dumbmatter.com

Online home of Jeremy Scheff

Flockas

If you like hip hop and you want to laugh, check out this thing I made.

Otherwise, please move along.


The Large Hardon Collider

The Large Hadron Collider is a marvel of modern technology. It is also an endless source of juvenile amusement, since the word "hadron" is very similar to "hardon". The Large Hadron Collider was built by the European research organization CERN ("CERN" means "science" in European). At CERN's official website, there are currently 141 articles which mistakenly use the word "hardon" instead of "hadron". The first result is the title of one poor guy's PhD thesis.


Bitcoin and crypto-anarchist sloths

When I first heard of BitCoin, a decentralized (i.e. not controlled by a government or corporation) digital currency, I immediately thought of Neal Stephenson. Why? Well, I have a total mancrush on Neal Stephenson, so he is never far from my thoughts. But a central theme of several of his novels (and a peripheral theme in others) is currency. For instance, in Cryptonomicon, the protagonists are developing a digital currency which is "anonymous, untraceable, and untaxable", but ultimately there is still some gold sitting in a vault somewhere centralized.

But Stephenson's short story "The Great Simoleon Caper" is even more prescient:

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Chaos: There should be more of it

Before I (finally) got around to putting something up on this domain name, I had some placeholder text. I'm going to repeat it here, because I like it and I don't want to just delete such a great quote from my website:

I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it.

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