On June 8, 1959, the US Navy fired a Regulus I missile from the USS Barbero (SSG-317) and directed it to land at the Naval Auxiliary Air Station at Mayport, Florida, near Jacksonville. While the sub was docked at Norfolk, Virginia, Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield helped place two blue and red metal containers, holding 3,000 letters, inside the sub’s missile prior to the flight.

The missile was fired from the submarine shortly before noon and arrived at Mayport twenty-two minutes later. The 3,000 letters inside the missile were identical letters from the Postmaster General that were addressed to President Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon, cabinet members and top federal officials, all members of congress, Supreme Court justices, U.S. governors, postmasters generals from around the world and the officers and crew of the Barbero. Summerfield’s letter was an enthusiastic announcement of the experiment, which had not been publicly announced beforehand.

Someone talk me out of buying a (wood) router.

Bitcoin’s ongoing meteoric price rise has received the bulk of recent press attention with a lot of discussion around whether or not it’s a bubble waiting to burst.

However, most the coverage has missed out one of the more interesting and unintended consequences of this price increase. That is the surge in global electricity consumption used to “mine” more Bitcoins.

According to Digiconomist’s Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, as of Monday November 20th, 2017 Bitcoin’s current estimated annual electricity consumption stands at 29.05TWh.

That’s the equivalent of 0.13% of total global electricity consumption. While that may not sound like a lot, it means Bitcoin mining is now using more electricity than 159 individual countries... More than Ireland or Nigeria.

...

* If it keeps increasing at this rate, Bitcoin mining will consume all the world’s electricity by February 2020.

It never ends, does it? Guitar players are never satisfied with their stuff.

27 years of dissatisfaction

Continue reading →

Religion don't mean a thing
It's just another way to be right-wing
-Spoon, Jonathon Fisk

For years, a coalition of well-funded groups on the religious right have waged an uphill battle to repeal a 1954 law that bans churches and other nonprofit groups from engaging in political activity.

Now, those groups are edging toward a once-improbable victory as Republican lawmakers, with the enthusiastic backing of President Trump, prepare to rewrite large swaths of the United States tax code as part of the $1.5 trillion tax package moving through Congress.

Among the changes in the tax bill that passed the House this month is a provision to roll back the 1954 ban, a move that is championed by the religious right, but opposed by thousands of religious and nonprofit leaders, who warn that it could blur the line between charity and politics.

Maybe they can set things up so that the congregations' tithings go straight to the GOP.

Or, perhaps having to sit through political lectures from preachers will be so terrible that people will abandon organized religion for good.

The speech was titled “It Is OK To Be White” and was sponsored by the UConn College Republicans, who declined to comment before and after the event. A Facebook event for the talk said Wintrich would “discuss identity politics, liberal victimhood, anti-conservative bias and other hot-button issues.”

Keep fucking that chicken, GOP.

h/t Mark Low!

Seeking to prove that a conspiracy of astronauts fabricated the shape of the Earth, a California man intends to launch himself 1,800 feet high on Saturday in a rocket he built from scrap metal.

Assuming the 500-mph, mile-long flight through the Mojave Desert does not kill him, Mike Hughes told the Associated Press, his journey into the atmosflat will mark the first phase of his ambitious flat-Earth space program.

Hughes’s ultimate goal is a subsequent launch that puts him miles above the Earth, where the 61-year-old limousine driver hopes to photograph proof of the disc we all live on.

...

“It’ll shut the door on this ball earth,” Hughes said in a fundraising interview with a flat-Earth group for Saturday’s flight. Theories discussed during the interview included NASA being controlled by round-Earth Freemasons and Elon Musk making fake rockets from blimps.

Hughes promised the flat-Earth community that he would expose the conspiracy with his steam-powered rocket, which will launch from a heavily modified mobile home — though he acknowledged that he still had much to learn about rocket science.

I'll guess that everything he sees will confirm his theory.

Trump sure knows his stuff...

The Trump administration is leaning toward naming Thomas Brunell, a Texas professor with no government experience, to the top operational job at the U.S. Census Bureau, according to two people who have been briefed on the bureau’s plans.

Brunell, a political science professor, has testified more than half a dozen times on behalf of Republican efforts to redraw congressional districts, and is the author of a 2008 book titled “Redistricting and Representation: Why Competitive Elections Are Bad for America.”

If you were, like I was, completely disappointed in how the first season of Serial podcast turned out, and therefore a little resentful that you wasted so many hours listening to it, there is hope. Netflix's American Vandal applies the Serial formula to the (fictional) case of "who drew all the dicks on the teacher's cars?"

The timeline. The missing half hour. The cell phone records. The back and forth of "I believe him! I don't believe him!" The endless spiral of chasing-down of witnesses' credibilities. But it's not about murder, it's about high school kids and big red dicks painted on cars.

So much fun. So far, anyway. Seems like this kind of thing could wear thin quickly. But, for now, it's redeeming all the time I wasted on Serial!