Still plugging away at this painting. I feel like I need to get a bit adventurous with the lighting.

We are headed to Puerto Rico for 4 nights. It will be the first family air travel in the aftertimes. Looking forward to it.

Drastically improved some regenerative medicine technology this week for Forever Labs. I need to spend the afternoon making sketches. Did some experiments in the lab on Monday, and it felt good. It had been a while since I had my hands in a bio hood.

In other news, I have been obsessed for some time with the idea that we need a new mobile OS that took full advantage of Ethereum applications. Anyway, I started tweeting about it enough until about three weeks ago a guy in Austria reached out and was like let's do it. So we made a discord, and now we have about 130 people and a number of them are building and designing, and we have a v0 Android fork that has an Ethereum client and apps on it can interact with it, and we have a v0 DappStore and a test Dapp.

Here's the site that went live today: https://ethereumphone.org

It's crazy that with github, discord, figma, notion, etc., people can quickly coordinate and build with very little knowledge of each other. When you couple that with tokens and DAOs, you basically have inverted the capitalist process. It now goes: people gather, sort by talent, build product, issue shares, elect executive leadership.

Organization of production used to be the value-capture, but now that aggregates with little more than an idea.

Working on a new, large painting.

Soon after moving into our neighborhood, I was walking up the street when I heard someone shouting for help. I ran to find a man named George, who was probably then in his early 80s, stuck in between the rungs of a ladder, trying to get into his second window. His brother had accidentally locked him out, and he was afraid to move and cause the ladder to slip. I helped him down, got the window open, then walked downstairs and opened his front door. I recall the house was packed with books and things. George and I talked a while, and he explained that he used to work for Pfizer in town, giving dogs coronal ligations (artificial heart blockage), and they were testing the drug that eventually became Viagra on them. It was a funny story. George owned several properties in the neighborhood. Since then, I gathered that George was somewhat of a property baron, and was a neighborhood personality. George passed away a couple of weeks ago, and just today I saw a crew filling dumpsters at his house.

Good morning.

I found a great public RC track about 25 minutes from my house. ecib and I headed over there to try the Frogtima out. This happened 5 minutes in:

That broke the a front C-hub, the rear arm connection, and a rear shock all at once! Also you can see a good amount of paint flake off the wing. I got it driving again in about 15 minutes and took it easy after that. This week I am repairing and hardening the Frogtima.

Painting continues...

I spent my birthday in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. It was pretty good. Lots of good hiking there. I don't think I'd like to live on a mountaintop however. It feels kinda like living in a suburb; you can't walk anywhere.

I am squarely middle-aged, and I am having very middle-aged feelings and thoughts. I am not sure if time is on my side, I assume it is, but I have resources to do things that I didn't for most of my existence. What to do? I am taking measure of my priorities. Not looking to do anything drastic, just thinking about where and what I want to be in the next few years.

I drove my RC car with my daughter and my brother and his two kids. It was a lot of fun. Then I drove in front of my brother's when he was headed for the ramp.

New wheels are in the mail.

You talking to me?

I really need to add image hosting to Hubski. That's what I need to do.

First Pubski of the new year.

Happy the Dems took the Senate seats in Georgia.

I think I am done.

This one wrapped up much faster than the last. The chance of me improving upon it is about the same as making it worse, so I decided to move on. I'll probably do some subtle lighting tweaks, but that's it.

I'm pretty sure that my nail is regrowing underneath the skin of my amputated finger tip. I'm trying to get an appointment with a hand surgeon, but time is of the essence. I'll be happy if I have some nail there, even if it is just 1/3 of what it was.

I started learning Swift. I am going to build an iOS app that I have been planning for a long time. I was originally going to use a Django framework, but went with Postgres/Arc/Swift instead. :) I'd decided to just learn one new thing at a time, and swapping out one API service for another can always be done. Getting SQL data to appear in my Swift app via Arc felt magical.

This is the last Pubski of 2020.

Dude, we all need recovery tricks. Be thankful to know what some are.

Godspeed.

I started a new painting.

It's a scene I have painted before, but this time I'll be painting autumn instead of summer. This is my first session:

Our labrador retriever puppy loves to eat poop. Deer poop, bunny poop, whatever. He doesn't have a refined poop palate. Predictably, it gives him diarrhea, but he hasn't made the connection. I was up a few times last night.

Tin-Can development continues apace. The next update will have threads and likes, which are both interesting to implement in an app without a shared database.

I deleted all my Twitter replies after getting into a pointless debate about masks and mold with Brendan Eich. I'm just sticking to likes and posting my paintings.

Sincerity sans naivete = the coolest thing ever.

This is wrong:

At its core, blockchain is a glorified spreadsheet (think: Excel with one table). In other words, a new way to store data. In traditional databases there’s usually one person who’s in charge, who decides who can access and input data, who can edit and remove it. That’s different in a blockchain. Nobody’s in charge, and you can’t change or delete anything, only view and input data.

Blockchain is not a new way to store data. Data has been stored in a distributed manner before. (Napster was a successful distributed data application) Blockchain is a method of securing state. In the case of Bitcoin, this enables a ledger that anyone can use, but no one can corrupt. This creates digital scarcity (a completely new phenomenon), but bitcoin also comes with a protocol for transactions. This is exactly what you need to make a basic digital currency, and thus, bitcoin was created. Bitcoin has serious drawbacks regarding speed and energy consumption, but it succeeds as a digital store of value. I used bitcoin last week to pay developers in another country.

