The business of cryptocurrency turns out to be one of the more power-hungry forms of market speculation.  An article in the April 2024 issue of Physics Today says that between 0.6% and 2.3% of the total electricity production in the U. S. goes to cryptocurrency mining farms.  Is this a bad thing, and if so, what can be done about it?   A helpful review of the history of cryptocurrency is found in the surprisingly entertaining 2020 book Money:  The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by National Public Radio reporter Jacob Goldstein, who points out that one of the main attr ..read more

  In the May issue of National Review, San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge presents smoking-gun data that shows the manifold harms to children and teenagers caused by smartphones, specifically social-media use on them.  She claims, and I agree, that we have to do more to alleviate these harms, by government intervention if necessary.    First, the harms.  Twenge has collected data on a wide number of measures of wellbeing including sleep patterns, socializing, indicators of loneliness and depression, and participation in adult activities.  Signific ..read more

  For nearly a decade, there have been isolated reports of strange health problems in U. S. diplomatic and espionage personnel stationed in sensitive parts of the world such as Cuba, China, and Vietnam.  Although there is no typical case, there are some commonalities in many of the cases.  The symptoms usually have a sudden onset.  Victims describe hearing strange noises, feeling severe pain in the head and elsewhere, and other neurological symptoms.  Some of them have proved to sustain serious brain-trauma injuries and suffered chronic debility from the attack.  ..read more

  Some accidents are simple:  two cars collide on a freeway, a tree falls on a jogger, lightning hits a golfer.  Others require a chain of events, each of which is unlikely, and so are much rarer than the simple kind.  The sequence of occurrences, each one fairly harmless by itself, which led to the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore Harbor on last Tuesday, March 26 included things that by themselves would cause few if any major problems.  But on that fateful night, they all aligned to end four lives and cause what will eventually turn out to be bill ..read more

Every time a new technology becomes popular, effects happen that nobody anticipates—not the designers, not the firms selling the product, and not the users either.  A small but significant case in point was highlighted in a recent Associated Press piece describing the increased vulnerability of historic covered bridges in the U. S. to truck and RV drivers who blindly follow their GPS instructions, only to smash into the bridge superstructure.   Covered bridges were themselves a technical innovation.  According to the Wikipedia article on covered bridges, wooden structural member ..read more

  The online platform TikTok is once again in the news, this time the target of proposed U. S. legislation.  One of the most popular and innovative social-media outlets, the Chinese-originated and Chinese-controlled app's infinite-scrolling videos have been imitated by Facebook and YouTube, and 170 million Americans use it, many of them under 30.  So why is Congress once more considering legislation that would either force ByteDance, the Chinese parent company, to divest itself of the U. S. division of TikTok, or else face a total ban of the app?   The ostensible reason is ..read more

  Charles C. W. Cooke seems to think so.  Cooke, a writer for National Review whose opinions and style I have great respect for, opines in the April 2024 issue that using Federal power to keep minors off social media is a bad idea.    He concedes there is a real problem:  bullying, pornography use, depression, and suicide are all results of teenagers and even younger people accessing social media.  He doesn't dispute that on balance, the harm that can happen is probably not worth the benefits that the youngsters gain.  The problem is acute enough to show up i ..read more

  While my headline lacks something in concision, the topic for today is anything but simple:  whether internet-based enterprises such as Amazon, Google, Tiktok, and X are free to do basically anything they want with the input their users provide, or whether the states of Texas and Florida can impose certain restrictions on content moderation.  Last week the U. S. Supreme Court heard opening oral arguments in two related cases on this topic that the Court has decided to hear together.   NetChoice v. Paxton pits the trade association NetChoice, which includes such heavy hitt ..read more

  I'm going to address a branch of engineering or business ethics that you don't see discussed very often.  The question it answers is:  what obligation does a company founder have to see that the business continues after his or her passing?  To help us think about this question, I'm going to give two examples at opposite extremes:  Information Unlimited and Edmund Optics.   In November of 2008, I ordered three high-voltage capacitors from a company I'd never heard of before:  Information Unlimited.  The company's website had an edgy vibe and featured hi ..read more

  Torrential rains had turned the normally placid Connecticut River into a turbid brownish-yellow lake.  The sun was out and the water was calm now, but the edge of the water where we stood watching our friend Dori was about thirty yards uphill from her house, which was a former fishing cabin on the bank of the river.  It was all she could afford, and when she bought it she knew the place was in a flood plain.  The house itself was on pilings and undamaged, but she had left her cats behind in her haste, and now Dori was wading out to rescue them.  When she got back to ..read more