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February 8, 2021 Archives
Monday, February 8, 2021
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Thermodynamically Sound Money: The Physics of Bitcoin
We mock your green paper “dollars”, created at the whim of an impotent and obsolete continental-scale, railroad-era empire, which defy fundamental physical principles such as conservation of mass-energy and replace them with the folly of illegitimate institutions at the behest of their political masters. Instead, we bypass your ziggurat of unpayable debt and fraud and supplant it with inherent scarcity grounded in number theory, then route around your coercive control, hidden confiscation by printing of funny money, and exclusion of billions of “unbanked” from the emerging global and eventually solar system free market.
Think you'll “Ban it?”
Go ahead, make my day.
Posted at
23:00
CONTEXT: Coming: The High Frontier—Documentary on Gerard K. O'Neill and Space Colonies
Here's my review from when I last re-read Prof. O'Neill's book in 2013: https://t.co/njio1LYxgd https://t.co/GxUu0rp1a8
— John Walker (@Fourmilab) February 8, 2021
Posted at
19:30
CONTINUITY: A Clever and Efficient Solar-Powered LED Lantern
Nokero (“No kerosene”) produce solar-powered lamps intended to replace kerosene lanterns (with their attendant fuel expense, fire hazard, and indoor air pollution) for the approximately 1.2 billion people without access to reliable electric power. The design uses a lithium-iron-phosphate battery which, although having a lower energy density than lithium ion batteries, withstands more charge/discharge cycles without loss of capacity, is more tolerant of overcharge and discharge, less likely to explode or burst into flames, and uses a safer electrolyte.
The Nokero lamp uses a current regulator driven by a microcontroller to extract the most useful light from a battery charge, providing constant light and avoiding losses due to voltage drops in regulator components. In typical applications, the lamp provides around 15 hours of light from one day's charge in sunlight and about 2000 charge cycles without loss of capacity.
In this video, Big Clive reverse engineers the circuitry and explains how it achieves its admirable performance.
Posted at
15:50
CONTEXT: Chimpanzees Have Astounding Short-Term Memory
Consider: millions of years ago our antecedents gave a massive sacrifice of their left hemisphere.
— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) January 5, 2020
We lost a tremendous amount of short term memory and replaced it with Broca’s, Wernicke & the phonological loop.
But why?
So we can—talk.
Thus chimpanzees can do this—we can’t: pic.twitter.com/CDznxg37p1
Posted at
13:07
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Air Stairs, a Hijacking, and the “Cooper Vane”
Posted at
12:05