Jonah Lehrer has written a book about love. In case the name of the author rings a bell, but you aren't quite sure why ... that is THIS fellow. Lehrer was a high-flying pop-science pundit over a five year period, from 2007 until 2012. He wrote a series of books with such titles as Proust Was A Neuroscientist with a lot of specific messages but with the over-arching meta-messages that Neuroscience is Wonderful and Explains Everything about Us. The link I provided you above takes you to a blog entry I posted here in August 2012, amidst Lehrer's fall from grace. The specific cause was a lot of crap he wrote about Dylan. But, as is often the case in these scandals, once some blood is in the water other sharks arrive, and other chunks of flesh are torn away from the reputational body. In this case, the "sharks" weren't doing anything more predatory than fact checking, and source checking. Which turned out to be quite predatory indeed for Lehrer. For example: W...
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So: now that Wired and Gizmodo have outed Australian Craig Wright, and Wright has owned up to it...is he really Nakamoto? Has the question of the origins of bitcoin been put to rest? Dan Kaminsky, a computer security researcher, has said that he and other researchers who've looked into this "have got him dead to rights." That is: that Wright is pulling a con. Jerry Brito, the executive director of a nonprofit research organization that studies currency issues, agrees. Wright has "provided no cryptographic evidence verifiable by the public, and many of his answers sound plain fishy." Even Wired seems to have changed sides. The cryptographic evidence adduced one way or the other is difficult for a non-expert to follow. Here is a simple point, though. Wright's company, Cloudcroft, a data analytics concern, has claimed to own two supercomputers, one of which was manufactured by SGI, the company formerly known as Silicon Graphics. But ... SGI denies i...
As you probably know, dear reader, the crypto-currency Bitcoin, the first and so far most successful of the world's crypto-currencies, is generally described as the invention of one Satoshi Nakamoto. And that name is generally understood as a pseudonym for a more shadowy person or group. About the actual identity of whom a variety of theories have bloomed. Why care? Other than the possibility that you love a recent-history puzzle, you might care because whoever that person is, or whoever they are, "Satoshi" holds a heck of a large cache of personal bitcoins. If he sold them in a single blow, he'd render the currency near worthless. His cache is called the Tulip Trust, and it consists of 1.1 million bitcoins. A few months ago (December 2015) a couple of magazines simultaneously and independently declared that they knew who Satoshi was/is. Their accounts differed in some details but had a lot of overlap. Wired and Gizmodo both said that bitcoin was the creatio...