stopped by 9/11.  Let's hope it lives a nice new life as a hotel...