Now, what Bitcoin does not do, but what Ethereum does, is use blockchain-secured state to create a global permissionless application. Computers are state machines. Ethereum is a turing-complete state machine that is accessible to anyone. Code runs on Ethereum much like transactions are made on Bitcoin. The result is that you can execute code that the entire world can interact with, and everyone shares the same results. You can create digital currencies using Ethereum, but because of its turing-complete nature, you can also do much more.

For example, because of blockchain, a girl in Poland can now buy shares in a house in the US, earn a portion of the rent, and sell the shares at a later date: https://realt.co/

Digital trading card games can be created with limited numbers of cards, and people can trade, buy, and sell these cards directly, or on unaffiliated marketplaces: https://godsunchained.com/ https://opensea.io/

Derivatives can be created around any of these assets, and markets for these derivatives are global: https://synthetix.exchange

As a result, there is an explosion of applications, and transactions are increasing https://etherscan.io/chart/tx

This author does not understand the technology, and is attacking the hype and failed early use-cases. The early web had similar hype and use case failures. However, the technology was transformative.

It's been rightly pointed out to me that it would be counter to my position that you own your content if we didn't allow for attribution to be removed.

This morning I was thinking of it from the perspective of a user that left, but wasn't determined to erase all history of interaction. It's my assumption that there are some.

I think the best way to do it would be a stepwise option. You can quit, your name gets a strike-through, or you can peace-out and your attribution is gone.

I'm not coding anything for the next couple of weeks as it is.

I should have given more thought to the matter before deciding anything. I'm sorry about that.

We are synthesis machines.

Oh. That’s not good. I’ll fix it.

Thankfully, there are very few of them.

Also, look at these guys:

Gas mask, multiple clips, flak jackets. These guys aren't protesting as much as LARPing. They've been dreaming about an opportunity like this for a long time. I was saying to ecib last night, I bet these guys did a number of mirror checks before heading out.

Sadly, they wouldn't be making a peep if Fox News was telling them to shelter in place.

Dollars to donuts, that's what happened. There are so many crumbs on that trail. I was just getting started here:

It doesn't make sense that it is from pangolin-CoV when it's far more similar to the bat virus RaTG13.

“The idea that is was just a totally natural occurrence is circumstantial. The evidence it leaked from the lab is circumstantial. Right now, the ledger on the side of it leaking from the lab is packed with bullet points and there’s almost nothing on the other side,” the official said.

Occam's Razor says they were inserting the ACE2 binding sequence and testing for gain-of-function in experiments similar to many before. It was done in a BSL2 lab when it should have been BSL4, and someone caught it.

I’ve been working with thenewgreen to keep Forever Labs in the best place to weather COVID19. At the same time, we have been working on a major business development. Zoom call after phone call after Zoom call. It’s a weird headspace to be in. We received our ISO biobanking certification yesterday, which is a big deal. We are the second biobank in the world to have it, and the other worked to create the standard. We passed with flying colors. I do take some pride in the quality of our lab operations.

We are getting three more days of rain, so I did a bit of grade adjustment for the rain garden, and I cut my native prairie grass plot short this morning. This would be the best time to burn it, but the city wouldn’t appreciate that. I suppose if I put in the effort, I might get them to come by and do it for me. Apparently many domestic and non-native grasses sprout early, and by cutting it back, the native grasses get a chance to sprout.

From what I have read, establishing a native prairie is a three-year project. In year one, you seed, and keep cutting it down to 6” to encourage the roots to spread. In year two, you do the same, but cut it down to 12”. Next year, I can let it grow to its full height.

I ordered a hophornbeam and an American hazelnut to fill in two places where they’ll fit.

I was in charge of my daughter’s science class yesterday. We made a terrarium in a glass bowl. After filling it with plants and some residents, she made a list of what she added in a terrarium journal. Her daily task is now to observe if there are any changes, and to record them. She also is going to record the water she adds.

I’m going to make another attempt at bread. Tomorrow, I think. I’ll try letting the yeast proof 30 minutes instead of 10 minutes first.

Martha paid her time, these assholes should too.

Shelves are done.

I started in on a new painting last night. This one is for my wife. It's the first time I'm painting with oil on canvas, and at 4' x 3' it will be my largest to date.

I got a nice mitre saw for X-mas, so I am going to be making my own frame.

I just deleted all my tweets save three paintings I did. I used Twitter for a bit more than a year, but concluded that its ok as a news/gossip feed, but the interactions I had were sparse and without depth. I also realized that I would get responses from my most edgy or opinionated tweets, which made me more likely to be edgy or opinionated.

All political authority is granted by the people. It is the purpose of government to serve the people. Trump actions subverted that authority, and the GOP protected him, not the system that protects the people. The GOP failed a critical task of governance.

That’s me, b_b, gq, _refugee_, OftenBen, ecib, and OBs fiancé (not in order), who did not disclose her Hubski username.

I think it is fine. It is true, and problematic. However, I think what is far more problematic are the rich nihilistic demagogues that prey upon them.

38 years ago I heard this song. I was driving with my dad in the upper peninsula of Michigan. I was about 6 years old. I remembered only a part of it (something about windshield wipers and a truck) and never was able to know which song it was. In fact, I wasn’t even sure if it was possible that I hadn’t heard it in so many years.

Today I was on a flight to Miami, and I watched the movie Finding Steve McQueen. It was the title track, and I recognized it immediately.

I solved a 38 year old mystery today.

This is the song.

Some sort of quid pro quo badge thing going on here...