Are You Using Bitcoins?

If you aren't and are wondering what bitcoins are, well, they're this online currency some people use. Not backed by a bank or a government or anything; it relies on cryptography to work. You earn bitcoins by going out and getting a miner. Long story short, it looks for suitable cryptographic hashes, of which there are only so many, and the only real way to find them is to dive in and look until you find some. As time progresses, there are fewer and fewer new hashes to find, and eventually they'll run out. (For a more detailed answer, go here and click on 'What exactly is Mining?')

If you are using them, first off, dude, WTF. (That 'not backed by bank or government' thing is kind of deliberate.) Because there's no bank or government banking, there's no real protection from wild, uncontrolled price swings for no good reason or even malevolent reasons. You're about as protected as you were when people traded in Beanie Babies and you know how that went. And I come to you today to note that just because it's not regulated now, that doesn't mean it won't or can't be... or that the idea of same is not currently being considered by Bart Chilton of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. This is just speculation for now, as a bunch of formal steps plus consent from the others on the commission need to be lined up, but it is on Chilton's mind.

That's right: commodity. There is no physical bitcoin, and because there isn't, bitcoins, as Chilton sees it, are not a cash market and therefore fall within the CFTC's scope of operation, same as gold, silver, oil, cattle, corn and frozen concentrated orange juice. Yes, Trading Places wasn't lying to you. That is a real commodity. It's fungible, meaning any given source of oranges is close enough in property to any other given source of oranges to end up in any given carton of orange juice together. Oil's the same- Venezuelan oil, Saudi oil and Kuwaiti oil is probably all in your gas tank right now. And that describes bitcoins as well; all bitcoins are alike.

This isn't even math we can use for anything else, for Pete's sake.

Few outside the bitcoin market would argue that the market looks a bit like the Wild West. It may soon get a sheriff.

Silence Of Interest

I'm personally not one for procedural dramas. So if you're like me, you may need a bit of a primer on the show Person of Interest. Basically, there's this guy who built a machine which is linked up to just about everything that is hooked up in any way whatsoever to any kind of surveillance device or what we've taken to calling the 'cloud'- the whole entire electronic network centered around the Internet. It watches everyone, all the time, fulfilling every Big Brother fear you ever had. Every so often, it'll spit out someone's Social Security number, corresponding to someone the machine deems likely to be involved soon in a crime- victim, perpetrator, machine won't say- and this guy and another guy he wrangled go off to Fight Crime while at the same time trying not to freak everyone way the hell out, which usually involves a lot of trying to keep people from knowing the machine exists.

That doesn't always work. In the show, one person who learned of it, Alicia Corwin, noted that after she left government work, she moved to Green Bank, West Virginia, explaining that it was because Green Bank has no cell phones or wireless Internet.

That's today's subject: such a place is designed to exist. Green Bank is home to the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope. It, and the Sugar Grove Research Facility (also in West Virginia; the NSA has a telescope there as well), are center to a 13,000 square mile region known as the United States National Radio Quiet Zone, largely encompassing southeastern West Virginia and northwestern Virginia. The FCC created it in 1958 to protect the telescopes. In order for the telescopes to work properly, there must be a minimum of radio interference. Any electronic device that could get picked up by the telescopes is restricted. Cell phones are permitted inside some of the area, but as you get particularly close to the telescopes, they can't be used either. Some exceptions are permitted, but those trend towards the public-safety end of the spectrum, such as weather radios and first responders.

What the zone also does is provide an unintentional refuge for people who believe they suffer from electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS). The mere existence of EHS is disputed- some people think that some radio frequencies can make you sick; the general scientific community think those people are simply convincing themselves that they do and display and/or develop symptoms in sympathy to it. But whether or not it's a real thing, the end result is the same: those people move to Green Bank to get away from the radio waves and complain very very loudly about any offending device anyone brings near them.

Broadcast TV is generally awful inside the area, so you pretty much need cable and satellite. That way you'll have something to watch besides Person Of Interest.

Your Science Teacher Was Maybe Possibly Wrong

Among the science you likely got taught in school regarding earthquakes is that one is formed when parts of the earth's crust run up against each other and bend and bend until eventually they snap back to their original shape. The snapback is the earthquake. We've been operating under that theory since the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco.

Scientists at Cornell University would like to dispute that. A team led by Richard Allmendinger recently traveled to the Atacama Desert in Chile, where cracks left over from earthquakes are particularly well-preserved, and noticed permanent deformations. It turns out they're not the first to actually notice- the Polytechnic University of Catalonia detected permanent deformation in the 2011 earthquake in Japan, and the Boxing Day Earthquake off the coast of Indonesia was observed as such by Italy's Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia in 2005 as well- so while you personally may be slightly late to the party, that's fine, because it meant there was time for supporting evidence to come forward.

