Author: mountainwashere

Nothing to see, move along.

Super fun doodle time!

So I finished True Detective last night. Great show, slightly disappointed with the ending, though. Anyhap, I did a bit of doodling while I was watching, decided to share them with you guys. They’re a bit more elaborate than usual, though by no means the largest I’ve done (though all the larger ones are gone, they got lost during a move a few years back). Sorry for the shitty photo quality, don’t have a scanner, just my crappy phone camera.
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Mechanism and Pseudoscience

Growing up with and around hippies, I was exposed to a lot of pseudoscience, so I had to develop a set of metrics to differentiate between science and pseudoscience. Many of them had to do with considering the reliability of the source, (if I heard this from some guy named Moonbeam at a Rainbow Gathering who can barely stand up straight: Probably not too reliable), but a few are more useful, and have stuck with me over the years. The main one has to do with mechanism.
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SETI@home vs. Bitcoin

I have an issue with bitcoin. Well, a few issues. It’s bad for the environment, it’s an unstable currency, blah blah, etc. Charles Stross covered most of my complaints. I have one in specific that really bugs me, though: All that computing power, and that carbon footprint, is just being applied to generating more bitcoin.
Well, duh, of course, what else would it be used for? Well, when I first heard about bitcoin, I didn’t quite get how it worked. I thought that the bitcoin mining process essentially loaned out your computer’s processing power to various networks that needed it, giving you bitcoin in exchange for that. I pretty quickly realized I was wrong, though, and that the mining process didn’t do anything but, well, mine. After a number of conversations and a good bit of thought, I’ve come up with an idea for a slightly more interesting and useful form of cryptocurrency: SETI@home Coin. (Note, not my original idea. I did come up with it on my own, but many others have come up with it separately before me. It happens.)

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The More You Know

So have you ever encountered a faster than light drive in fiction that CAN’T be used in or near a gravity well, at least without serious consequences? A good example of this is Halo 2. A Covenant ship jumps inside Earth’s gravity well/ atmosphere, causes a huge explosion. Other examples of this include the StarDrive universe, the Tom Swift III universe (I think, haven’t read those books since I was a little kid), and a number of others. There is a good reason for this: awesome space battles.
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