The Bitcoin Paradox

A Blockchain Explainer
"It’s easy to become enchanted with the dizzying profits being made with BitCoin, and with the elegance of the mathematics beneath it. But it’s dangerous to forget that the point of these systems is to bring the political power of common knowledge into the Internet age, together with all of its potential for disruption and conflict"

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Via: Nautilus
h/t

The Women's Hockey Star Fighting to Grow the Game

Richard T Gagnon/Getty

When she was just 2 years old, Kaliya Johnson knew figure skates wouldn’t cut it. “I was obsessed with Julie in D2: The Mighty Ducks,” says Johnson. “She was the only girl on the team … I knew that’s what I wanted to do.”
For the next six years, Johnson followed in Julie’s footsteps. With no girl’s youth hockey club within an hour of her home in LA, she played with the boys. But once her mother, Kelli, a former collegiate basketball player, realized hockey was more than a phase, road trips became part of the family rhythm. “I knew she was serious when she gave up all her other sports,” Kelli tells OZY. “She was an amazing soccer player and was on her way to a black belt in Hapkido, but she gave that up.”

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Via: OZY

10 of the Most Covered Songs in Music History

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

"Unlike movies, where it's rare that a second (or third) attempt at remaking a film can ever match—let alone top—the original, music is different sort of creative beast. Just because The Beatles did a bang-up job on one song doesn't mean that Joan Baez or Elvis Presley couldn't do the same tune justice in their own unique way. Which is a very good thing, as The Beatles's catalog is one of the most copied in music history. While not an exhaustive list, here are 10 of the most covered songs."

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Via: Mental Floss

What If Consciousness Doesn't Drive the Mind?

It’s easy to assume that these contents of consciousness are somehow chosen, caused or controlled by our personal awareness – after all, thoughts don’t exist until until we think them. But in a new research paper in Frontiers of Psychology, Peter Halligan & David A Oakley argue that this is a mistake.

They suggest that our personal awareness does not create, cause or choose our beliefs, feelings or perceptions. Instead, the contents of consciousness are generated “behind the scenes” by fast, efficient, non-conscious systems in our brains. All this happens without any interference from our personal awareness, which sits passively in the passenger seat while these processes occur.

Put simply, we don’t consciously choose our thoughts or our feelings – we become aware of them.

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Via: Real Clear Science

The Serial-Killer Detector

"Thomas Hargrove is a homicide archivist. For the past seven years, he has been collecting municipal records of murders, and he now has the largest catalogue of killings in the country—751,785 murders carried out since 1976, which is roughly twenty-seven thousand more than appear in F.B.I. files. States are supposed to report murders to the Department of Justice, but some report inaccurately, or fail to report altogether, and Hargrove has sued some of these states to obtain their records. Using computer code he wrote, he searches his archive for statistical anomalies among the more ordinary murders resulting from lovers’ triangles, gang fights, robberies, or brawls. Each year, about five thousand people kill someone and don’t get caught, and a percentage of these men and women have undoubtedly killed more than once. Hargrove intends to find them with his code, which he sometimes calls a serial-killer detector."

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Via: The New Yorker 

Getting a Dog May Save Your Life

Having a dog can bring a lot of love into your life. It could also make it last a little longer. A group of academics from Uppsala University in Sweden analyzed the health records of 3.4 million people in that northern European country, where databases contain detailed information on everyone’s hospitalizations, medical history and even whether they own a dog. Such detailed records made it relatively easy to suss out the impact of having a canine companion. People in possession of a pooch were less likely to have cardiovascular disease or die from any cause during the 12 years covered by the research, according to the study published in Scientific Reports.

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Via: Bloomberg

10 Things That Will Put Hair on Your Chest

In the link below Brett McKay, creator of the Art of Manliness, highlights ten of the most common things we were told as boys would put hair on our chests (but actually don’t). We hope it will help further the tradition of benign parental cons (i.e., Santa Claus, tooth fairy, “your face will stay that way if you make it for too long,” etc., etc.).

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Via: Art of Manliness

The Hidden Science and Tech of the Byzantine Empire

Byzantium was a pragmatic and down-to-earth culture—it developed sophisticated systems for taxation, justice, administration, and military deployment—and it also exhibited prowess in science and technology. In his new book, A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from History’s Most Orthodox Empire, Anthony Kaldellis aims to capture this side of the Byzantines.

Byzantine military inventors perfected Greek Fire, a combustible liquid like napalm that could be hurled at enemy ships (or lobbed against land armies as hand grenades); a Byzantine philosopher made two synchronized clocks, placing one at the frontier and one in the capital, so that messages could be sent across Asia Minor via a network of fire signals, each message keyed to the time of day or night that it was sent; and Byzantine theologians included ancient Greek science within the basic curriculum of learning that aspiring religious thinkers had to master.

Follow the link to read about six notable successes (and failures) of Byzantine science and engineering.

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Via: Nautius

The military's unsung Native American heroes

The Military's unsung Native American Heroes. They make up a proportionally huge number of veterans and those actively serving.
Native people account for about 2 percent of the American population. But in recent years, America's first citizens have been serving in the military at the highest rate of any ethnic group in the U.S. per capita, according to the Department of Defense.

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Via: The Week

ScanPyraminds

The Great Pyramid of Giza, the largest in all of Egypt, was built more than 4500 years ago as the final resting place of the 4th Dynasty pharaoh Khufu (a.k.a. Cheops), who reigned from 2509 to 2483 BCE. Modern Egyptologists have been excavating and studying it for more than a century, but it's still full of mysteries that have yet to be fully solved. The latest discovery, detailed in a new paper in the journal Nature, reveals a hidden void located with the help of particle physics. This is the first time a new inner structure has been located in the pyramid since the 19th century.

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Via: Mental Floss

"JFK Assassination Records Collection Act stipulated that all records that had been withheld, either partially or in full, would be released to the public 25 years later, on October 26, 2017.

"Well, the time has come to open up the files, and there is plenty of intriguing content in the 2800 newly released documents to sift through. (At the last minute, the government withheld 300 more documents, which will have to undergo classified review over the next six months.) Here are five things we’ve learned so far—not all about the assassination itself—from the documents."
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Via: Mental Floss

Fright Fest: The Science Behind Why We Love to Be Scared

Every week of the year, in rural Summertown, Tennessee, not too far from Nashville, retired Navy man Russ McKamey terrorizes people. McKamey Manor is a haunted house, but it's nothing you'd send your kid to for Halloween. It's billed to interested parties as "live your own horror movie."

 Taking pleasure in fear is actually quite normal, it turns out. According to Kate Brownlowe, neuropsychiatrist and section chief of neurobehavioral health in the department of neurology and psychology at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, being afraid is essential to human survival. "On an evolutionary basis, people who had a good fear response to things that were dangerous were far more likely to survive in the wild," she tells Mental Floss.

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Via: Mental Floss

A Lazy Person's Guide to Happiness

Find the right environment, and very little effort is necessary.

"After publication of his 2008 book Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest, he launched a company of the same name that works with local communities to integrate health-based changes. I first talked to Buettner at the Aspen Ideas Festival a couple years ago, where he was one of the few people in jeans and a T-shirt. While most people there were sitting listening to interviews and panel discussions, he texted to see if I wanted to cut out and go mountain biking.
I couldn’t, because I have a job. Buettner’s job is to find and hang out with the healthiest people in the world. When we did sit down, he told me about how he was working with Gallup on finding a way to identify the statistically “happiest” people in the world. This month that work is published as the third book in the series, The Blue Zones of Happiness."

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Via: The Atlantic

The IQ test has a dark history

"Since its invention, the IQ test has generated strong arguments in support of and against its use. Both sides are focused on the communities that have been negatively impacted in the past by the use of intelligence tests for eugenic purposes.
The use of IQ tests in a range of settings, and the continued disagreement over their validity and even morality, highlights not only the immense value society places on intelligence — but also our desire to understand and measure it."

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Via: The Week

Here are the Meanings Behind 19 Classic Sailor Tattoos

These days, tattoos are so commonplace in the U.S. military that every branch has its own policy as part of its uniform regulations, but a few years ago that wasn’t the case. The U.S. Navy, however, has a long tradition of tattoos.

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Via: Under the Radar

What Happened at Nikola Tesla's Secret Experimental Station?

Tesla claimed that he could transmit electric power abundantly and cheaply anywhere on the planet but there is little to no evidence that Tesla succeeded, not even in his own meticulous notes.

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Via: Real Clear Science

Harvesting cork in rural Spain

I knew cork came from trees but this is not exactly what I expected. The video in the link shows  expert axemen carefully harvest the thick exterior bark from cork oak trees at the Las Varas del Zumajo estate in the La Mancha region of Spain.

After the tree is 25 years old, the cork can be havested - once every nine years. Seems like cork should be more expensive than what it is.

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Via: The Kid Should See This

25 of Oscar Wilde's Wittiest Quotes

1. ON GOD

"I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability."

2. ON THE WORLD AS A STAGE

"The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast."

3. ON FORGIVENESS

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."

4. ON GOOD VERSUS BAD

"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."

5. ON GETTING ADVICE

"The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself."

6. ON HAPPINESS

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go."

7. ON CYNICISM

"What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."

8. ON SINCERITY

"A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."

9. ON MONEY

"When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is."

10. ON LIFE'S GREATEST TRAGEDIES

"There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it."

11. ON HARD WORK

"Work is the curse of the drinking classes."

12. ON LIVING WITHIN ONE'S MEANS

"Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination."

13. ON TRUE FRIENDS

"True friends stab you in the front."

14. ON MOTHERS

"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his."

15. ON FASHION

"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."

16. ON BEING TALKED ABOUT

"There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."

17. ON GENIUS

"Genius is born—not paid."

18. ON MORALITY

"Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike."

19. ON RELATIONSHIPS

"How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being?"

20. ON THE DEFINITION OF A "GENTLEMAN"

"A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone’s feelings unintentionally."

21. ON BOREDOM

"My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people’s."

22. ON AGING

"The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything."

23. ON MEN AND WOMEN

"I like men who have a future and women who have a past."

24. ON POETRY

"There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope."

25. ON WIT

"Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit."

h/t Mental Floss

The Origins of 25 Monsters, Ghosts, and Spooky Things

Though dressing up as an angel is acceptable, it’s ghouls and goblins that truly capture our imaginations during the Halloween season. As lit jack-o’-lanterns beckon and monsters lurk in the shadows, we explore the origins of 25 frightful things that go bump—or boo—in the night.

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Via: Mental Floss

Searching for the Identity of San Francisco’s Mysterious Mummified Girl

 

On May 9, 2016, as construction crews were renovating a home in the city’s posh Richmond district, they struck something with their shovels. Under the garage floor was a tiny coffin made of lead and bronze, its most prominent feature a pair of glass windows that allowed workers to peer inside. They saw the preserved remains of a three-year-old girl. She was dressed in white, with ankle-high shoes, and grasped purple flowers that’d also been woven into her hair. A rosary and eucalyptus seeds had been carefully set atop her chest. There were no markers indicating who she was or when she died.

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Via: Atlas Obscura