What this means is that, if that's in fact the way things shake out, the already-murky field of earthquake modeling is going to get a little murkier, as it would mean the models currently in place to try to predict earthquakes are all off and need to recalibrate to account for permanent deformation. But hey, it'll be more accurate afterwards.

Reading Between The Words

We're going to play a word game today. In today's Sporcle quiz, you're going to be given a pair of words in the Scrabble dictionary (4th edition, if that matters to you) that have a single word between them (plurals and verb tenses are disallowed). Your task is to provide that word. You're given 26 pairs, one per letter of the alphabet; you have 8 minutes.

Strip Search: The Home Game

Let us begin by saying I am not an artist in any sense of the word. I'm a writer.  However, Strip Search, Penny Arcade's talent-search competition for webcomic artists- which if you haven't started watching, go get caught up now starting with Episode 1- seems to have had something of a Bob Ross-style effect on a lot of its viewers. They just want to go out and draw something afterwards.

Apparently including me.

One of the chief vehicles driving that is the seemingly-simple, easy-to-play-along nature of the elimination challenge, which fans have deemed the 'Thunderdome'. In the Thunderdome, the two artists placed up for elimination each draw one crumpled-up piece of paper from the "Wastebasket of Broken Dreams". They then uncrumple the papers to reveal two topics, and then have 90 minutes to create a comic strip combining those topics.

This is amazingly easy to emulate. You can just write down a bunch of topics, fill a little wastebasket with them, pull two out and set a 90-minute timer... which can be found here. Or better yet, skip the wastebasket and just pause the elimination episode when the two topics are revealed to the contestants. That's the approach I've just taken.

MILD SPOILER ALERT WE'RE ABOUT TO GET INTO SHOW-RELATED MATERIAL SO STOP HERE, GO WATCH AND COME BACK WHEN YOU'RE CAUGHT UP








The official Strip Search website has taken to recognizing some of the better home-game strips as submitted via the #ElimComic hashtag on Twitter. In the previous round, given the topics 'mermaid' and 'ukelele', someone actually managed to sew a comic. With a sewing machine. And felt. When someone throws down that kind of gauntlet, you gotta pick it up, right? This can't be that hard to attempt, right?

Right?

So I tried my hand at it this morning. The topics presented to the viewers here were 'mystery' and 'naughty'. Topics I'm not entirely a fan of, but all right, let's see what we can do with this.

My attempt, too large to fit in the space provided here, can be seen at this link. Please once again note that I am a writer, not an artist, and I was pretty much limited to an MS Paint disasterpiece as the medium.

November Fools' Day

There's a reason I don't participate in April Fools' Day. I brought it up last year. It's because I'm trying to be trusted. That's a core task of a journalist, to get people to trust you. If you don't have trust, you have nothing. Participating in April Fools' Day just undermines that trust. 'Hey, everyone, you really shouldn't have trusted me yesterday; it was April Fools' Day.' Okay, just today? Are there other days when I shouldn't trust you too?

The saving grace, of course, is that by now people know April Fools' is coming, so they know to be on guard. But what about when the media fools them and it's not April Fools' Day? Perhaps, say, November?

On November 9, 1874, a lengthy piece ran on the front page of the New York Herald, claiming that animals had broken loose from the Central Park Zoo and had begun rampaging throughout New York. The full text of the article can be seen here.

The headline ran 13 levels deep (headlines were multilevel back in those days). 49 were reported dead in the opening paragraph with 200 injured, with the death toll expected to rise. A proclamation from the mayor's office was reported asking people to remain indoors until the National Guard had cleared the town of the 12 animals still at large. After explaining the origin of the escape- a visitor poking a rhinoceros with his cane and the rhino busting out of the cage to get at him, followed by the rhino going around to the other cages to free other animals- the author of the article, Joseph Clarke (assigned the task by editor Thomas Connery) went on to give an eyewitness account of people being trampled, gored, slammed against cage walls, torn to pieces and otherwise horribly mutilated by rampaging animals. He told of some of the animals fighting each other. He told of a tiger charging at him. He told of how many of them were being brought down by anyone who had a big enough gun on hand. On and on he went, complete with a partial list of the names of the dead.

