I’ve been looking forward to my trip to Louisville. Then I looked at the 10-day forecast. Yikes.

That’s ugly. 90+ degrees and 70+% humidity every day.

Had an interesting discussion about bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general with a couple of friends last night. It got a little tense, as the only way I could answer certain questions was with deeply technical concepts. I mean, how do you explain that this particular cryptocurrent (bitcoin) isn’t really encrypted, but uses the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) to sign (assign ownership) a coin? Anyway, this morning I found a good article that lays it out in mostly-plain-English terms. Bitcoin and crypto have become semi-religious topics for a weird mix of conservatives, criminals, investors speculators, and anti-government types. They believe, but they don’t understand the details. For me, the only detail worth remembering is that cryptocurrency (especially bitcoin) is a Ponzi scheme, suitable for speculators (gamblers) and not much else.

Speaking of technical, I really enjoyed this article comparing the Apple M1 and M2 CPUs. 20 billion transistors for the M2 – that’s incredible. When I entered digital tech in college, we worked with the Motorola MC6800, with a whopping transistor count of 4100. The M2 has five million times (!!) as many transistors as my old 6800. Makes me feel old…but proud of my fellow engineers.