[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

[rfmcdonald]

• At Antipope, Charlie Stross examines the connections between bitcoin production and the alt-right. Could cryptocurrency have seriously bad political linkages?


• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes GW170680, a recent gravitational wave detection that is both immense in its effect and surprising for its detection being normal.


• Centauri Dreams reports on a new study suggesting hot Jupiters are so large because they are heated by their local star.


• Crooked Timber counsels against an easy condemnation of baby boomers as uniquely politically malign.


• Daily JSTOR notes one paper that takes a look at how the surprisingly late introduction of the bed, as a piece of household technology, changed the way we sleep.


• Dangerous Minds shares a 1968 newspaper interview with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, talking about Charlie Manson and his family and their influence on him.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog takes a look at the opioid epidemic and the way that it is perceived.


• At A Fistful of Euros, Alex Harrowell suggests that the unsolvable complexities of Northern Ireland may be enough to avoid a hard Brexit after all.


• The LRB Blog describes a visit to a seaside village in Costa Rica where locals and visitors try to save sea turtles.


• Lingua Franca reflects on the beauty of the Icelandic language.


• The Map Room Blog shares an awesome map depicting the locations of the stars around which we have detected exoplanets.


• Marginal Revolution notes the ill health of North Korean defectors, infected with parasites now unseen in South Korea.


• Roads and Kingdoms reports on the revival of fonio, a West African grain that is now starting to see successful marketing in Senegal.


• Spacing reviews a fascinating book examining the functioning of urban villages embedded in the metropoli of south China.


• Strange Company reports on the mysterious 1920 murder of famous bridge player Joseph Bowne Elwell.


• Towleroad reports on Larnelle Foster, a gay black man who was a close friend of Meghan Markle in their college years.


• Window on Eurasia notes that, although Ukraine suffered the largest number of premature dead in the Stalinist famines of the 1930s, Kazakhstan suffered the greatest proportion of dead.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell has a photo essay looking at the Berlin Brandenburg Airport, still years away from completion and beset by many complex failures of its advanced systems. What does the failure of this complex system say about others we may wish to build?

Comments

Bitcoin Bad-News Vibes

[dewline]

Oh BOY. This is SO not good a prospect.

More electricity than Ireland???

Noting this:

"Times change, and so, I think, do the people behind the ongoing BTC commodity bubble. (Which is still inflating because around 30% of BTC remain to be mined, so conditions of artificial scarcity and a commodity bubble coincide). Last night I tweeted an intemperate opinion—that's about all twitter is good for, plus the odd bon mot and cat jpeg—that we need to ban Bitcoin because it's fucking our carbon emissions. It's up to 0.12% of global energy consumption and rising rapidly: the implication is that it has the potential to outstrip more useful and productive computational uses of energy (like, oh, kitten jpegs) and to rival other major power-hogging industries without providing anything we actually need. And boy did I get some interesting random replies!"

Further:

"Obviously, a lot of folks with BTC wallets are kind of attached to them and dislike the idea of losing them. What I wasn't expecting was white supremacy/neo-Nazi connection. Bitcoin isn't just popular among libertarians, it's popular among folks with green frog/Kek user icons and anti-semitic views. ("Are you a Jew?" asked one egg.)

Okay, we definitely have another aspect of the Fascist International Problem in play here!

Re: Bitcoin Bad-News Vibes

[dewline]

Also: "coinhive"?

As far as I know, I have no stake in this stuff right now, but that doesn't rule out anyone I'm dealing with tying my future to it without my knowledge or consent.

Re: Bitcoin Bad-News Vibes

[dewline]

Oh, and if you haven't already seen this yet?

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1212451