Until the very last paragraph. After over 10,000 words recounting the horrors of the day- MS Word has everything prior to the last paragraph clocking in at 10,158- the reader would see the following:

THE MORAL OF THE WHOLE
Of course the entire story given above is a pure fabrication. Not one word of it is true. Not a single act or incident described has taken place. It is a huge hoax, a wild romance, or whatever other epithet of utter untrustworthiness our readers may choose to apply to it. It is simply a fancy picture which crowded upon the mind of the writer a few days ago while he was gazing through the iron bars of the cages of the wild animals in the menagerie at Central Park. Yet as each of its horrid but perfectly natural sequences impressed themselves upon his mind, the question presented itself, How is New York prepared to meet such a catastrophe? How easily could it occur any day of the week? How much, let the citizens ponder, depends upon the indiscretion of even one of the keepers? A little oversight, a trifling imprudence might lead to the actual happening of all, and even worse than has been pictured. From causes quite as insignificant the greatest calamities of history have sprung. Horror, devastation and widespread slaughter of human beings have had small mishaps for parent time and again.

That's right. 10,000 words of death, destruction and horror were followed by a 'never mind' and a warning to maybe consider upgrading the zoo a bit to keep this kind of thing from happening.

If anyone made it all the way through the article to read that part, history does not record their name. In fact, odds are many people never got past the 13-level headline. Which is par for the course. That's why in journalism classes, you're generally taught to put the most critical parts of a story right at the top of the article: to have the best chance of someone actually seeing them. That's known as the lede. Often, people never read past the headline. I'm no different; in the course of finding something worth writing about here, I sift through a lot of articles and many of them aren't read any further than the headline. I see a headline, decide to pass on it, and move on to the next headline. I don't have time in the day to read all those articles to completion, much less read them all and then write my own on top of it. (Non-indicative headlines like I typically use here help combat that a bit; if you skip out after one of my headlines, you haven't really been mislead on anything since I haven't really told you anything yet. I try and write so that you're driven to read as much as possible.)

Besides, this is the kind of article you tend to drop in the middle in a blind panic to do something about it or quit in nauseous exhaustion. There's no reason to suggest that the rest of the article is anything but horror on top of horror. What is this, April Fools' Day? Of course not. It's November. Besides, as Russell Puntenney of Cracked pointed out, 10,000 words is a bit far to go with it if it's just a hoax.

So New York freaked out. Anyone who didn't freak out, or was nearing the end of the article and thereby the truth, had only to look outside to see cleared streets, armed vigilantes and terrified parents rushing to school to grab their kids and get them home to prepare for the onslaught of escaped animals in order to determine that something was in fact going on. The fact that no actual animals were around was not picked up by anyone for a while- after all, it's Manhattan and there are 12 of them; they could easily be somewhere else But Coming Very Soon. The other newspapers in New York were completely taken in as well; World reporter George W. Hosmer showed up in his newsroom with a revolver in each hand exclaiming, "Well, here I am." General John A. Dix never made it to the part of the article where he personally shot a Bengal tiger, and set out with a rifle himself... thereby fulfilling the article's proclamations enough for anyone who did get that far to believe it.

Herald owner James Gordon Bennett, meanwhile, spent the day in bed along with a lot of the city.

Good idea. Because when people inevitably figured out what had actually happened, papers nationwide wanted his head. The New York Times, while conceding that the cages in the zoo could in fact stand to be upgraded, called the Herald's way of going about saying that "intensely stupid and unfeeling". Some readers even marched down to the district attorney's office to see if some sort of charges could be pressed against the paper (the answer, as it turned out, was no). The Plainfield Times (NJ), according to the book The Martians Have Landed! by Robert Bartholomew and Ben Radford, reported that one of their local residents actually did die, of a heart attack while reading the article.

The Herald ultimately weathered the storm of public discontent (and distressingly easily so). It's thought that there were later unrelated consequences to the hoax, namely a Thomas Nast cartoon from November 7, 1874 marking the original depiction of the Republican elephant. That's wrong. First off, the Herald hoax was published two days later on the 9th, and second, the Nast cartoon was backdated from October. Though once Nast's lead time caught up to it, Nast proceeded to merrily rake the Herald over the coals for months afterward.

Right along with everyone else.

The Central Park Zoo received its first permanent building in 1875.

Rapid-Fire Book Club, This Ought To Hold Me Until LA Edition

I leave for Los Angeles in two weeks. I've gone out and grabbed two books which I hope will last me until I touch down at LAX, after which I can reload. One was picked up at Boswell Book Company, the other at this little place at the Shops of Grand Avenue mall titled 'BOOKS'. Which is really all you need to do to get me in the door anyway.

Purchased this time:

*Powell, Robert Andrew- This Love Is Not For Cowards: Salvation And Soccer in Ciudad Juarez
*Trav S.D.- No Applause- Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous