Category Archives: propaganda

Iconography and ideology.

Time to reboot

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I’m going to try to merge my (private) project wiki with the public blog. This calls for a new spark-o-licious theme! Pardon the dust while stuff gets added and shuffled around.

The background shot is one of my early attempts to design a modulated flyback driver. Sparks emerge from a tungsten electrode (at the top), striking a piece of highly ordered pyrolytic graphite (at the bottom). The original photo and others from those days are up on Flickr. The coil resonated at around 20 kHz, but the driver was horribly inefficient, requiring heat sinks and turbine fans. I’m having much better luck with the ZVS driver these days.

Bytecoins!

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Bytecoins!

I scored 15 bytecoins at Metrix CreateSpace yesterday. What are they worth?

Well, I’ll tell you what I paid for them. I traded a shrunken Susan B. Anthony dollar for a 10-byte note, and a shrunken quarter for a 5-byte note. That puts the direct exchange rate at about 10:1 (B:$). We agreed that since they were shrunken coins, it established a fair “proof of work”.

But it gets more complicated than that. The going eBay rate for a shrunken dollar is about $21 for a $1 Sacagawea. That puts the exchange rate at roughly 1:2 (B:shrunken $).

Money is complicated.

I think I’ll hang my bytecoins on the wall and watch them appreciate… That seems like the fiducially responsible thing to do.

Also: Happy 99th Birthday, Alan Turing!