A reader recently asked me to comment on the demise of MtGox and its implications for Bitcoin enthusiasts. I refused to do so, on account of the MtGox scam having been thoroughly beaten to death elsewhere – long before the recent and final convulsive fit people erroneously describe as ‘its demise.’ – The unwashed masses, […]
The following is a conversation I recently had with an alert and inquisitive reader. It has been redacted for brevity; handles/names/irrelevant things have been removed. Some text has been turned into links to relevant material. Anyone still reading this page for reasons related to its original purpose is encouraged to read this; it may help […]
If you came here via a search engine, you were probably looking for Pierre Cartier’s wonderful mini-biography of the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck – from which I shamelessly stole the title. Please go straight there. Otherwise… “And so no one, except for two people, enters the top floor of the Aedificium. …” The abbot smiled. “No […]
Your kitchen is alive with vermin! Who is to blame? The cruel forces of nature? Or, might it be you – the fellow who scattered delicious crumbs everywhere; spilled honey a thousand times without picking up a mop once; and kept a mountain of old newspapers around for rodents to chew into nest liner? Your […]
The Bitcoin Kill Switch is quite alive, well, and waiting to be pressed: “I can’t assure with 100% certainty that the all the black dots are owned by Satoshi, but almost all are owned by a single entity, and that entity began mining right from block 1, and with the same performance as the genesis […]
“The most important thing a crook needs is an impeccable reputation.” (Attributed to Agatha Christie.) Bitcoin interests me as an obvious example of a technological jewel tossed around aimlessly by the brutal hands of cave men. I can’t help but picture a flashlight or a radio set, left behind in the wilderness by geologists, to […]
“The enlightened, disciplined mind is the holiest of holies, a wonder among wonders. Upon the Earth – a grain of sand in the Universe, man is on the order of one-billionth of the smallest magnitude… And yet this particle in your mind’s eye, that lives but for sixty or so trips of the Earth around […]
Three years ago, I predicted that publishers will inevitably declare war on book-lending: “Let’s pretend that a Nook book (or any similar DRM’d ebook) could be lent in exactly the same manner as a physical book: to whomever you like, whenever you like, for as long as you like – with the added benefit of […]
Computing pioneer Alan Kay tells us that a computer is “an instrument whose music is ideas.” This seems like a beautiful metaphor, until you realize that we have somehow ended up in a world where the profession of musician is nearly unknown. To continue with this analogy, let’s imagine that you were a child who […]
At present, I have taken a break from the hardware aspects of Loper – to work on “Jupiter,” a Linux-based emulator of the system’s essential aspects. (Think QEMU.) Jupiter is unlikely to be of any practical use to anyone but myself. However, at some point, I will make it public, so that interested persons who […]
